We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Let’s get this straight. The house price bubble has been caused by money printing. In today’s world, that means as a result of the Bank of England keeping interest rates artificially low. That’s why the money supply is growing at more than 10% a year and this money has to go somewhere. Lots of it has gone into the housing market. And the “solution” from all of the above is more of the same!
Those who are going to pay for this mess are the prudent, those who haven’t lived beyond their means. Their savings will be inflated away to bail out the welfare bums, many of whom are economic illiterates infesting the business world.
– David Farrer names and shames a bunch of granny muggers
Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper’s way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology.
– W. W. Bartley, Philosophia (September–December 1976)
The whole difference between statistics and astrology is supposed to be that statisticians make statements of statistical significance to determine how likely or unlikely it is that an observed outcome could have happened chance, while astrologers are satisfied with merely anecdotal confirmation of their hypotheses.
– Hu McCulloch
Politicians are like parents who tell you what time to go to bed but can’t put dinner on the table.
– Matthew Taylor, now Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Arts, quoted in a 2002 article by Janan Ganesh
Hollywood illiberals such as George Clooney and Michael Moore made a career of sneering at the ageing Charlton Heston, which was almost enough to make me join the NRA. True, many of Heston’s conservative views might be as dated as his movies. But a willingness to take up arms for human freedom is one reason why we still don’t live on the planet of the apes.
– Mick Hume, reflecting on the stance on the right to bear arms that was taken by the late, great Charlton Heston. Here is a wonderful tribute to Heston by the US actor, Richard Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a ‘liberal’ in the American usage; his comments show real class and generosity of spirit.
Obama’s speeches frequently include passages that flatter their listeners who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow his thinking actually is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are.
– Stephen Bainbridge. Ouch.
To hell with constructive engagement. This is a state that imprisons, tortures and kills its political opponents. It is a state that pollutes public discourse with untruths, and that not only seeks to suppress truths, but that seeks to suppress the free exchange of thought between its citizens. It is a state that gives succour to the genocidal regime in Sudan, and has backed itself into the position of casting Buddhist monks as dangerous terrorists.
– Sam Leith, writing in the Telegraph why we should subject China to an Olympic boycott
‘Market’ was the sixth word I ever learnt – after ‘This little piggy goes to…’
– Dr Eamonn Butler, author of The Best Book on the Market. Isn’t it great how we get children understanding buying and selling months if not years before the anti-market teachers can get their claws on them?
Has the Prime Minister got lost?
– The Queen during the Windsor Castle banquet for Sarkozy
“The Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations.” Aren’t they? Actually, the Olympics seem an ideal place for demonstrations.
– Anne Applebaum, pointing out the obvious fact that the Olympic Games are highly political by their very nature. I am feeling a greater and greater sense that the Beijing Olympics are going to be highly memorable, quite possibly in the sense that a trainwreck is highly memorable. And I am not sure this is bad.
“Can you believe this place?” Admiral Driscoll said to me. He sounded like a bit like a kid on Christmas morning. I felt weirdly like a jaded old man who had seen it all even though he is older and more accomplished. I understood then what some American soldiers and Marines mean when they say the top brass lives and works at “echelons above reality”. I’m not blaming the admiral. His job requires him to be isolated from nuts, bolts, and the street most of the time.
– Michael Totten
One of this Government’s proud achievements has been helping to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq – where elections were policed by imprinting a finger of every voter with indelible ink. Yet at home it has corrupted an electoral system that the world once looked up to. Ministers were warned as long ago as May 2000 about the lack of security in postal votes. Yet they ploughed on, claiming that postal voting would reinvigorate the electoral system by encouraging more to vote.
– Ross Clark.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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