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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John McGuinness chides NRO’s blog The Corner for their disinclination to link to articles they reference.
I’m enjoying National Review’s new Blog — The Corner, but one complaint is that they don’t seem to be as diligent in linking to articles they’re referring to as most bloggers are. So it’s not always easy to tell if they’re representing opposing viewpoints fairly.
John makes a very good point. I also groused about that and why it is actually counter-productive in an earlier article. I suspect the NRO team are so steeped in old-media-think that it just does not seem ‘right’ to link to people they incorrectly view as competitors. Well the fact is that links are what makes the blogosphere and the very internet itself go around and they are a resource in themselves… and like unilateral free trade, which works even if the idiots in other nations are protectionists… I will continue to link to Corner if I quote them (and they are also in the blog side bar) because it is in my interests to do so for both the reasons I mentioned in my earlier article on the subject “Jonah Goldberg comments on the joys of group sex“, and also for the valid reason John McGuinness gives: it actually boosts credibility to be able to check the facts yourself.
So guys, what are you afraid of?
Real free trade would mean no subsidies, no trade taxes, no loan guarantees, and, for Heaven’s sake, no bailouts of foreign banks and governments.
– Lew Rockwell
Any one who migrates to Windows XP must be a very trusting soul. Pathologically trusting in fact. An excellent InfoWorld article (via Instapundit) demonstrates why if you have Win XP you are more or less granting Microsoft access to whatever they deem their business on your hard drive any time you connect that Windows XP machine to the Internet.
Use Linux, Unix, Macintosh, Windows 98 or Windows 2000…hell, use DOS if you must but for goodness sake stay away from Windows XP unless you think it is just fine and dandy for a company not known for its benevolence to have a access to your data in the pursuit of their interests. You will not even know when they are looking or what they have downloaded to your machine ‘for security’ (their security, not yours). Bill Gates already has quite enough money to live happily ever after, he does not need any more of yours. Friends don’t let friends buy Windows XP.
And while we are on the subject, don’t forget to regularly check out Privacy Digest if you happen to think your business is your business.
Just because we libertarians deplore the state’s intrusions does not mean we give the Mega-Corporations a free ride.
The splendid European Union is going to demand people selling over the Internet add EU Value Added Tax (VAT) on to item delivered digitally in Europe.
Solution:
- Register several companies off-shore with different names
- Each company separately sets up to take credit card
- transactions
in different countries
- Sell your product without collecting VAT from outside EU (and outside USA as well for best protection)
- Do not hide what you are doing…use it as a marketing plus
- Set up several servers & shells so if EU tries to shut you down you can be back up in minutes in another country
- You make money and EU kleptocracy does not. Double Plus Good.
Oh! But this is not clever tax avoidance, this is breaking law!
I don’t live in the EU though I do sometimes do business there. I recommend not breaking the law where your severs are but as for EU law? Yes, break it every time and as often as possible. Don’t cooperate with your own repression and for goodness sake don’t help fund it for other people. Remember: what a business person can do across a border in minutes, hours, days can take a lawyer weeks, months, years to do across the same borders if you choose your borders well.
Of course I am just speaking theoretically 
[Thanks to Medvjedica for link]
Andrew Sullivan is pleased that Irish singer Bono is not slagging off drug companies. Well a word of advice, Andrew… don’t get your hopes up that Bono’s seeming conversion to the forces of reason is more than a fragile veneer. He does have this disheartening knack for seeming to make sense, only to dash your raised expectations on the rocks of reality a little further down the road, as I observed back on January 14th 2002 in the article Teeth grinding illogic and grotesque conflation…or perhaps genius?. He is either a perverse genius or a jackass. You choose.
This humourous phase was once used to describe fox hunting but could just as well be applied to the US Congressional investigation into the fun and frolics pertaining to Enron. For a rather more forthright view of this investigation, let me refer you to the blog known poetically as Gut Rumbles:
The central point seems to be that a bunch of overblown, publicity-seeking assholes who lie, cheat and waste other people’s money for personal gain have a lot of nerve to appear on television and barbeque a bunch of overblown, secrecy-seeking assholes who lied, cheated and wasted other people’s money for personal gain.
Not quite how I would have phrased it but I can’t say I disagree.
Be watching for a full page ad in the New York Times tomorrow, Sunday, February 10, 2002. We The People Foundation has purchased one in the main news (first) section of the nationwide edition, titled “IRS and Department of Justice: Why Won’t You Answer Our Questions?“
You may remember the organization leader, Bob Schulz, who fasted last summer to force a congressional hearing on the legality of the US income tax. He and many, many others have long held this tax is unconstitutional and passed into law under very shady circumstances.
