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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In case anyone who has been observing the Tory Party in Britain has not noticed, they have not been doing very well for rather a long time now. In spite of years of Tony Blair’s less that glorious ‘precedency’, the Conservatives are still trailing a very distant second place in England and are more of less nonexistent in Scotland, riven everywhere by factions fighting over control of the carcass of the Party and quite bereft of any distinctly identifiable ‘Tory’ ideology. In fact there is not even any sign of an intellectual or political ‘wave of the future’ starting to build up… not even a ‘ripple of the future’ really.
Now we are being told by Norman Tebbit, the Dr. Harold Shipman of British politics, that what the Tory Party really needs is a purge of any ‘libertarians’ (i.e. anyone who likes non-white sportsmen or dislikes the state telling them what to do with their genitals or actually has anything resembling a new idea).
Of course Tebbit has quite a lot of experience masterminding Tory party purges. He shut down the Federation of Conservative Students in 1987, thereby guaranteeing the Conservative Party would become an ideology-free zone from then onwards.
Funny how the party has been in decline ever since it eradicated its most radical and highly motivated roots. They don’t call it ‘The Stupid Party’ for nothing.
Although Prague has been hit hard by the worst flooding of the Vltava in a century, at least there has been some good news for the despondent staff at Prague’s zoo. After having been forced to put down several highly prized large animals when it became clear they could not be moved to higher ground in time to avoid drowning, returning zoo employees were astonished to discover Slavek, an 18 year old hippo, waiting for them on the second floor of a zoo building in an exceedingly bad mood.
 Don’t just stand there gawping, feed me, damn it!
How else does one explain this?
Things in Zimbabwe are going from worse to even worse than that and I think it is safe to assume that Robert Mugabe is really not kidding around. Zimbabwe surely must qualify as Evil Central combining marxist year-zero policy with a highly illiberal dose of ethnic cleansing. Yummy!
White farmers are now being arrested for defying Chairman Mugabe’s edict and, in due course, they will either be expelled or killed. Mugabe has had, to all intents and purposes, the green light from the Tranzis who have been far too pre-occupied with bringing down the Great Satan (USA) and Little Satan (Israel) to waste any valuable hectoring time with the likes of Brother Mugabe whose odds of seeing the inside of the Hague are considerably longer than my odds of seeing the inside of Gwyneth Paltrow’s bedchamber.
Still, the Tranzis might live to regret it. Comrade Mugabe is in the process of setting a precedent and precedents tend to get followed. That’s why they’re called precedents. Trouble is, a whole load of other people might live to regret it as well.
Although it has been linked to elsewhere in the blogosphere, I feel that this essay by John Fonte is simply too important to pass without mention here.
It’s a long essay but far more than worth it. For me, it was more like a gripping novel; once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down. It isn’t just good, it’s exciting because a lot of us have known for some time that there was something wrong in the world but it was difficult to pin down and put our fingers on. It was something that has no face and no name. Like fog it swirled all around us but not being corporeal we lashed out fiercely in all directions, landing blows on nothing. It was like an itch we could never scratch.
John Fonte has done us all a service by running his nails deliciously down that spot and we will hear more of him and, more importantly, much more of the ‘Transnational Progressives’ (“Tranzis”) he so graphically disects.
You don’t need a government to tell you when you’ve gone too far. There’s no greater deterrent for a comedian than stone silence.
– Mike Myers
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Twenty-five years after his death people all over the world are gathering to celebrate the life of Elvis Presley. And when I say the world, I mean the world. Not just all over the USA but in Britain, Germany, Holland, Japan and even Malaysia.
Elvis Presley is bigger, more popular and more influential now than he was even when he was still alive. He is a global phenomenon that shows absolutely no signs of waning. His memory and his music continues to proselytize across borders and generations.
Elvis was so much more than a great rock ‘n’ roll singer. He was dirt-poor red-necked farm boy who earned fame and fabulous wealth by exploitation of his raging talent. He was all about looking good, living fast, having fun, driving gas-guzzling cars, eating hamburgers the size of cathedrals, wallowing in pretty girls and not letting anybody tread on his blue-suede shoes. His consumption was not merely conspicuous it was outrageous.
In a story linked to the one above, Chinese Elvis Impersonator Paul Hyu says:
He has gone down in Far East culture less as a rock star, and more as an icon of the West presented to them in a stage of their development.
For so many academics and ‘intellectuals’, Elvis represents everything that is crass and vulgar but for millions of other humbler folk he is the American Dream made flesh. It is a dream that are buying into as they gather together in every corner of the planet to shake, rattle, roll, jive and jitterbug.
Whether they realise it or not, Elvis fans are engaged in a glorious political act.
The King lives on.
…was that a large proportion of the Samizdata Team were distracted by Antoine Clarke’s birthday party in London!
Antoine blows his cork!
Adriana and Brian look on as David Carr
does his mushroom cloud impersonation
A man in New York City is suing McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s and KFC, saying they have made him fat. He is also suing Victoria Secret for making him play with himself.
– Jay Leno
August 17, on this day in 1795 the slave known only as Tula and his friend Bastian Karpata started a violent revolt against their oppressors.
When Janis Ian wrote her first article on the rather big shop of horrors the music industry has become, she expected it would be read by the usual few fans and industry friends who visit her web site.
Boy was she ever wrong!
Janis was not fully aware of the magnitude of the war raging across the Internet between “us” the consumers (and lowly creators) of music and “them” the parasitic entities of “Big Music”. At the very least she did not expect a huge organized opposition ready and willing to adopt her as a figurehead.
She should have known better and I mean that in a very positive way. Read her response to it all and you will see what I mean. This is one extremely intelligent woman, someone who is far more than a well known songwriter. She understands the business of music and how to make a living off it. She knows how to research, learn and synthesize technical issues in short order.
She’s also a very nice person who took the time and trouble to individually and personally respond to many strangers who contacted her. One of them was myself and she and I had a lovely email chat. We grew up only a few short miles apart in the Ohio River Valley in the same time period and we both started writing songs early on so there is a bit of commonality Of course the difference is her songs were great and she is justifiably famed for them, whereas mine were merely okay and I am perhaps justifiably unfamous.
What is important to those of us who have never reached her heights in the “biz” is her inside knowledge that the Majors are just as sleazy, just as crooked and just as intent on screwing the last possible dime out of the artist as any of us ever imagined we knew.
If you have any interest in music or in keeping culture open, read what she has to say.
Oh, and by the way… go buy some of her records. She’s a really nice lady and deserves your support.
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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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