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 only way to use (teleportation) as a secret weapon is to allow our enemies to bankrupt themselves thinking they can produce a teleportation machine.
The Air Force is to be applauded for investigating technologies that may have value for national security…But wormholes, negative energies, warped space-time, etc., require futuristic technologies centuries to millions of years ahead of ours. The only thing going down the wormhole is taxpayers’ money.
Michio Kaku
What an exciting time it is to be alive: ours still is the golden age of scientific discovery, creationists and other ignoramuses notwithstanding.
–Abiola Lapite, commenting on yet more advances in genetics.
I had never heard the word blogger until May 25 . But now I know them well because of all the amazing coverage they had of the protests. My friends overseas all followed what happened through the blogs, because they have more credibility than the mainstream media.
– Rabab al-Mahdi, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo, and an opposition activist.
We spent all this money to do things legally and right, and all the sudden it becomes illegal to do something legal
– Nick Mari
The state is not your friend, Nick.
There is no “tolerance”, there are only changing fashions in intolerance.
– Mark Steyn
“I do not really think the House of Commons is ‘My Cup of Tea’, I am too much of an individualist, and also, too self-centred and set in my ways. Enough if I remain a mute, just adequate back-bencher, but frankly most of the problems that so excite ‘the Hon. Members’ leave me quite cold and indifferent.”
– Sir Henry “Chips” Channon in his diary entry for December 5th 1935.
“No part of my job involves stopping people from fornicating”
– Elena Procopiu
A minority of musicians not only dislike the capitalist world, but they believe they can eschew it. Some of them have set up the sort of micro-firms that capitalism makes so easy to do. So they have spurned being sub-contractors or suppliers to large firms, and have become entrepreneurs instead – and think of it as rebellion.
– Richard D. North in Rich is Beautiful
GR: Do you think our technological civilization *is* fragile?
SS: On the contrary, I think it’s immensely resilient. Note that famines generally occur in countries where peasant farmers are still the majority! It’s precisely the complexity that makes it so hard to damage; economies are like ecosystems, they’re more stable as they grow more complex. They work around damage.
– Science Fiction writer S.M. Stirling (interviewed by Glenn Reynolds), stating something that is pretty obvious when you think about it. I think I would also argue that the global communications and global supply chains that have come into existence in the last few years make it dramatically more resilient rather than less. There are vastly more brains linked together and these supply chains actually contain massive redundancy.
“The Government uses a false dichotomy that liberty and security have to be traded off against each other. But you can indeed have both life and liberty. The freedom to express yourself short of inciting violence does not threaten security but bolsters it: I want to know exactly who my enemies are by reading their freely spoken words. And when they cross the line and incite people to terrorism, I want the Government to do the one thing with my tax money of which I approve: protect me from these nutters by throwing them in jail or out of the country.”
– Perry de Havilland writing in today’s Times of London.
“So what can Britain learn from Pakistan about fighting home-grown terrorists? Newsnight interviews President Musharraf”
– Martha Kearney.
Let us hope Gordon Brown was not watching, eh?
“The Central American Free Trade Agreement is just at the beginning of a century of trade liberalisation, more significant and powerful than any previous wave of liberalisation. Europe and Britain can either choose to follow the path of America, Asia and China, or it should prepare for a century of decline. If the EU is to avoid long-term economic stagnation, it has to welcome globalisation – not fight it.”
– Alex Singleton writing in The Business newspaper.
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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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