Mr Schulz was prepared to fast unto death but was reprieved near the end. The government agreed to a hearing under the requested terms. Then came September 11th… Mr Schulz quite reasonably agreed to a delay, as would any decent and honourable man. According to Schulz, the delay has turned into an unadmitted cancellation:
[January 28, 2002] Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (MD), Assistant Attorney General Dan Bryant, and IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti have broken their written agreement with the American People and have betrayed the United States Constitution.
While I cannot speak to the correctness of Mr Schulz’s legal arguments, I can comment on the character of the people he is dealing with. They are liars, cheats and scoundrels whose word is of no worth.
To those brought up as I was, a man whose word is no good is not a man at all.
Porn has been around longer than written language. It has been around since humans first started drawing on cave walls. If porn is unnatural, then so is writing and agriculture and high heels and teddy bears and antibiotics. As for causing emotional and physical damage, you could just as easily be describing most close personal relationships, or football, or being a war correspondent or riding a horse come to that. Are these also things to be ‘discouraged’?
One big trouble I have with so many conservatives is the implicit arrogance that underneath it all, people basically see the world the way they do and feel as they do. Now I am as guilty as them of seeing the world through the filters of my own experience and emotions, but at least I do not claim that I think most other people secretly agree with me when it is quite clear they do not. Conservatives can claim that there is deep meaning in sex and certainly that can be true. But the truth is that sometimes sex is the banquet at the wedding feast and sometimes it is just a quick trip to MacDonalds.
The evidence is clear that much of the time people see sex as an end in and of itself. You do not have to even read Playboy to see that. Look through Vogue and you will see page after page of exaltations of female sexuality… not female commitment, female sexuality, with a strongly bisexual/sapphic overtone at that. It is all about elegant, lovely, lustful and largely unobtainable sexual perfection. We all want to look like exquisite Christy Turlington wearing Hervé Leger, Bulgari and exchanging enigmatic eye contact with Linda Evangalista. Of course we all know in our heart of hearts that the only person who can actually do that is Christy Turlington, not us. Yet I still buy Vogue every month… Italian edition, German edition, Russian edition, British edition.
And so it is with pornography. Maybe we need to look at unobtainable uncomplicated thrilling sex for the same reason we want to look at unobtainable expensive sophistication in Vogue. For the same reason preliterate man made sexual cave paintings and extravagantly male outlines on hillsides, we still need to experience the animal side of our existence. Do you think the conservatives roaring fiercely as they watch their favourite sportsman on television are getting in touch with the spirit of Aristotle? So why do they find it so hard to understand the nature of pornography? It is impossible not to trip over people’s true attitude to sex every time you walk down the street or turn on the television or pick up a magazine. People do not use marriage as a marketing devise, they use sex, because that is what people actually think about much of the time. Pornography is just the essence of that. In reality most well adjusted people do not get porn and real life confused, keeping them in different boxes in their heads.
Yet I don’t read Vogue primarity for the articles anymore than most people read Playboy for the articles (which are mostly crypto-socialist drivel anyway). I read them both for the sex. I don’t have a problem with pornography because unlike many conservatives and their socialist-feminist friends, I do not have a problem with the reality of human nature. I just wish those conservatives and their statist allies on the left would stop trying to use the force of law to impose peculiar world views on everyone else.
Greg Nemitz, one of the founders of TransOrbital has reported in the Artemis Society e-mail digest that Paypal will be going public early next week, possibly Monday. What is particularly interesting about this IPO over others is Elon Musk, the largest shareholder of Paypal, has dedicated his wealth to opening Mars.
Paypal presently has 12-13 million members.
Check out a first-class summation of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia by Alastair Palmer in the latest edition of the British weekly magazine, The Spectator. Very good, particularly in bemoaning Nozick’s failure to give a substantive defence of natural rights. Otherwise Palmer has nice things to say about Nozick, not least the fact that he makes it clear that Nozick was certainly not an apologist for Big Business or the Republican Party. What is so good about this review is how the author manages to draw out the essence of Nozick’s critique of egalitarianism and ‘social justice’ theories generally.
I thought Microsoft had plumbed depth’s of tastelessness none could match. But the Opinion Journal has pointed me to a cartoon from the Concord (N.H.) Monitor (clipping courtesy of PoliticsNY.com) that takes the prize.
Where are the rocks these people crawl from under? Wherever they are, we should build a parking lot there so they’ll be an endangered (or even better an extinct) species.
Can anybody think of any historically-significant cultural or technological innovation to have emerged from Continental Western Europe since World War II?
[Editor: does Catherine Deneuve count?]
[Other Editor: how about the World Wide Web?]
[Reader Ken Hagler: “How about the VAT? You didn’t say it had to be good…”]
[Reader & blogger Mark Byron: SCUBA, Velcro]
[Reader & blogger Steven Den Beste: Audio cassette, laser disc]
[Reader Aaron Dickey: ABBA] hmmmm.
Update: Of course although the World Wide Web was created in CERN (Switzerland) Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor, was an Englishman
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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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