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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[Napoleon] had one prodigious advantage – he had no responsibility – he could do whatever he pleased; and no man has ever lost more armies than he did. Now with me the loss of every man told. I could not risk so much; I knew that if I ever lost five hundred men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought upon my knees to the bar of the House of the Commons.
– Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
Our present day military commanders probably think in private that Old Nosey had it about hundred times easier on the PR front than they do.
Last Friday, the Mises Institute published a special edition of their daily article containing nothing else but quotes by von Mises on the subject of war.
The quotes are hard to disagree with, apart from their mistaken application to the current situation. No distinction is made between using war as a means of conquest, expanding one’s power and using war as a defensive measure, protecting one’s security, freedom etc. For those who believe the US and the UK are engaged in the former, I shall leave them to their struggle against the neo-imperialists…
For the rest, I retaliate with a small collection of quotes that make such a distinction:
We make war that we may live in peace.
– Aristotle
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
– John Adams
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
– John Stuart Mill
That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon.
– G.K. Chesterton
I cannot see how we can literally end War unless we can end Will. I cannot think that war will ever be utterly impossible; and I say so not because I am what these people call a militarist, but rather because I am a revolutionist. Absolutely to forbid fighting is to forbid what our fathers called “the sacred right of insurrection.” Against some decisions no self-respecting men can be prevented from appealing to fortune and to death.
– G.K. Chesterton
OK, this is not going to win the war, but it will have to do while we are waiting for our logins for The Command Post warblog!
Although a system may cease to exist in the legal sense or as a structure of power, its values (or anti-values), its philosophy, its teachings remain in us. They rule our thinking, our conduct, our attitude to others. The situation is a demonic paradox: we have toppled the system but we still carry its genes.
-Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish journalist, 1991
The Parliamentary Conservative Party is filled with people who despise principles too much even to see the value of pretending to have any.
– Sean Gabb in Free Life 43
More than half a century of experience shows that the U.N. is a theater of hypocrisy, a sink of corruption, a street market of sordid bargains and a seminary of cynicism. It is a place where mass-murdering heads of state can stand tall and sell their votes to the highest bidder and where crimes against humanity are rewarded.
– Paul Johnson in Five Vital Lessons From Iraq [via Instapundit]
Michael Moore is just like P. J. O’Rourke, only without the wit, the humour and the insight
– Tom Burroughes
The government announced today that it is changing its emblem to a condom because it more clearly reflects the government’s political stance. A condom stands up to inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks and gives you a sense of security while you are actually being screwed. Damn, it just doesn’t get more accurate than that!
– Anonymous
I don’t fault Dan Rather for going to Baghdad. If someone had interviewed Hitler in ‘39 for three hours, we’d prize the tapes as an invaluable historical document.
– James Lileks from his Bleat this morning
Everyone is reactionary about subjects he understands.
– Robert Conquest, quoted in the Guardian, and then quoted again in The Week
There will be no war on Iraq. There will be a liberation of Iraq. There will be an end to the war that the Ba’ath Party has been waging on the people of Iraq through its policies of racism, persecution and genocide. Liberation will bring hope to enslaved Iraqis and justice for the dead, for the hundreds of thousands of Kurds murdered during such campaigns as the Anfal, for the Assyrians who were “disappeared,” for the Shi’a Arabs slaughtered for rising up against the regime, for the deported Turkomans and the Sunni Arab officers shot for plotting to overthrow the regime
– Dr. Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, in the region controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
As we await the Budget in March and the rise in National Insurance rates in April, you’ll be glad to know that Gordon Brown is responding to criticism that he’s made the tax system too complicated. The new tax form will have only two lines: ‘How much do you earn?’ and ‘Hand it over’.
– Eamonn Butler from yesterday’s Adam Smith Institute Bulletin
We certainly have seen the results of appeasement. It is much easier to tolerate a dictator when he is dictating over somebody else’s life and not your own.
– Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga in response to Jaques Chirac’s outburst.
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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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