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 of the day
Snapped by me a fortnight ago, at the LA/LI Annual Conference at which Anthony Evans was the final speaker. I’ve straightened and sharpened it as best I could. A copyable, pastable and more readable version of the text from which this is taken may be read here. More photos of the speaker taken that same day can be viewed here.
UPDATE: Anthony Evans website, articles, blog.
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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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This would seem to me to be unarguable. Yet the readers of GU… well, I was about to say they argued with it, but they didn’t. They just repeated the assertion that the crash was due to deregulation and subjected Evans to ridicule, which isn’t really the same thing.
Sadly yes – the enemy do not try and refute our arguments, they just sneer.
W.H. Smith (before anyone laughs – for every person who ever goes on this site I bet a thousand people go into a W.H. Smith branch at a railway station) is promoting a work as “book of the month”.
It is another in their beloved “Everything is Shit” series. According to this noble tome neocons love Atlas Shrugged (that neocons are actually social democrats passes the author by) because it is “shit” – indeed all pro freedom protests, books, arguments (or whatever) are “shit” and that is that . The only account given of what these evil “capitalists” might believe given is that we believe in slavery, starvation wages, child abuse, and so on. Not that we are a big target of the latest “Shit” book – we are just dealt with in passing, on a few pages.
This is an extreme example – but not that extreme (it is book-of-the-month remember – and previous “Shit” work was pushed by W.H. Smith for more than a year).
Borders and Waterstones are much the same as W.H. Smith (look at the politics sections – and so on, for it is not just the politics sections).
Nor is it just bookshops – it is also the schools, universities and the mass media they produce.
Even in conservative newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph statist beliefs and attitudes (from the meta context the writers have been taught) are strongly present.
Sorry, but a few internet sites (no matter how well argued or noble in intent) are not going to trump all the above. We live in a culture dominated by statist ideas.
The United States is also dominated by statism – but there is a strong dissenting voice.
Best selling books (in high street bookstores as well as the internet), talk radio pro free market voices, and (yes) many of the people on Fox News.
Here there are none of those things.
I do not believe that our blogs and conferences (and so on) even amount to a dissenting voice – it is more like a dissenting whisper in this land.