Samizdata

Samizdata.

Eleven years. Blimey. Many thanks to all the contributors for 14,148 articles and to the commentariat for just under a quarter of a million comments.

Hopefully before the end of the year we might (maybe, perhaps, possibly) have a new improved Samizdata (hi Alec!) with new red knobs and extra added fiddly bits.

It should be possible to discuss racial genetics dispassionately and honestly in a public forum. But it is not. That is simply an empirically derived conclusion gained from running Samizdata for 10 years… it.can.not.be.done. Sorry but that is the inescapable truth. Racists are the perfect example of Churchill’s definition of a fanatic and unless you immediately show them the door and boot them through it, discourse in the comments section will quickly become untenable.

So Samizdata will continue to delete and ban racists when they leave comments and no apologies will be made for that. Our house, our rules.

For another article pertaining to why we will not tolerate racist discussions on Samizdata, read this.

…have been rather unwell lately, hence it has taken rather longer than usual to get comments approved if they have aggro’ed smitebot. Do not be concerned if you have no idea what this means

It has been clear to me for some time that support for capitalist wealth creation was no longer acceptable. The foolishness of our Austrian economic based opposition to massive politically directed transfers of ordinary people’s money to failed bankers, non-viable unionised car makers and anyone else who has political connections is clearly futile. This is the way of the future and we might as well get used to it while there is still any real money left to be redistributed. Let the printing presses roll and lets re-inflate that credit bubble! Fly me to the moon, my darling, fly me to the moon… on a massive gravity defying credit bubble!

As a consequence, as soon as I can get our technical guru to make the changes, we will be changing the name of this blog to ObamaBrownData, not as catchy as Samizdata I grant you, but it more fully represents the paradigm shift that all thinking people have now undergone and this blog is no exception. The world is rotating around the Gordon Brown/Barak Obama Axis now. So please all of you… go rotate.

We must learn to accept the wisdom and judgement of our political masters, sanctified by democratic processes, and realise that we are all dependent on the regulatory welfare state now. I will be signing up for as many state aid programmes as I can find and anyone who wants to advise me how to get on the gravy train, please let me know. All these years denying myself the largesse of our beneficent Big Brother has left me with a poor grasp of how to best benefit from the system. As Frederic Bastiat said, “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else”, well everyone will include me now… and the Samizdatistas… or Obamabrownistas as we will now be known.

Point me to the trough, I repent my foolish ways and have a lot of catching up to do.

Our migration to the new CMS will not happen until next weekend, so you can enjoy your fix of spleenic rants and pro-liberty disgruntlements throughout the weekend uninterrupted.

We felt it was better to get it right than do it fast… plus I am told the stars will be more favourably aligned next weekend.

As you might have noticed, the Samizdata server crapped out in a major way… and just to make it menthol, we also lost all our back-ups after 24th September (quite how that happened is still a bit unclear).

Well at least I had a separate set of back-ups also made by someone else, so no problem, thinks I… so imagine my happiness when I discover that the back-up back-up server crapped out some time ago and we were not in fact being backed up. That would have been nice to know.

I will be manually reconstructing the posts as best I can from the full RSS feeds.

Oh joy.

Needless to say I shall be setting up some sort of full site backup myself now.