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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Our very own Brian has written an awful lot over the years; his writings have influenced, encouraged and advised many of us Samizdatistas and other libertarians. When I heard that he was trying to find his old writings and get them in order, I had a think about how I could help, and so began the Brian Micklethwait Archive.
The idea is first of all to put a lot of old writing in a more convenient, easy to find, search, quote and refer-to location. Some writings exist only as PDFs which do not render well on mobile devices and do not work well with the rest of the internet. That part to do with fixing that has got started already. The next idea is to find all the places Brian has scattered his work, such as his many defunct blogs, and make sure that it stays online and is easy to navigate. Then there are other things such as podcasts to be organised and catalogued, and a database of quotes to build.
Why go to all this trouble? The writings and ideas are valuable. Brian himself has argued for the value of repetition: old audiences need reminding and new audiences need a chance to discover things for the first time. An archive does not have to be a musty museum, seldom-visited: its contents can be blogged and tweeted about and memed for eternity. And it gives me something useful to do: my creativity has not been flowing in the direction of blogging lately, so here is a way I can help the cause of liberty.
And you can help too, by commenting here or otherwise pointing me in the direction of particular bits of Brianalia that I ought to get to sooner rather than later. Or keep an eye on that site or its Twitter account and read and tell people about it.
Which WordPress plugins are recommended for adding posts to Parler (which will be back) & Gab? I have axed the previous buttons for linking to Twitter & Facebook (basically fuck ’em).
We are experiencing some technical issues with the commenting system… working on it!
Update 14th August 07:30 UTC: comments are now working. Service may be spotty while we investigate the underlying issue.
Prosecutorial discretion is a power jealously protected by prosecutors, who will tell stories about forgoing prosecution of 18-year-old guys for “rape” of their 17-year-old girlfriends, of not prosecuting people for technicalities when the equities demanded they violate those technicalities. It all sounds so decent and commonsensical.
That’s how people like Epstein go forever in safety, how Clinton escaped prosecution for the same acts that put others in prison regularly, how the Jussie Smollets of the world walk away from their troubles . . .
You don’t need to be that well connected to benefit. Bobby b, commenter of this parish, worked for a time as a criminal defence lawyer in the twin cities of Minneapolis / St. Paul.
In my relatively short crimdef career, I asked prosecutors to use that kind of discretion many times. It worked for the judge’s kid, for the cop, and for two staffers of the St. Paul City Councilperson. They were the only ones deserving of the city/county attorneys’ mercy.
We’ve seen the US Department of Justice exercise a lot of ‘discretion‘ recently (and not so recently). Bobby warns us that this bit of the deep state runs a lot deeper than that.
(After ‘discretion’ finally ran out for him, I assume it was a different but liaising bit of the deep state who arranged that one fine day in the middle of the night the ‘forever’ safe Epstein suddenly expired in his ‘guarded’, ‘suicide-watched’ cell.)
Samizdata is a site that writes about things from a primarily libertarian perspective (which means different things to different people, of course). But the issue firmly wedged in the minds of many people here is not a libertarian/non-libertarian issue, it is political, and it has split the samizdatistas much as it has split the UK.
Brexit.
Samizdata needs to get back to writing the kind of things it has always done, and will continue to do, but that does not mean the overtly political stuff is not worth saying… just not here. Not on samizdata. After much pondering, I have decided it just isn’t what this site should be about.
And that is why we now have The Great Realignment, an overtly political site in its very early days for all the various things that do not really fit on samizdata. It is not a replacement, it is a fork in our particular road. I believe that we are now entering a period in which many of the assumptions that have underpinned the UK’s political order are no longer true, but the politics we see have not yet adjusted to this uncertain half-glimpsed future. This is what we will be discussing, with a UK focus, but we may well look at similar realignments elsewhere.
Check it out.
We’re performing some long-needed maintenance on the site. If we did things right, you should not have noticed most of our work, but there will be a few user-visible changes.
First, you may have noticed that the site is much, much faster now than it was a few days ago. The (temporary) price of this has been the “Recent Comments” sidebar is now visible only on the front page. We will restore the sidebar when our new theme is complete.
Second, as implied above, we’re working on a new site theme. It should be much like the old on the surface. However, it will be much more maintainable, will feature better and more modern mobile support, and have (very) slightly updated aesthetics. It may also improve site performance even further, though things are quite snappy after our first round of changes.
Third, there has been a bit of site downtime in the last day, and will be a bit more in coming days as we complete our work. Downtime should never last more than ten to thirty minutes, so if the site is down, fret not, it will be back quickly.
Until we can figure out how to fix WordPress’ “helpful” update that over-rides CSS, Samizdata will be looking a bit weird… sorry folks.
And hey WordPress… fuck you. Maybe time to start looking for an alternative to WordPress.
Smitebot seems to be yielding an unusual number of false positives lately, so if your innocuous comment got ‘smited’ and does not appear after half a day or so, feel free to send an email to reply-at-samizdata.net to alert me to the fact that your worthy remarks are languishing in smitebot’s cat box.
I have enabled ‘nested’ comments for a while as an experiment, thus you will see a ‘reply’ option on each comments that may be used if you seek to reply to that remark specifically, rather than to the article in general. This may or may not become a permanent feature.
We are trying out a plug-in that lets people edit their comments on Samizdata for five minutes after posting them… no more eye watering typos, right? This is just an experiment to see if this causes anything else to break.
I am away from HQ for a few days and looking out over the horizon I see this…
Where am I*?
This may cause a delay in un-smiting legit comments that get smitten/smote/smitted by the samizdata Smite-Bot.
* Not you, Jennings, you already know 😛
The samizdata smitebot interface is well and truly out of London, drinking nice wine and eating mighty food, so there may be delays in unsmiting comments that get moderated by the dreaded samizdata smitebot. According to Google Maps, I could walk to Kiev in 170 hours or Warsaw in 92 hours. Where am I?
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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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