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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Today I received the following email:
Brian,
Brian has started a webring of Brians with blogs. If you would like to join us, go and sign up here.
Brian
What is a webring? If I signed up to it, would the rest of my life be ruined? The Brian who sent me this email seems to be gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, consenting adults, some of my best friends…, I’m personally in favour of gay marriage, blah blah blah. But if I sign up, will I be bombarded with gay porn for the rest of my days?
In general, I feel that it is good that we Brians are getting together, and if a webring is what I think it may be, we can perhaps sit on one, in a circle, perhaps somewhere in the countryside, and discuss the Brian Issue. That is, we can discuss why cuckolded husbands, send-up substitutes for Jesus Christ, etc. etc., in the movies, all seem to be called Brian. Brian is not a cool name, is my point. Maybe we Brians can get together and change that. (The danger, of course, is that by getting together in such ways as these, we might merely confirm all the existing anti-Brian stereotypes, and cause Brianphobia to become even more deeply entrenched.)
Meanwhile, how many indisputably cool Brians can be assembled? I offer two outstanding contemporary sportsman: the West Indian cricket captain and ace batsman Brian Lara, and the Irish rugby captain and ace centre threequarter Brian O’Driscoll.
Now, we have to be doing something right! The Guardian has written many articles about blogs – arguably they are the most clued up newspaper in the UK on the subject, however much it pains me to admit it – and so far not once they mentioned Samizdata.net. The latest omission occurred in their article on political blogs, a day after the VoxPolitics seminar in the House of Commons. We were there, in force, and made ourselves heard. To our surprise, we learnt that many people who are not our natural fellow-travellers (to put it mildly) apparently read us quite regularly. So it can hardly be said that we are unknown among the statist left and right.
- The Guardian have heard of us, in fact, maybe even read us but given our dislike for their ideology cannot bring themselves to mention us. Perhaps, the Guardian blog crew who have studiously been ignoring our existence hope that if they shut their eyes long enough we will have disappeared like a bad vision. Ain’t gonna happen, guys. If this is the case, the Guardian is biased and their reporting is poor.
- It is just possible they have never heard of us – stranger things have happened. However, we do get around and it is no mean feat to miss us in the blogosphere… Out of eighteen bloggers they mention in the article we know personally, in the flesh, seven of them and further three certainly know about us. So, if it is the case of the Guardian missing us, well, they did not do their homework right and their reporting is poor.
It’s a win-win situation.
The Guardian do not need to like us or our writing, agree with us or even rate us particularly highly. But to write about the British blogosphere as if we do not exist, means that they really do not understand what they are writing about as we are almost certainly the most visited British political blog. We know from our comments and emails that a goodly chunk of our readers do not always agree with us. We take their custom as a compliment since they obviously find us interesting enough to return regardless.
Last night’s seminar on blogging at the House of Commons was quite interesting for all sorts of reasons. Firstly it is always nice to meet fellow denizens of the blogosphere face to face for the first time, such as Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole. Secondly, it is fascinating to see who ‘gets’ blogging and who does not. Much of the discussion was about how blogging can make politics more inclusive and participatory… ‘making democracy work’.
Labour MP Tom Watson, who is the first Member of Parliament with a blog. Tom clearly does indeed ‘get’ blogging but I think he is quite wrong about blogs being inherently ‘democracy-friendly’, though in fairness he did not labour the point and seems quite realistic about the potential downside for a politician of having an easy to search archive of his views. He also made the interesting point that party whips are going to get very nervous about blogging MPs and I am sure he is quite right once they realise that an enthusiastic but untutored MP swinging his blog like Excalibur is more likely to take his own head off than that of the leader of the opposition… to be an effective blogger you must write what you really think: insincere political PR speak is treated with derision by the blogosphere… and thus I look forward to watching many MP’s torpedo themselves spectacularly via injudicious blogging far more effectively than we could ever do it for them. Not surprisingly we at Samizdata.net see this as a feature, not a bug.
It will surprise no one who knows me that during the public section of the proceedings I could not resist making the point that blogs like Samizdata.net are not in the slightest bit interested in helping the political system work but rather about throwing spanners into political interactions whenever possible. To be able to say that within the Grand Committee Room of the Houses of Parliament, with Members of Parliament present, was something of an inexpensive thrill for me.
Redoubtable blogger and journalist Stephen Pollard was also one of the speakers and we were delighted that he mentioned our across-the-spectrum civil liberties sister blog White Rose as an example of an issue specific collective blog. He also rather artfully addressed the question of ‘why would a professional mainstream journalist write for free on a blog?’… and his short answer was that he does get ‘value’ from his blog which often translates into paid journalistic output. Unsurprisingly Stephen uses his blog as a ‘vent’ for issues which irk him but for whom there is no market, but also he uses blog commenter feedback to spark ideas for articles for which he does indeed get paid.
