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]
|
[M]aterial prosperity enables people to develop morally as well as intellectually. It provides the very basis through which individuals can begin to live like humans and not act like animals.
– Neil Davenport, in the course of a sp!ked piece that neatly demolishes David Lammy’s barmy theory that British teenagers stab each other because they want to be rich. Lammy’s article is more wide-ranging in its insanity than Davenport allows. He ends up advocating compulsory social service and apprenticeships for all as a cure for gangs.
“We live in a world where Ben Affleck won an Oscar and Robinson didn’t. Where’s your god now?”
Dirty Harry’s Place, talking about the late, very great Edward G. Robinson.
“Never brush your teeth if you’re dressed in black. Don’t trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle. Always put the shower curtain inside the bath. Life is forever teaching us lessons, and here’s another that I learnt last week: it’s impossible to be mates with celebrities.”
– Sathnam Sanghera
My dad was a newsagent, I went to state school, I’m Asian, I work in the city and I earn loads of money. I do it so my parents and future children can have something close to the only kind of life Toynbee has ever known. Me explain my position? How about she explains her right to speak for the poor?
– Peter Hoskin singles out that comment by Raj Chande on an excerpt from Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s book entitled Unjust Rewards
Men do not like tits because they buy Zoo. Men buy Zoo because they like tits.
– mr eugenides comments on Michael Gove’s aside about men’s mags in this
“I thought I’d begin by reading a sonnet by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.”
Spike Milligan
The moment that a policy “war” is declared these days, you can guess it’s doomed to gradual failure.
Jenny McCartney.
“We all know that politics is a con some of the time. It has begun to feel like politics is a con almost all of the time.”
– Camilla Cavendish.
Well, some of us have never thought much of politics in the first place, certainly not politics as a professional job.
“Weren’t the eighties grand? Cash grew on trees or, anyway, coca bushes. The rich roamed the land in vast herds hunted by proud, free tribes of investment brokers who lived a simple life in tune with money. Every wristwatch was a Rolex. Every car was a Mercedes-Benz. A fellow could romance a gal without shrink-wrapping his privates and negotiating the Treaty of Ghent. Communist dictators were losing their jobs, not presidents of America and General Motors. Women wore Adolfo gowns instead of dumpy federal circuit court judge robes. The Malcolm who mattered was Forbes. Bill Clinton was only a microscopic polyp in the colon of national politics, and Hillary was still in flight school, hadn’t even soloed on her broom. What a blast we were having. The suburbs had just discovered Martha Stewart, the cities had just discovered crack. So many parties and none of them Democratic…Back then health care was a tummy tuck, not an inalienable right. If you wanted a better environment, you went to Laura Ashley.”
– PJ O’Rourke
I often wonder how different individual lives in Britain would be if alcohol had never been invented. Just imagine all the couples who would never have got together without a little encouragement. All those unsent text messages and undeclared intentions. Can you imagine dancing, let alone pulling, in a sober club?
– Iain Hollingshead, Twenty Something: the quarter-life crisis of Jack Lancaster
Consider the fact that the Federal Reserve is a central planning committee. We are lucky, I think, to have intelligent, highly professional planners, but there are in-principle limits to what they can do with limited information, and so there is no way they are not going to get it wrong sometimes, or a lot of times. The housing “bubble”, which has turned out very badly for a lot of people, and the historically high price of gas, which is to a large extent a function of the low value of the American dollar, probably has had a lot to do with the policies chosen by our monetary central planners. Failures of government planning don’t discredit free markets. Rather, they suggest free markets might be worth trying some time.
– Will Wilkinson, of the CATO Institute, on their blog.
But of course, blaming the credit crunch, or high oil, or expensive bread and rice prices on evil speculators is soooo much more satisfying!
I might be wrong, but I don’t think a fellow who works at a gas station in the Midwest whose wife works as a nurse and commutes 27 miles a day and complains more about the cost of gas than the cost of dance lessons regards Obama as One of Us. They may like his views on this issue or that, and they may well vote for him in the name of Change or a serious belief in Obama’s positions, but if you grew up in a community that was already pretty well organized on its own, you might look at a Harvard grad “community organizer” who had the time and luxury to write an autobiography before he was 50 as something other than One of Us in the “second-shift / Costco” sense.
– The wonderful James Lileks.
Mind you, I am more interested in cutting the state down to size, rather than worrying whether Joe Sixpack or an old Etonian is in Downing Street or the Whitehouse.
|
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.
|
