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]
|
Samizdata quotes of the day Bluntly when you’ve been called a bigot by the media and the left and you know you aren’t one, the chances are pretty high that you’ll discount the claims that others are the same. Especially when the same people also make the same false claims again and again. The activist who cried “racist” is meeting the same result as the boy who cried “wolf”.
– Francis Turner
-Racist
-Sexist
-Misogynist
You burned those words.
They carried weight, until you used them on everybody.
Important words, meaningless now.
– Alejandro Argandona
|
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.
|
I take it as read that anyone whose head is above the public domain parapet and who has not been called at least one of these is a coward, a fraud or a co-conspirator – or all three.
I remain aware that the contrapositive is not true, but I sensibly apply a reasonably rigorous standard to any claim of an actual example of that.
(I should qualify the above: it applies to anyone who is older than the age of naivety – otherwise a fourth category of naive propaganda dupe should be allowed.)
Not all that important, merely useful at times.
The meaning, if you can call it that, these words now have are of the same order as “F— off!,” and “You are a f—ing a–hole.” They are pure expressions of emotion, with absolutely no intellectual content.
‘Nazi’, ‘fascist’, ‘authoritarian’, ‘Islamophobia’, these words are all practically meaningless now. The phrase ‘on the right/wrong side of history’ is utterly worthless as well. The progressive frauds who use it will be getting a sharp reminder in the coming years that history has no ‘sides’!
“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.” – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (April, 1946)
I find it helpful to remember that “democracy” isn’t all that. Sure, it’s the fetish du jour, but unfettered democracy is mob rule, as we saw with the Arab Spring.
It’s at times like these that I find myself amazed by the prescience of the founding fathers of the USA. In an era when democracy had barely been taken for a spin around the block those guys foresaw how it could go bad and built constitutional bulwarks against it.
A republic, if you can keep it. Indeed.
I’ve been a racist all my life, if you listen to those who claim to know. (It’s a difficult trick – living in rural Minnesota, I didn’t meet my first black until I was eighteen and went off to college. Perhaps they were counting the occasional Ojibway who passed through.) At this point, seventy years later, the accusation causes me more annoyance than guilt.
So be it for all the accusations we’ve been subject to in such plenitude throughout our lives. Perhaps when I get into my eighties I’ll not have the energy for annoyance.
Wot, you never told a lutefisk joke? 😛
Just lately it appears that “uneducated” and “unintelligent” are the buzzwords through which American Progressives are demonstrating their moral superiority and trenchant wit.
PersonFromPorlock:
I ate about a cubic centimeter of lutefisk once. It was no joke.
Yes – the boy who cried wolf.
The left (the media and the education system) call everyone they do not like a “racist” and so on.
So when real “White Nationalists” come along – the left are helpless.
After all what are they going to do – demand a “safe space” and threaten a “protest” as the Nazis nail the sexual organs of the leftists to the floor?
The tactics of the left only work against nice people – they do not work against nasty people.
They are lucky that Mr Trump is NOT really a “White Nationalist” – if he was there is nothing the media or the education system could do about it. As they would all be dead within a few days of him becoming President.
You left out stupid, redneck, deplorable and Islamophobic.
It’s funny how words get misused. A bigot is actually someone intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them, not a racist. That label belongs far more to the left than the right. Anyone trying, or happy that someone’s trying, to derail Brexit qualifies, or the people trying to De-legitimise Trump.
How do you think the rest of us felt when you elected a war criminal to be (Blair) or the greatest plague on international relation in a century (Obarmy). But we didn’t go out and beat up innocent passers by because they voted the wrong way.
So what is the corollary phrase to ‘Shut up and sing’?
Maybe ‘Shut up and yarn’?
“It’s a difficult trick – living in rural Minnesota . . . “
If you can get along with those bedamned Finns, you’ve established your diversity credentials well. Getting along with other races is just frosting on the cake.
I don’t remember who said it, but it was cool. They said “The left keeps crying wolf, until a wolf happens by.”