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 urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.
– H.L. Mencken
“Government provision in water has overseen millions of deaths through lack of sanitation and unsafe water. Bringing in private sector expertise and investment is needed, both to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, but to actively contribute towards social justice the world over. In the vast majority of cases, where the private sector has been called upon, it has delivered the goods – even in cases decried by critics as ‘failures’.”
– Mischa Balen
My experience of racists is that they are race based collectivists who are so utterly without anything to redeem them (and know it), that they pick out something they didn’t have to earn (race) and claim that as their most valuable asset.
Regular commenter VeryRetired, skewering one of those rather sad individuals who are upset that libertarian bloggers do not devote more time to writing about inherited genetic characteristics or the supposed political implications thereof.
This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.
– Dr Brian Day, of Vancouver, explaining what happens if you make private health care illegal, but leave private veterinary clinics alone. (It’s a shame about the picture of Dr Day and Fidel Castro though).
Whoever said “there is no such thing as bad publicity” obviously never had their career “Dan Rather’ed” into tiny pieces by the twenty thousand bloggers.
Commentator “rosignol” provides the knockout blow to those who want the whole world run one way, on the mistaken assumption it is always going to be their way:
With multiple governments, people have the possibility of moving to whatever nation suits them (with, admittedly, varying degrees of effort/risk).
With one government, if you object to how things are being run, your non-violent options are just about limited to “leave the planet entirely”.
I’d add that with one world government your violent options are going to be be limited, too. Governmental violence will always be quantatively greater than any you can muster.
“Chatting over a llama is certainly a novel way to meet people in a relaxed environment, and participants can enjoy a romantic picnic afterwards.”
-Charity worker Mary Walker, providing Valentines Day advice that is more useful than most I have heard this year.
“Almost every young libertarian I come in contact with these days is equally opposed not just to the sort of new copyright protections that the content providers seek, but even to traditional copyright laws and rules that pre-date the 76 Act. And not all of these people are wacko libertarian-anarchist types. Many respected young libertarian minds are turning against copyright. I don’t believe that the best strategy is to ignore them. You guys should engage them in debate and defend your views before this extreme anti-IP position becomes more mainstream.”
– Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation (many years ago, he worked at the Adam Smith Institute), quoted here.
“The defence of a free society is the defence of its procedures, not its output.”
– Oliver Kamm
“They won’t publish cartoons, but they will run anything they can get out of Abu Ghraib. Both sets of images provoke Islamic anger; note how the media behaves when that anger is directed at them.”
– Tim Blair, referring to the Australian media – although the same could be said of the British, in contrast to those papers in Europe that have showed solidarity with their Danish colleagues.
The ever-rational, ever-eloquent, ever-humane Matthew Parris in The Times:
Many faiths and ideologies achieve and maintain their predominance partly through fear. They, of course, call it “respect”.But whatever you call it, it intimidates. The reverence, the awe — even the dread — that their gods, their KGB or their priesthoods demand and inspire among the laity are vital to the authority they wield.
Against reverence and awe the best argument is sometimes not logic, but mockery. Structures of oppression that may not be susceptible to rational debate may in the end yield to derision.
We have a free press and this freedom of expression is a vital and indispensable part of our democracy and this is the reason why I cannot control what is published in the media
– Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen
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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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