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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“Ours” Journalist Nancy Rommelmann writes, after a surprisingly (to me, anyway) pleasant evening spent with feminist writer Susan Faludi, of sitting on the back steps of her home with her husband and a glass of wine:
It must be hard-wired into humans to want a little patch of earth and grass, a peaceful place to sit at the end of the day, or the beginning, and think, ours.
So true, so simple, and yet anathema to so many.
Read the rest of Nancy’s post for some unsurprising-but-fun gossip that she and Faludi exchanged about a certain tiresome feminist whinger extraordinaire.
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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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Well, humans are territorial, so I suppose this is indeed hard-wired into our brains. We are also self-aware, so we can rationalise “mine” and “not mine”.
Then again, we are also social animals, and like to do things in groups, so we can rationalise “ours” and “not ours”.
The failing of Communism is that is ignores the first and concentrates on the second. A weakness in libertarianism, I think, is that it ignores or downplays the second and concentrates on the first.
EG
There are no weaknesses in libertarianism. Only weaknesses in the minds of people who fail to understand it correctly. Libertarianism says precisely nothing about whether we ought to act in groups or alone.
You are joking, aren’t you?
Wasn’t this the justification used by the Soviet government for locking up dissidents in mental “hospitals”?
EG
You are joking, aren’t you?
No.
Wasn’t this the justification used by the Soviet government for locking up dissidents in mental “hospitals”?
What has this to do with anything? I do not advocate the incarceration of those who fail to fully understand libertarianism. I merely correct them sometimes when they are propagating their errors.