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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A young black man can be murdered by a gang of white thugs at a bus stop1. The result? Senior politicians and police in front of the cameras; public inquiries; new phrases such as ‘institutional racism’; sweeping reforms; a trust set up to help others from ‘similarly disadvantaged backgrounds’. A young white man gets murdered by a gang of four black men and a black woman in Lewisham, South East London; it makes a one-inch high column at the bottom of page two. Why?
– Ian Wells, London E18, today in readers’ comments section of Metro newspaper (a daily distributed for free on the London Underground).
1 = Reference to the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
– Frédéric Bastiat
They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
– Frédéric Bastiat
The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.
– Michael Oakeshott
You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was “but we’ve always done it this way.” A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?
– Terry Pratchett
When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty
– Confucius
For example the term ‘liberal’… once meant (& to some, prefaced by ‘classical’, it still does) a supporter of individual liberties against both force backed custom (paleo-conservativism) and force backed allegedly rational planning (socialism). It is now generally used as a euphemism for ‘democratic socialism’.
Long live freedom and Secularism
– From the Movement of Iranian Students, who are right now the fighting forces of ignorance and darkness.
Rousseau’s reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not wish to admit.
– Paul Johnson
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: “I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with me?” An American says: “I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with him?”
-Terry Pratchett
This is truly terrifying. It’s almost as if, in addition to the Fabian socialists, a parallel group of Fabian fascists was loose in Europe – except they actually found a way into the bureaucracy to steer it.
– Brad Ems
Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle one, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
– C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters
I am never in favour of war… but the fact is we are now in a war, so the question is, do we win it?
– David Carr
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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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