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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You know, let’s not blame other people for our own mistakes.
– Nihad Awad, spokesman for the Council of Islamic-American Relations, debating the slightly unhinged Bill O’Reilly on his TV show.
Mr Awad is referring – presumably in his conveniently interchangeable capacity as an American rather than a Muslim – to recent US activity in Iraq. Nevertheless, I think the world would be an immeasurably more peaceable a place if a number of Muslims heeded his words. What’s sauce for the goose and all that.
(Via LGF)
Green on the outside, red on the inside.
I move that any member of this ubiquitous breed of activist shall henceforth be known as a “watermelon”.
UPDATE: members of the commentariat have alerted me to the fact that I did not devise the “watermelon” double entrendre first. Fine – consider this post a propagation of an excellent and underused meme.
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
– David Deutsch
I’d rather be stuck in a lift with Abu Hamza than Zac Goldsmith
– Sean Gabb, at the Libertarian Alliance/Libertarian International conference today
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to treat my setback at work as a chance to contemplate things like The Transient And Illusory Nature Of Material Things and Attachment As The Root Of Suffering – the bits of yoga that actually matter. And today I did a fairly intensive backbending practice – perhaps not the best possible idea in the circumstances. Backbending has a tendency to be emotional-turmoil-inducing at the best of times, let alone at the end of a weekend spent brooding on the Cruelty Of Fate. Even today, though, the peace that comes from just watching the breath going in, watching the breath going out, was there eventually. Even if it was only for the last four or five breaths of a two hour practice, that’s enough.
– Alan Little just breathes
Where coercive institutions are strong a fanatical minority is well placed to capture them and turn them to its own purposes.
– Natalie Solent, in this discussion, which is a an interesting touchstone of liberalism.
Yes indeed:
Miss Israel has been given permission not to carry her assault rifle during service in the Israeli army because she says it bruises her legs.
This has everything that a Samizdata quote of the day should have. It is about a beauty queen. It is not just something said by or about some dreary politician. Plus, guns are involved.
But: Is this decision evidence that Israel is going soft, or does it display a fine understand of the balance that must always be struck between the needs of national defence and the need not to damage that which is being defended?
Putin, a former member of the KGB, became the leader of Russia in 1999, eight years after the fall of the USSR. Would anyone have considered it acceptable for a former member of the Gestapo to be leading West Germany in 1953?
– David Emami
It’s the danger of tidy-minded people…
– Andrew Marr, in an extempore line, almost thrown away, to close an item on the surveillance state on the BBC’s radio talk-show Start the Week.
I think Marr pins it down precisely. Oppressive regimes are frequently driven by a desire for order, seen as conformity to explicit rules. The most insidious, most universally oppressive castes, don’t seek order because they want to be obeyed. They seek order for its own sake. They want the security of rules for everything, and recording everything.
If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
– Milton Friedman
Not the baby, but the luggage.
– A Danish airport security person yesterday, explaining to a passenger what did and what did not need to go through the X-Ray machine.
Terror ‘priority’ if Brown is PM
– BBC
Never a truer word. He wants us to be afraid. I for one am going to cooperate on that one point.
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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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