Overall it was an interesting evening. Blogging continues its march ever deeper into the public consciousness.
Adriana Cronin, Perry de Havilland, Mick Fealty, David Carr
Tonight many of the Samizdata.net, White Rose and the Big Blog Company bloggers will be attending a seminar about blogging being hosted at the Houses of Parliament in London.
It will be interesting to meet fellow members of the Blogerati in such a different context.
In case some of the people attending did not get the message, the time has been changed to slightly later (now 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm), and the venue is now the Grand Committee Room in order accommodate the larger than expected demand for seats. Entry as before will be via St Stephens Entrance, Houses of Parliament.
F is for Frogman… Dissident Frogman… he is here… in London!
We know who he is… and you don’t.
We got a mention in The Times (link may not work if you are outside the UK) today in an article about blogging by Michael Gove. Excellent.
And they go our URL completely wrong. Bugger.
I called up The Times this morning and asked them to at least correct the URL for the on-line edition. And did they? Nope. It seems the wheels grind extremely slowly at The Times.
Oh, and Michael… I ready don’t think our antipathy to statist solutions to most things makes us ‘right wing’ as social conservatives we ain’t.
The Telegraph continues to paddle in the murky waters of our Gallic neighbours with a further editorial devoted to Sabine Herold and what appears to be a growing movement for free market reform in France:
The French long for a Margaret Thatcher to tame the over-mighty public sector trade unions, but despair of ever finding one. In the cafes of Reims, speaker after speaker deplored the weakness of President Jacques Chirac in the face of union opposition, with many echoing the withering Thatcherite critique launched against him by the 21-year-old student Sabine Herold in Paris.
What really caught my eye though, in the sidebar next to the article, is the link to Merde in France.
En avant et vers le haut, nos amis.
With the assistance of several notable bloggers, namely Perry de Havilland and Dissident Frogman, I have set up a protest blog collective called White Rose. The original impetus came from an article about imminent introduction of identity cards in Britain which scared the hell out of me, and so I decided it is time to rally the Anglosphere behind resistance to the accelerating destruction of personal liberty in the UK.
White Rose will point a finger at the British government’s measures eroding personal freedom. All the time. With as many people helping as possible. It is not an exclusively libertarian project and we welcome regular contributions, from bloggers and non-bloggers alike, across the political spectrum. The only requirement is a refusal to tolerate the draconian nature of the state’s reach over the individual.
The format is that of a one-stop-shop for news, analysis, ideas, concepts and arguments, information and contacts related to privacy and civil liberties. The focus will be on the situation in the UK but any contributors who can point at similar cases and experiences in their countries will form an essential input in the debate. The objective is to discuss alternative solutions and halt the drive for security undermining personal freedom and privacy.
To read the White Rose argument about why the debate should not be framed around the trade-off between freedom and security, please go here.
If you want to find out how to become a White Rose contributor, please go here.
The sharp eyed and attentive amongst you may have spotted the funky monkey that has appeared in the ‘free market’ section of our sidebar… we have acquired a sponsor!
But not just any sponsor.
The Gold Casino is an off-shore internet casino (obviously) in the most literal sense of the term. It is located on a server in the Principality of Sealand, a fully independent micro-state off the shore of Great Britain. Don’t like the state? Go set up your own.
No I am not joking!
Well I did say micro-state, didn’t I?
So take a peak at what our sponsor is offering by poking the funky monkey and check out their message via the link underneath the sidebar graphic. I assure you it is far more interesting that the usual marketing blather one is usually confronted with… you will see why we find them so ideologically agreeable!
It adds a whole new nuance to the term ‘off-shore business’
Responding to a posting a fortnight ago on CrozierVision, I posted a piece the day before yesterday on my (Brian’s) Culture Blog entitled Do blogs convert people? Jonathan Wilde commented on that piece in a manner which suggests that the early editorial meetings concerning Samizdata may have been bugged. By Jonathan Wilde. He certainly gets what we’re trying to do here:
As I stated in my original post on Patrick’s entry, I do believe that blogs at least influence people, if not convert them. Yet. I was a libertarian prior to finding Samizdata, but over the 18 months or so that I have been reading Samizdata, I have been directly influenced by what I have read. I used to be a reluctant voter thinking that to be a libertarian meant being a Libertarian (i.e., member of the American Libertarian Party) and that taking part in the political process was the only way to be a libertarian. When I read Samizdata, I saw people who didn’t really care that much which political party was in power, but were in the business of changing ‘meta-contexts’ and going around the state, rather than through it. Further, I saw people who were influenced by Mises, Popper, and Hayek rather than the usual Rand and Rothbard that you find in America, yet arrive at the same basic conclusions on most issues. I saw people who were proud of Western culture. I saw people who were proud of defeating the Nazis in WWII rather than simply seeing it as just another state war, with all of its side-effects. These were all things that made me believe that it was okay to be a libertarian and agree with those ideas.
