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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I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
– Will Rogers
And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Sir Thomas More, played by Paul Scofield in a Man for All Seasons. Even if Tudor history means nothing to you, I definitely urge folk to rent out this movie. It is an object lesson in what integrity means.
Thanks to a commenter for pointing out that I got Scofield’s first name wrong. It was Paul, not John. (Dolt!)
I would like to compare the situation of Iran and the price of oil with teams in the AFL [Australian Football League] languishing at the bottom of the ladder.
West Coast Eagles captain and star player Chris Judd weighs in on the big issues. I love it when professional athletes branch out into other disciplines where their prowess is – erm – slightly more modest.
(Article link found at Yobbo’s)
The bloody wombats were getting in over the fence. We had no idea they could climb.
– Australian farmer Bill deCorsie, complaining that local marsupials were eating his truffles. (The bigger picture behind this, which is that the Australian agricultural industry has over the last couple of decades been rapidly moving (shall we say) up the food chain from relatively low value (but high quality) basic foodstuffs to high value products largely for export is quite an interesting one).
Inheritance taxes are of course loved by Jacobins of various hues, or by those well-meaning folk who imagine that we have to recreate an economic ‘level-playing field’ with each new generation. On that basis, it is more meritorious for a person to gamble away his millions than to give it to his children or friends. How perverse is that?
– Johnathan Pearce
Sartre said “Hell is other people”, and as usually he got it wrong. Hell is a foreign keyboard.
– Perry de Havilland
The British National Party is selling wine on its website. Wine? Sounds more the kind of thing a French neo-nazi would drink. That’s lost my vote, I’m afraid. An English fascist should be drinking hogsheads of mead, or I’ll simply refuse to take him seriously. A nazi who drinks Chardonnay is not a nazi in whom one can have complete confidence.
–Harry Hutton
I’m sorry to say that the latest on carrying hand-baggage on flights to/from Britain is that violins appear to be a no-no.
– Jessica Duchen writing today about the difficulties now being faced by itinerant classical musicians
If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
– Kingsley Amis.
When poor countries catch up with rich countries, the actual absolute level of inequality between them can increase. Now that’s just wierd. My head hurts.
– Tony Stephenson responding to Brian Micklethwait
There have already been a couple of Samizdata quotes of the day, the first officially labelled thus, and the second an SQOTD in all but title. Had there been no such copying and pasting postings so far today, then I would have put up a quote from this (“MSM sacrifices itself for Hezbollah”), such as, for instance, this:
The MSM usually claims that it is better than the blogosphere because it can filter and detect fraud. The Lebanon conflict shows that claim to be a flat out lie. The MSM may possibly speak truth to power but it seems keen to speak falsehood to the rest of us and to support the terrorists. I assume MSM support of the terrorists is based on the idea that idividual journalists may die or lose access to “scoops” unless they uncritically regurgitate terrorist propaganda, whereas they see no downside to criticising Israel or the USA becuase these countries have a tradition of press freedom. Unfortunately that analysis seems to be at the usual level of MSM strategic thought – poor. In the short term they are correct. In the long term they are as wrong as it is possible to be. Aside from state supported outlets such as the BBC the MSM depends on advertising revenue to survive and that revenue is roughly proportional to the audience size. If the MSM are shown to be puppets and liars then they will lose audience (which they are) and hence lose money. Eventually they will be out of a job. And even the BBC will feel the chill wind of financial cuts if it loses credibility – there is no reason to assume that the next UK government will not force the BBC to wean itself from the license fee and even less reason to assume that once weaned it will not see a drastic downsizing.
Meryl Yourish thinks this means that the terrorists are winning the propaganda war, to me it seems more likely that they are helping the MSM destroy itself. It really seems to me that Lebanon is going to be the place where the MSM collectively martyred itself, fighting for the cause of an Iranian backed terror group that seeks the utter destruction of Israel and the imposition of Sharia law and press censorship that would be antithetical to the MSM itself.
My thanks to Nigel Sedgwick (who urls himself as something to do with this) who flagged up this piece in a comment on this posting here yesterday. → Continue reading: Puppets and liars and the myth of the non-existent camera
“I have run into a certain amount of conflict with bodies like Oxfam and Christian Aid, who are very effective at presenting what looks like extremely professional, well-researched data which seems to prove that trade is bad for poor countries and bad for poor people in these countries. I do not know a great deal about the subjects that they deal with, but I know enough about trade policy to have doubts in my mind when I read this stuff. But my colleagues come to me with it and say that they have had a deputation, including the local vicar and all the party members and have been given this report from Oxfam’s public affairs department and it must be right! They ask ‘why are you being awkward and asking questions? Surely we should just sign’.”
– Vincent Cable, Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor (via The GI)
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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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