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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My name is Salam Pax and I am addicted to blogs. Some people watch daytime soaps, I follow blogs. I follow the hyperlinks on the blogs I read. I travel through the web guided by bloggers. I get wrapped up in the plots narrated by them. I was reading so many blogs I had to assign weekdays for each bunch, plus the ones I was reading daily. It is slightly voyeuristic, especially those really personal blogs: day-to-day, mundane stuff which is actually fascinating; glimpses of lives so different, and so much amazing writing. No politics, just people’s lives. How they deal with pain or grief, how they share their happy moments with anybody who cares to read.
— Salam Pax, summarising how quite a lot of us actually feel, writing in the Guardian. Actually, go read the whole thing. The descriptions of how the Ba’athists attempted to censor the internet and how people got around it that follow are quite interesting.
This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future.
– Attributed to Adolf Hitler, 1935
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
– H. L. Mencken
I don’t think philosophically there’s a meeting of minds between Ayn Rand and Our Glorious Leader, Tony Blair:
I am not my brother’s keeper. – Ayn Rand
I am my brother’s keeper. – Tony Blair
You might think that being your brother’s keeper is fine. But when Tony Blair says that he is his brother’s keeper, what he actually means is that he wants to force everyone else to be this. The statement isn’t about him at all. If he really subscribed to the moral code he advocates, surely he would donate most of his income to the poor. Then again, when you hear middle-class socialists demanding higher taxes, and you ask them how much extra they personally should pay, they often reply back that only “the rich” – people richer than they are – should pay more.
Judging cultures is not the same as judging races. One’s race is unchosen; no-one can be condemned for membership of a racial group. However, culture is chosen, so a person can be condemned for their acceptance of an immoral culture. The equivocation of culture with race is one of the commonest forms of racism today: it is based on the racist view that one’s race determines one’s ideas and outlook.
– Andrew Medworth
It would be helpful if you could indicate your city or town or, at least, your state, province or country. Failing that, your continent or hemisphere will do. If you seriously think Arianna Huffington is the voice of the people, do let us know what planet….
— Mark Steyn’s advice to people who would send him e-mail.
Thinking has been given a bad press. Feeling did not devise a law of gravity: thinking did.
– Madsen Pirie, quoted in a Guardian article on ’emotional literacy’
This constant intervention by government in tasks that belong to the
individual must cease … Day by day the doctrines and practices of a
paternal government are speciously and tentatively expanding over the
country, and the habit of popular thought is unhappily becoming
accustomed to them.
– Senator Thos S. Bayard to Congress, April 1884
(with thanks to David Goldstone)
When I leave university and get a job, I want to live and die by my own efforts, but if they are especially productive, I want to enjoy the fruits of my labour without being penalised by the state for my success. I don’t want to see people starve, or to go without basic needs, but rather than having the state steal my money and use it to pay them to stay poor, I want them to have the opportunity to work, earn and live for themselves. I also want, through free charity, to be able to decide for myself in whose aid the money I donate will be spent: perhaps I might find the starving Iraqi child a more deserving cause than the perpetually-unemployed Dundonian who can’t afford the monthly satellite television subscription; perhaps I won’t think that the fact that one has been born in closer geographical proximity to me gives them a greater claim to the money I worked for. I don’t want these choices to be taken from me and decided centrally, by those whose very jobs require them to please as many local people as they can.
– David Bean, part of the St Andrews Liberty Club’s new committee, writing on The Liberty Log
…that can be found over on www.bureaucrash.com
Which reminds me of my favourite picture of Che Guevara, that achingly cool totalitarian pop icon…
As you sow, so shall you reap
Most of academic economics is polluted by the dangerous notion of ‘perfect competition’. It is dangerous because it is so utterly unlike the real world. Capitalism’s great duty is the taking of risks. Success is measured not so much by the virtues of the product but its place in a subtle flux of prices and alternatives. Perfect competition, with its associated poetry of ‘equilibrium’ is a romantic folly.
– John Blundell, Institute of Economic Affairs
One reader complains that he could never see why we use the word ‘service’ for public monopolies such as health, education, the post office (and even the ‘civil service’) when they deliver such rotten products.
Then a local farmer mentioned he was getting a bull in to service his cows. After that, our reader recognised that it was actually a pretty good way to describe the relationship between public producers and the taxpayers who have to fund them.
– Eamonn Butler, Adam Smith Institute
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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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