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]

Samizdata slogan of the day

State funding of abortions is, however, a completely different matter. The pro-choicers say it’s a matter of choice. Let it stay that way, then, without forcing people who oppose infanticide to fund it.
Tomas Kohl

Samizdata Quote of the Day

“God made the 20th Century to teach us that the notion that things work better when experts plan them is a fallacy. It’s a pity that a hundred-million or so had to die to illustrate the lesson. But now we got it. Right?”
John Weidner

Samizdata quote of the day

He’s a shark in wolf’s clothing!
– Gabriel Syme

(I’d love to tell you the context… but alas I dare not)

Samizdata quote of the day

There are two possible political morals to this. One is, don’t have schools. Children in large groups behave like troops of baboons. The other is, if you are going to have schools, have discipline.
Natalie Solent

Another Samizdata quote of the day

I’m not really all that interested in what Hollywood does with its stuff. I mean, they’re only the size of the porn industry. I think the real revolution is in industrial production. It’s about manipulating factory processes, it’s about mass customization, it’s about a revolution in industry that gets the toxins out of the air and is more efficient by, say, a factor of four than what we had. When that happens we’ll have a genuinely new world. Playing movies off handhelds, that’s not really that big of a deal.

– Bruce Sterling, interviewed in Reason. (Link via slashdot).

Samizdata slogan of the day

The state is something different from society; it is ultimately the servant not the master of individual human beings; its potential for inflicting horrors remains as great as ever.
-Margaret Thatcher in Statecraft

Samizdata slogan of the day

Give me dusky capitalism over Aryan socialism/fascism any day
Frank McGahon

Quote unquote: Winston Churchill on false optimism

“There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. The British people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.”

– Winston Churchill, quoted in this review of Ripples of Battle by Victor Davis Hanson

Samizdata quote of the day

“France is the best country in the world.”

— Claire Sepchat (who is French).

Samizdata slogan of the day

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
– Barry Goldwater

Samizdata slogan of the day

The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations.
Ronald Coase, quoted by Everett Ehrlich in
yesterday’s Washington Post

Samizdata quote of the day


As to the “Left” I’ll say briefly why [September 11, 2001] was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our “national security” calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of “Left” intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush’s legitimacy. So I don’t even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.

— Christopher Hitchens, interviewed in FrontPage Magazine.

(Link via NZ Pundit).