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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Sorry! Here is a poster I snapped in the London Underground the other day, through the Jubilee Line glass screen at Waterloo. It is quite amusing, but should they really be boasting about things like this?
And look down at the bottom. Is this a conclusion they really ought to be proud to be drawing? Or is the implication that if they ever do make any mistakes, they are all just typos?
Detail of the bottom corner, with a bit of help from Photoshop to make it more readable:
So, may we now expect a poster with a big mistake corrected?
We have been supporting state centralised socialistic stupidity and stagnation for, you know, a long time. We were wrong. Sorry and all that. Capitalism has its problems, but it is, we now realise, much better.
DifferentNow guardian.co.uk
Such will not, I suspect, be the substance of my next posting here.
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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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Gotta love the Grauniad.
Gosh, I wonder why they didn’t use this actual example of one of the corrections they had to publish recently?
I keep seeing this poster, and it drives me crazy imagining how much the Guardian paid for such a poor campaign. Fools and their money, etc.
They got so many complaints about the Wolfowitz quote they than had to put up this page explaining it all. The thing is, a google search, as many blogs discovered showed the story had been discredited (discredited in English too) about two days before the Guardian got hold of it.
The bad thing is, this is an influential newspaper. It boasts of having more public-sector jobs advertised than any other paper. The BBC top job was advertised there. Thankfully its readership is pitifully low – about 300,000 when the Sun has about 3 million.
For a moment I thought the tag line in the corner said
The Guardian “French” Thinking.
Which would be somewhat appropriate I should think.
I remember thinking that if the BBC had behaved as the guardian did in this case, i.e. apologised promptly when they were wrong then the whole Hutton fiasco would not have happened.
In this case, at keast, the Guardian behaves in a sensible manner.
Yes. And it really is a funny poster. Good for them.
Jackie D,
Although still an amusing triviality, the interview, the mistake and the correction cited in the poster were real.
IMO, the Guardian’s policy of owning up to its factual errors is the best thing about the paper, and I only wish the others followed its example. It keeps you from the “Piers Morgan*” territory: “Never mind that the photos are fake, there is serious abuse going on somewhere and so they speak to a broader truth”.
* Mind you, Morgan does have a reputation for being a stickler for factual accuracy (however unfairly the facts may have presented) before that the prisoner abuse photos debacle. The theory that he stayed on to be sacked, because he stood to get paid a big wedge if sacked but not if he resigned, is somewhat attractive.