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]
|
We may be wandering through a vast desert of stupidity, monstrosity and petty tyranny but never forget that there are some oases of sanity still to be found.
One of them will blossom into life next month when the Libertarian Alliance Conference opens in London. True to tradition, the Conference features an impressive array of brilliant speakers who will deliver their pearls of wisdom to an audience of the enlightened. It is bound to be a uplifting experience.
Book now and book with gusto. Your salvation may depend on it.
At last! A how-to seminar for friends of freedom and limited government: the Cato Institute’s October 20-23 seminar on “How to Win Arguments, Win Allies, and Win Friends”.
A free republic rests on an informed citizenry, but more important, it rests on a citizenry willing to resort to persuasion rather than force. And for freedom to persist, freedom’s advocates must acquire the skills of advocacy.
October’s Cato University is a weekend long intellectual feast where you can make new friends, renew your commitment to freedom, and hone your skills as an exponent for liberty.
Speakers include Reason’s Nick Gillespie, the Objectivist Center’s David Kelley, Don Boudreaux of George Mason University, the Cato Institute’s David Boaz, Gene Healy, and Tom Palmer, among others.
Sessions will be held in the F. A. Hayek Auditorium of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., as well as at the historic home of George and Martha Washington, Mount Vernon, just across the river from Washington in Alexandria.
Samizdata editor Adriana is going to be in New York and is looking for hook up with some of the Big Apple’s blognoscenti for a ‘geek dinner’ along the lines of previous successful geekfests.
Does that sound interesting to you? Well then take a look at this wiki which has just been set up and invite yourself!
I attended the GI launch last night, and Alex Singleton turned me loose as the kind of semi-official photographer of the event, and has used some crowd shots I took, and also pictures I did of Bill Emmott and Alan Beattie (who is also quoted here).
Glad to be of use. But what really got my attention last night was the number of nice looking women who were present. Johnathan Pearce is fond of mentioning P. J. O’Rourke’s Law of Babes, or whatever it is called, which goes something like: Wheresoever the Babes are, there shall also the Action be. Tom Wolfe’s description of how the Babes managed to track down the men test flying jets in the top secret desert of western USA in the early 1950s, in The Right Stuff, is an earlier exposition of the same law.
Judged by this standard, the GI Institute is doing pretty well. Here are eight nice looking ladies, and one genuine baby type babe just for good luck, and because he/she was there. (Cranking out more of those being a lot of what this is all about, after all.)
And those are only the ones I got reasonably good photos of. I can recall at least two more ladies who only missed the cut because I did not get good photos of them. So if you are a fully certified Gorgeous Babe and you were there, please do not be offended. You just came out all blurry in all my photos, on account of my chin hanging down and hitting the focussing nob.
Click to get bigger pictures, some of which include extraneous males of the species. Cropping such photos is always a controversial matter.
Today’s reason for light blogging is that the Samizdata editors are in Paris(!) attending a blogging conference Les Blogs. Blogging is making some waves in France and this conference is truly international, bloggers from 20 countries are present. We have met many a blogger we have known virtually and putting faces to blogs is always an interesting experience.
For those who are interested in the blog trends and biz, head over to the Big Blog Company blog for some furious blogging of the conference.
While driving down Virginia’s crowded Route 28 this afternoon, I heard a radio spot from our good friends at UNICEF that almost caused me to drive right off the road. The announcer solemnly intoned that with your help, UNICEF would create “a tsunami of love, a tsunami of hope” for children affected by the Dec. 26th disaster in the east Indies.
A “tsunami of love?” Even if these people have their hearts in the right places, just how tone-deaf is this organization? Apart from the fact that “tsunami of love” sounds like it could be the title of a song by Def Leppard, who actually thought that this was clever? Somehow, I cannot imagine soldiers liberating the German death camps of WWII telling prisoners, “We are going to build you a concentration camp of compassion!” or Amnesty International offering “a gulag of love” to political prisoners.
UNICEF must have gotten complaints about this, because the downloadable version of the ad available on their website now says “a wave of love.” Which isn’t a huge improvement, actually.
Of course, that still is not as bad as this Seattle Times column, from Saturday which dismisses tsunami victims as “clutter” apparently worthy of a tsunami of scorn for deigning to develop beaches into tourist attractions.
(A tip o’ the hat to Jesse Walker of Reason Online for the Seattle Times link.)
