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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Christopher Hitchens, RIP “Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. ‘All the News That’s Fit to Print,’ it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it’s as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.”
Unfortunately, not even the Gray Lady was able to extend the lifespan of this essayist and controversialist beyond his age of 62. Farewell, Hitch.
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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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Cancer is a bugger, isn’t it. You know how sick someone like that is (and unlike Steve Jobs, Hitch was very upfront about how sick he was) but it still comes as a something of a shock when they actually do die. Particularly when (as in the case of both Hitchens and Jobs) they seem to have been working ferociously almost until the moment they died.
I am certainly going to miss reading his stuff.
I once heard of a Chicago police officer, dying of cancer, who kept working to try to reach some number of years on the job that would vest survivor’s rights for his family.
He worked his last shift literally hours before he died – a few days short of the vesting line. I’m not sure what happened after that.
There are heroes we never hear of.
Good point, Rich.
Vearing slightly off topic, but the best strap line ever composed graces the Ankh Morpork Times – The Truth Shall Make ye Fret.
I am sure CH would have approved.
Turns out his mother was Jewish.( She hid the fact from her husband and children, and Hitch learned about it only after both his parents died.
He could write.
Here is what annoys me about this… Hitchens was a great writer and journalist, alright, and he stood up to Clinton, alright – and so on – but the praise he seems to have gotten in the last few years, especially from libertarians and conservatives, has been a bit like binge-drinking.
Let’s not forget that this is a man who, for all he is lionized as a truth-crusader, nevertheless seemed to deliberately ignore the gross fiscal and monetary obesity of the U.S. government and indeed, dismissed the Tea Party with a scarcely more “eloquent” version of the “ignorant hicks on welfare” slapstick. I mean he voted for Obama for christ’s sake.
In his later years (including before he was diagnosed with cancer) he was a man who was increasingly indulged by his “comrades” on the Left with softball questions on religion and alcohol and other nonsense just as he indulged them in some of their worst and most despicable stupidities. I hold that much against him.
Like so many First World leftists, he spent much of his career as a fair weather foe of the United States. But 9/11 revealed him to be a fair weather friend, for which he was ejected from the herd of independent minds. He was a tough polemicist, a fine foreign correspondent, and at last an ally, if not altogether a friend, of the West.