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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The riding list All twelve of the firefighters who were working in my husband’s firehouse died on 9/11. The “riding list,” handwritten in chalk, listing all the men who were on duty that day, still hangs on the firehouse wall, forever preserved in glass. Engine 40 Ladder 35 #NeverForget
– Janice Dean
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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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It is very grim.
And made worse by the horrible failure of policy in the 21 years after 9/11.
Policy, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or domestically in Western countries, was based on the false assumption that the problem is the “distortion”, “twisting” or whatever of Islam by a handful of “extremists”, or some new thing called “IslamoFascism” or some other nonsense word.
Indeed, the situation in the West has got so bad that one can no longer even discuss these matters further (as Prime Minister Gladstone and Winston Churchil did) without risk of PUNISHMENT – not punishment by the forces of Islam, punishment by Western authorities, including by supposed “Conservatives”.
This started soon after 9/11 when President Bush, in his public statements, repeated the nonsense that I mention above – and set the tone for the rest of the Western world.
21 years of war, with vast loss of human life and money (yes money – money does matter) followed – in pointless enterprises, not pointless because the thousands of lives brutally taken on 9/11 did not matter, but pointless because the wars were based on a false assumption.
Nothing more can be said – without risk of punishment, punishment by the Western authorities.
>And made worse by the horrible failure of policy in the 21 years after 9/11.
>Policy, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or domestically in Western countries, was based on the false assumption that the problem is the “distortion”, “twisting” or whatever of Islam by a handful of “extremists”, or some new thing called “IslamoFascism” or some other nonsense word.
This was 20 years ago, now the West tries exact opposite methods, at least concerning Russia.
Russia bad. All Russians bad. Everything Russian bad, even cats and dogs. All Russian property is to be seized without even pretense of due process, all Russians expelled, no Russian is to be let in the West.
Will it work better than the previous approach? We will see.
Back when Bush was in office, I took the view he was mostly naive and bumbling.
More recently seeing him all pally with the Obamas and suck up to the liberal-leftist US media, while him and his Bush-in-all-but-name successors (McCain/Romney) do their best to undermine President Trump, makes me think he was actually just a malevolent jerk all along.
Yes, I most certainly subscribe to that notion. Finding ways to fuck over and ideally collapse the Muscovite empire needs to be a major foreign policy objective. A Russian military fiasco in Ukraine might (but only might) be all it takes for internal Russian political gravity to do the rest.