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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Samizdata quote(s) of the day 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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See:
http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2008/06/boris-regime-mcgrath-mayor
BTW, the NS is offering a free book to new subscribers. It’s ‘In Defense of Lost Causes’ by Slavoj Zizek.
The blurb for this book says: “Zizek claims that, particularly in the light of the forthcoming ecological crisis, we should reinvent revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for universal emancipation. We need to courageously accept the return to this Cause even if we court the risk of a catastrophic disaster.”
Jeez.
And unlike those ‘leftieluvvies’ spitting venom at Johnson no obsessional hatred was directed towards Ken Livingstone by anyone… oh wait
I think the difference is hating Ken Livingstone has never been a badge of personal acceptability in right-wing circles, for anything very much. Where he has been hated it has been on account of his political persona, not class. And there’s been very little fictionalising of the politics or personality, with the exception of the (to my mind) rather tiresome and unconvincing attempt by the Evening Standard to brand him anti-semitic, rather than rude-when-drunk, after his altercation with one of its reporters.
What’s strangely reminiscent of the groupthink of Two Minute Hate is that even though a Conservative MP, Boris wasn’t held up as an evil, racist toff until the moment he stood against Livingstone. His role up to then was as licensed eccentric, OK-for-a-Tory, the perplexingly pleasant right-winger.
“We need to courageously accept ”
He should swing from the gibbet for that split infinitive alone….
“Emancipation through terror” indeed.
I think the Internet has far surpassed the Two Minute Hate 🙂