The Adam Smith Institute will be hosting an event called Democracy & the Blogosphere next Tuesday 16th November. The speakers will be Stephen Pollard, William Heath, Sandy Starr and yours truly.
The event is ‘jacket and tie’ at 6:15pm and will be followed by a reception at the ASI at 23 Great Smith Street, London, SW1P 3BL
Anyone who would like to come along should send an e-mail for an invitation.
Tonight I attended a very interesting event hosted by the Adam Smith Institute which commemorated the 25th anniversary of the abolition of exchange controls. Speaking at this dinner were Lord Howe and Lord Lawson, the people actually responsible for the action which set off a cascade of events not just in Britain but across the world. This in no small measure led to the second age of globalisation in which we live today. The third speaker, acting as the warm up act and comic relief, was yours truly.
Last evening I enjoyed a pleasant evening chatting to old friends at a reception held at the Institute of Economic Affairs in honour of great Victorian author, Samuel Smiles. His most famous work, Self Help, became a best seller, not just in Britain but also around the world.
It is, in fact, probably the great grandaddy of self help books. Go into any bookshop today and you will see shelves crammed with books showing you how to get rich, be healthier, happier, deal with relationships, and so forth. In fact, the spread of liberal ideas will be limited unless people also take the opportunity to liberate their own potential. Reading Smiles is a reminder that there is more, much more to ideas than the pure political realm.
After a long period of neglect, I hope this great book will win back the respect it deserves.
David Carr may have given up cigarettes but he still likes a good cigar.
Here he is, pictured at my place on Friday night, pondering the enigma wrapped in a mystery smothered in something else which I have forgotten that is Russia. This was the subject spoken about by Helen Szamuely (co-author of this blog – here is her latest, posted this morning).
Click on David if you want him to be bigger.
Last night many Samizdatistas heading for Aldwych as the 2004 Big Brother Awards were held at the London School of Economics. The list of winners, who are in fact losers, can be found here1.
Simon Davies of Privacy International is the driving force behind the Big Brother Awards…
The stout lads from No2ID were out in force…
About 450 people turned up to heckle cheer…
This was probably the best propaganda shirt I saw!
The left has always been good at that sort of thing
1 = Update: The link to the Big Brother Award details has been changed, which is not very clever. Link updated to a somewhat less informative page.
The annual London Gay Pride march took place earlier today.
Typically, I pay no heed to the occasion. This is partly due to the fact that I have no strong feelings about it one way or the other but also because it has now become just another piece in the cultural jigsaw of London life. A part of the social furniture really.
However, now into my 3rd year as a blogger, I find that I have a heightened sense of curiosity so I wandered over to have a look at the promotional website.
I rather regret bothering to do so as it makes excrutiating reading. Apparently as much devoted to disabled and asylum-seeker ‘rights’ as homosexual ones, every page drips with exquisitely pitched right-on-ness. In fact such is the extent of the dogmatically po-faced sincerity that some of it is unintentionally hilarious. For example, the line up of guest speakers includes:
Ida Barr, artificial hip hop from Music Hall Veteran and Rally Compere.
Now that means that Ms Barr plays hip hop music that is not genuine or does it mean that she merely hops around on an artificial hip? If the latter, then that is not what I call entertainment.
Julie Felix, singing against inequality, injustice and war for the last 40 years.
Clearly the number one choice when you really need to get the party swinging.
Wesley Gryk, Solicitor for the UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group Gay Asylum seeker.
If I made up a group called ‘Gay Asylum seeker’ (and I consider myself somewhat remiss for not having done so) then not only would I not be believed but I would also be pilloried for exaggeration and hate speech.
There is no mention anywhere of any stop-the-war or anti-globo ranters but given their leech-like ability to latch themselves onto any passing warm-blooded creatures it would not surprise me in the least to find out that a whole sackload of them had tagged along for the ride as well.
There is nothing here about pride, much less freedom of association or individual sovereignty. This is all about group-think and the fostering of grievance cultures. What was once an understandable public protest against unjustifiable persecution has become a portmanteau of victimologies. It is as if the organisers are seeking to stitch together some coalition of alleged unfortunates with the thread of an earnestly cultivated sense of self-pity.
There was a time (and not all that long ago either) when homosexual men in this country were unfairly treated by the state so I fail to understand what is so attractive about revelling in an alleged pariah status that is demonstrably no longer the case. If homosexuals who are inclined to buy into this sophistry could learn to chuck it off and just live their lives, then that really would be a liberation.
|
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.
|
