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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To hear conservatives indicate that a husband is not the person best qualified to decide what his wife would have wanted indicates a view of what marriage constitutes that seems rather at odds with the usual conservative obsession with the importance and gravity of that institution.
– Perry de Havilland
I had intended to make the following excerpt from an essay by George Reisman, Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism, a Samizdata Quote of the Day:
Today, the critics of “Eurocentrism” rightly refuse to accept any form of condemnation for their racial membership. They claim to hold that race is irrelevant to morality and that therefore people of every race are as good as people of every other race. But then they assume that if people of all races are equally good, all civilizations and cultures must be equally good. They derive civilization and culture from race, just as the European racists did. And this is why they too must be called racists. They differ from the European racists only in that while the latter started with the judgment of an inferior civilization or culture and proceeded backwards to the conclusion of an inferior race, the former begin with the judgment of an equally good race and proceed forwards to the conclusion of an equally good civilization or culture. The error of both sets of racists is the same: the belief that civilization and culture are racially determined.
However I have changed my mind. Partly this is because Adriana has got in first with a quote of the day from the estimable Terry Pratchett, but also it is because Reisman’s essay is sucking great quotes out from my typing fingers like an unstoppable brain-eating science fiction monster, with the difference that my brain seems actually enhanced by the process. A single QotD is not enough to fulfil my compulsion.
Here is another memorable passage:
For the case of a Westernized individual, I must think of myself. I am not of West European descent. All four of my grandparents came to the United States from Russia, about a century ago. Modern Western civilization did not originate in Russia and hardly touched it. The only connection my more remote ancestors had with the civilization of Greece and Rome was probably to help in looting and plundering it. Nevertheless, I am thoroughly a Westerner. I am a Westerner because of the ideas and values I hold. I have thoroughly internalized all of the leading features of Western civilization. They are now my ideas and my values. Holding these ideas and values as I do, I would be a Westerner wherever I lived and whenever I was born.
Food for thought here:
I believe that the decline in education is probably responsible for the widespread use of drugs. To live in the midst of a civilized society with a level of knowledge closer perhaps to that of primitive man than to what a civilized adult requires (which, regrettably, is the intellectual state of many of today’s students and graduates) must be a terrifying experience, urgently calling for some kind of relief, and drugs may appear to many to be the solution.
I believe that this also accounts for the relatively recent phenomenon of the public’s fear of science and technology. Science and technology are increasingly viewed in reality as they used to be humorously depicted in Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi movies, namely, as frightening “experiments” going on in Frankenstein’s castle, with large numbers of present-day American citizens casting themselves in a real-life role of terrified and angry Transylvanian peasants seeking to smash whatever emerges from such laboratories. This attitude is the result not only of lack of education in science, but more fundamentally, loss of the ability to think critically–an ability which contemporary education provides little or no basis for developing. Because of their growing lack of knowledge and ability to think, people are becoming increasingly credulous and quick to panic.
I found the essay via Abode of Amritas.
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.
– Terry Pratchett, Jingo
I’m all for equality. I am. That’s why I let my female staff work longer than the men so they can earn the same.
– the Pub Landlord on telly last night
I always thought that NGO meant Non Governmental Organisation. How come any of them get money from the state?
– thanks to Natalie Solent for spotting a good point made at The Road to Euro Serfdom
Visiting London without a camera is like visiting the Lake District without climbing boots.
– said to me by this northern lady yesterday in Parliament Square
I was tired of being poor.
-Paul Rutherford, a sales associate at Fry’s Electronics in Burbank, California, when I asked what prompted him to emigrate from the UK to the US
If anything is evident it should be that, while nations might abide by formal rules on which they have agreed, they will never submit to the direction which international economic planning involves – that while they may agree on the rules of the game, they will never agree on the order of preference in which the rank of their own needs and the rate at which they are allowed to advance is fixed by majority vote. Even if, at first, the peoples should, under some illusion about the meaning of such proposals, agree to transfer such powers to an international authority, they would soon find out that what they have delegated is not merely a technical task, but the most comprehensive power over their very lives.
Hayek ‘The Road to Serfdom’ (Routledge edition: Page 236)
The gods of Samizdata decree that linking to The Times of London is discouraged. But I am going to at least quote from it. Twice.
First, here is William Rees-Mogg on the EU Constitution, but stating a general rule:
So long as our Government takes us for fools, we have every reason to take them for liars.
Meanwhile, my former neighbour Mr George Thomas, on the letters page, demonstrates an application of the rule:
Tony Blair claims that “there is no greater civil liberty than to live free from terrorist attack”.
He is wrong. If the 20th century teaches us anything it is that the greatest threat to civil liberty comes from governments that have been allowed to exercise excessive power over their own people. The greatest civil liberty is to live securely protected from government intrusion. We have seen that, while terrorists can threaten the lives of hundreds and maybe thousands, governments can oppress and maltreat entire peoples and can do this for decades.
I bought a DVD of Nabucco the other day. It’s the usual story: boy meets girl; girl’s father attacks Jerusalem; Hebrews carted off to Babylon. “Sack, burn the temple,” says the King of the Babylonians. “This cursed race shall be wiped from the earth.” But first, let’s all have a sing-song.
I saw it in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. It was the Latvian National Opera, so I was watching Latvians, in China, pretending to be Jews in Babylon, and singing in Italian. Well that’s all right. I can take a joke.
– Harry Hutton last Friday. More about Nabucco here.
It’s one thing to have people looking at your sex tapes, but having people reading your personal e-mails is a real invasion of privacy.
-The anonymous source who took the story of Paris Hilton’s hacked BlackBerry to the press
We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs. I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.
– An unnamed member of a group of Greenpeace activists, who failed to stop trading on the International Petroleum Exchange yesterday, but who did succeed in having the crap beaten out of them by traders.
(Link via Tim Blair)
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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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