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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Silly Easter stuff I’m feeling guilty, because I’ve done nothing for Samizdata for three whole days, and I’m supposed to be one of the regulars. Like many bloggers I found that once that statue got taken down I couldn’t be bothered with the war, but going back from the war to the usual stuff we write about didn’t feel right either. Result: nothing.
The most annoyingly memorable thing I’ve seen on the web recently has been this rather terrible song called Hippo Girl, which, inevitably, comes to you via b3ta.co, who also link to this rather nice little massage robot.
Meanwhile Dave Barry guides us to this piece of grammatical advice, which all Samizdatista’s should read because its full of good advice. Nobody edit that last sentence until theyve checked the link.
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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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Nah… I much prefer the moon song, which is truly demented… Dada at its best.
I remember many years ago when I was in college, I had a .sig on Usenet that read something like “Apostrophe’s are not to be used in plural’s”.
For some reason, the lack of standard written English in Email and Usenet drives me up a wall. Of course, on one of the newsgroups I frequent, we have a kindly Belgian man who corrects the English of other Belgian posters. 🙂
This has become my new pet peeve. And the worst part is when a teacher does it. Sure, he’s not my English teacher, but still…. he’s a college educated man and he uses an apostrophe in plurals on occasion. It’s kind of sad.
You know, unlike the cartoonist here, I think “VCR’s” is acceptable, although I would write “VCRs” myself. I seem to remember being taught that the plural of an abbreviation could carry an apostrophe to stand for the letters that were abbreviated out.
Mentioning the statue coming down reminded me of this
Richard: Oh please. Do states lie through their teeth when it suits them? Yes of course.
But I watched hours of that incident unedited and live before many the US viewers were out of bed that day (coverage was more or less continuous on several channels). At various times the size of the crowd ebbed and flowed (at one point there was a sniper scare when gunfire rang out nearby and many of the crowd scattered when the US soldiers took cover) but it started with a bunch of curious Iraqi guys trying to pull over the statue and failing and then getting the US troops to do it.
The idea it was staged is ludicrous and shows how tha anti-war mob are desperate to prove… well, I am not sure what the hell they are trying to prove… that there were US tanks in a city being overrunning by the US military? Oh yeah, very suspiscious… that the crowd was not huge given that fighting was still going on nearby? Well I have got news for you… that picture only shows a single tiny slice of what the video showed and the crowd was larger a various times, not that that really matters. Ther were maybe a thousand people at one point, maybe 500 at another. So what? Perhaps the point being made is that millions of Iraqi people really did not want to be rid of Justin Raymondo’s good buddy Saddam Hussain? If you ever want to be taken seriously about anything, just give it a rest.
Natalie:
I believe that apostrophes in the plurals of letters and numbers is actually correct — eg., three a’s and two 8’s. I’m not certain how it applies to acronyms, however.
Way back when on alt.usage.english, somebody commented on the incorrectness of an advertisement that said “oven’s on sale”, to which one wag replied that the store could defend itself by saying there really is only one oven on sale! 🙂
I agree that the conclusions drawn at antiwar.com are suspect. For instance, that this wasn’t a “spontaneous demonstration” is a possibility supported by the presence of American hardware to help pull down the statue. However, that it was spontaneous is supported, not contradicted, by the fact that there were only a few hundred people there
I seem to remember being taught that, when
denoting the possessive of a word ending in the
letter “s”, one puts the apostrophe after the
word ( as in “rockets’ red glare”). At any rate,
I have done so for lo, these many decades – and
the ghost of Mrs. Frazier has yet to appear and
sieze me by the ear as was her wont.