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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As if an answer to my suggestion to document the communist history in Eastern Europe through the lives and eyes of individuals, the PLOTKI, an on-line and print magazine about culture and society in Central and Eastern Europe, invites contributions to a project Changes from Below:
The project “Changes From Below“ aims to collect pieces of research which highlight personal stories behind movements against ‘‘communist’’ dictatorship in Central and Eastern Europe.
… Whilst historical investigation on resistance to ‘communist’ rule often focuses on historical ‘grand events’ such uprisings as Prague Spring 1968, Hungarian Autumn 1956, 17 June 1953 in GDR or Poland in the 80’s, Plotki wants to research the smaller stories, personal experiences and the rumours which slipped through the historical sieve and serve them up via various artistic means such as writing, photography, graphics, film or audio. We are thinking about the Orange Alternative in Poland who attended illegal meetings of dwarfs, and were arresting for handing out tampons to women; the spontaneous ‘community supported agriculture’ networks that evolved during Ceausescu’s dictatorship in Romania, and that kept urban people alive by illegally supplying them with food; or Czechoslovakia’s Society for Happier Contemporary Times; or the diversity of ecological movements as the Umweltbibliothek (an environment documentation centre) in East Berlin, Ekoglasnost in Bulgaria or groups of people concerned with ecological damage in Bohemia; or factory self-management in Yugoslavia; or the protestant churches resistance in GDR; or the countless other inspirational, exciting and quirky forms of resistance which once inhabited the region.
Great stuff and worthwhile effort, no doubt. Just one minor gripe – what’s with the quotation marks/inverted commas around the word communist?!
A person calling him or herself “Thorkel” left a comment over at Wired magazine’s recent item on water shortages:
Your article on the planet’s dwindling supplies of freshwater (“Peak Water,” issue 16.05) shies away from the obvious: There’s not a hope in hell of avoiding dangerous water shortages until demand is reduced. And there’s not a hope in hell of reducing demand sufficiently until the human population is significantly reduced. We can either start taking measures to curtail our own breeding, or we can die in thirst and hunger and in the wars over what little is left.
How “significantly” we should reduce the human population, or by what means, is not explained. Apart from “curtailing our own breeding” (by forced sterlisation, compulsory abortions on the Chinese model, perhaps?) is not explained either. Neither is this writer, I expect, aware of how previous predictions of disastrous shortages of water and food been shown to be utter nonsense.
More than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. That seawater is not drinkable but then the problem is therefore one of using resources to convert that water into drinkable form. But to suggest that the Earth has a water shortage problem is a nonsense; what it has is currently an under-investment in the systems that might be needed to convert seawater into liquids fit for human use.
The always readable Leon Louw, who spoke at last year’s Libertarian Alliance conference on the issues raised here, is good on this topic.
Data is accumulating that the British residential property market is now undergoing a significant fall. The commercial side of it has been suffering for some time. Apart from some prime residential bits in central London – and even these parts are not immune to change – average prices have now fallen month on month across the country for quite some time.
Some of this may abate eventually. I hope so, since a collapse in house prices would presage a major recession. It is all well and good for people to say that a shakeout is necessary to clear all this cheap money out of the system – and I understand that point – but it is pretty grim having to endure the process first-hand. But beyond that, what this episode reminds me of is the unwise move by many people to put all their long-term retirement savings options into property. I know quite a few people who cheerfully tell me that they have no pension and are relying on a business or set of properties to do the job. Well, they have a half-decent point: many pension savings schemes are a rip-off and poorly invested. But relying on bricks and mortar to keep us comfortable in our rocking chairs does not strike me as very smart. Maybe market developments will act as a wakeup call. And anyway, as I have remarked before, more and more people are going to have to re-think the whole notion of “retirement” anyway, particularly if we are going to live longer, and in healthier shape, than our ancestors.
To succeed in modern politics you should take care to be a bland, self-preserving, sober, drugless, funless, dull-witted bore for years beforehand.
– Libby Purves, discussing leftyluvviedom’s cultivation of the Two Minutes Hate1 against Boris Johnson.
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1The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
– George Orwell, ‘1984’
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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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