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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The entire point of having a legal system, rather than vendetta, is to make justice depend on public principle, not on private feelings. Those feelings ought not to influence legal decisions at all. At present, victims and their families are urged to express strong emotions about verdicts and sentences in a way that encourages them to cultivate vindictive malice, since forgiveness is (rather strangely) much less popular. This habit is deeply injurious to them personally, as well as to the legal system, and it ought surely never to be allowed to influence the courts.
– Mary Midgley
Go on, have a rich dessert…before Labour makes it illegal.
– Michael Jennings, Samizdata contributor and epicure, at dinner earlier this week
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents ‘interests’, I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
– Barry Goldwater, the greatest president America never had.
Tabloids don’t sell movies or help anyone’s career. If that were true, every Lindsay Lohan movie would open to 80 million dollars.
– Cameron Diaz, putting the much vaunted ‘power of the media’ into perspective.
The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organization of production is a function of national concern, the organizer of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production. State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.
– Benito Mussolini, 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: ‘Ardita’ Publishers. (pp. 135-136)
Ed: With thanks to DC Downsizers…
The simple fact is that advertising doesn’t compel anyone to buy a product. At best, it can create some warm and fuzzy associations. A person can act on those random impulses — or he can choose to think about his purchases. It’s wholly up to him.
Diana Hsieh, stating what ought to be bleedin’ obvious as we Brits say. But good on her for saying it anyway.
Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day and say: I’m free to think and to speak.
– Actor Jimmy Stewart
We should really ban oxygen as well: bullies use that also. That would take care of the problem, right and proper.
– Greg Lorriman, Leatherhead, UK, a commenter on a Times (of London) article about the supposed terrors of bullying via such sites as YouTube. Amazing what people find to get alarmed about, isn’t it?
“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time – that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.”
– Carlo Rovelli. Remember this next time you turn up late for an appointment.
Moreover, American Idol is a rebuke to those silly “crunchy conservatives” who insist that modern technology and mass production denigrates community, and so forth – in T.S. Eliot’s idiotic words, “The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.” But that’s not true! The community has all joined in on this wholesome, fun, harmless moment to celebrate opportunity, singing, and lightheartedness. What could be more American than that? Lightheartedness is, I think, a profound and incredibly rare value, and one which our country has figured out how to mass produce. That may be among its greatest accomplishments ever.
– Timothy Sandefur, US blogger.
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
– Thomas Jefferson
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation
– Saki, from ‘The Square Egg’ (1924).
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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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