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 – the first freedom We say “freedom of speech.” That’s not really what it is.
It’s freedom of thought.
People who can’t say openly what they think for too long are forced into a shadow world. Either they give up the right to have their own view of the world and accept into what society or the government tells them. Or they keep their own views but no longer admit them aloud – and spend more and more time and energy gaslighting themselves.
Note that I am not using the words truth or lie in this analysis.
That omission is deliberate.
It doesn’t actually matter whether the speech is right or wrong, objectively true or false. Indeed, the First Amendment makes no reference to the truth or falsity of the speech it protects. Plenty of people have strange ideas. If I think aliens are real but can’t say so, I have lost some essential part of myself.
– Alex Berenson
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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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Propaganda is #1 weapon of Russian Federation. Goebels, The radio of the thousand hills were persecuted for a good reason. I support Lithuania’s , Latvia’s , Ukraine’s ban on totalitarian organizations and totalitarian propaganda.
Good post – nothing to add, but the first comment is terrible.
Sigis copying the censorship of Mr Putin is not good – it is bad.
As for calling anyone you dislike a Nazi “Goebbels” – yes Mr Putin does that as well. He pretends that the government of Ukraine are “Nazis” – totalitarians.
I think that we here in Australia should have a basic ‘Freedom of Opinion’ right, embedded in our Constitution. But our politicians love the idea of banning hate-speech!
This should be obvious. Isn’t thinking the main function of language?
Nicholas Gray – as you know Sir, “Hate Speech” is speech with which the powerful disagree, it is dissent.
It is precisely “Hate Speech” that the 1st Amendment of the American Constitution is meant to protect – as speech with which the powerful agree, requires no protection.
In the modern world what the powerful believe in is summed up by the DEI (in Britain EDI) and ESG agendas – so it is people who speak against the doctrines contained in DEI and ESG who most require protection against being victimised for peacefully expressing their political and cultural opinions.
My colleague Councillor King Lawal is an example of someone who has expressed opinions with which the powerful disagree. Once the opinions he has expressed were the opinions of the powerful – but that was long ago, in our world it is the people who hold the opposite opinions who are the powerful.
That various pieces of legislation (such as the Equality Act of 2010) lay down duties on elected representatives to push doctrines that both they and the people who elected them may dissent from is problematic – to say the least.
The thinking behind such legislation is totalitarian – it is that everyone must have the same opinions and actively promote them. The very totalitarianism that Sigis says he is against.
Language was developed so that there was a proper medium in which men could fail to fully express their emotions to women.