Since this is a culture blog, let me mention that the ‘culture’ of Samizdata had a lot to do with its success. Yes, the brilliant writing on the blog is vital to convert readers. But the culture is also essential. Pictures of Samizdatistas drinking, acting goofy, fondling women, and making fun of war protestors gives the impression that libertarians aren’t angry gun nuts from Montana (the stereotype in America), but are simply regular, everyday people.
And the last way in which Samizdata influenced me is to start my own website with similar characteristics – a group blog focused on Austrian economics, with a ‘laid-back’ non-angry-gun-nut atmosphere, and periodic ‘off-topic’ content.
I was already a libertarian, and perhaps I’m not the best example of blogs influencing, if not converting people, but the blogosphere is young. If our ideas are better than the rest, then they will rub-off with time. After hearing Perry being on a forum with ‘mainstream’ media on BBC last week, I really think that Samizdata has a chance to be something special. And it’s a classic libertarian strategy: carve a new niche, go around the established paths, and succeed on what you do best. The blogosphere is the new niche, and Samizdata is at the top.
Jonathan Wilde
People in the US, who take notions of Freedom of Expression and Private Property for granted, will be astonished by the latest steaming pile of wisdom to emerge from the clenched cheeks of our European would-be masters. Declan McCullagh reports:
The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or “blogs”), must offer a “right of reply” to those who have been criticized by a person or organization.
With clinical precision, the council’s bureaucracy had decided exactly what would be required. Some excerpts from its proposal:
- “The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours.”
- Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. “It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it” from the spot of the original mention.
- “So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link.”
- Long replies are fine. “There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media.”
It’s pretty zany to imagine that just about every form of online publishing, from full-time news organizations to occasional bloggers to moderated chat rooms, would be covered. But it’s no accident. A January 2003 draft envisioned regulating only “professional on-line media.” Two months later, a March 2003 draft dropped the word “professional” and intentionally covered all “online media” of any type.
Read the whole article.
So what is the message to the EU I mentioned in the title? Simple:
We will not comply
We have a comments section on samizdata.net in which people can and do comment about what we write, but access to that comment section is at our capricious discretion. If we decide we want to IP ban someone or want to delete their remarks from our comments section because we think they are offensive, or even if they are not offensive but we just bloody well feel like doing it because we have a headache, then we bloody well will. This is our private property.
We are already hosted on a server in the USA and I am quite confident our hosters would tell the EU where they can stick any demands to yank us off the net because we decline to submit to political moderation of the form our free speech takes on our private property (i.e. the server space we rent from them). If we have to go entirely pseudonymous and log onto Samizdata.net in order to post via ‘dead drop’ servers rather than submit to EU regulation of how we manage the information on our blog, then that is exactly what those of us who post from within the rapidly emerging EU tyranny will do. We utterly reject political moderation of free speech in civil society. This is not about giving people a voice but rather about replacing social interaction (which is what true free speech is), with political interaction mediated and mandated by the state.
If these regulations become the law of the EU (as seems likely), we will not obey, we will not cooperate, we will not accept that anyone has a ‘right’ to reply on our blog. Do you think we have said nasty things about you and want to reply regardless of our unwillingness to let you use our comment section? Fine…go to blogger.com, sign up (for free), click on ‘create a new blog’ and voila… you have your own blog on which you can scream about how those mean old Samizdatistas ‘done you wrong’ to your heart’s content.
And if the EU says we have to let you comment… tough shit, it ain’t gonna happen. The people who write for Samizdata.net all now live next door to Samizdata Illuminatus, in Arkham, Massachusetts.
 
The inimitable Alice (well, only by herself) sums up some ‘lightbulb blogs’. In the spirit of pro-Samizdata bias I select two for your amusement:
How many David Carrs does it take to change a lightbulb?
I had thought that the madness of last week’s lightbulb-blowing could not be toppled. I was, of course, wrong. Things are much worse than I thought then, in my light-hearted, innocent, Morris-dancing kind of way, and it is now perfectly apparent to all of us here at Samizdata.net that today’s lightbulb lunacy is tomorrow’s Mysteron plot to destroy the universe. Those who disagree must be conquered in the strongest terms. I refuse either to change the bulb or not change it. It is an outrage that anyone should dare to ask such a thing in the first place. I personally refuse to compromise and demand that they cease forthwith!
How many Brian Micklethwaits does it take to change a lightbulb?
Yesterday I posted about this article. Tomorrow I am going to post about this blog, which related to an earlier posting of mine here, about this rather interesting subject from last Thursday, which I’ve been wondering about for weeks, to do with car parks. I wonder whether anyone will comment or not? Sometimes they comment many times, and other times they don’t. It’s hard to predict these things. In the meantime, I might watch Friends tonight. Not sure yet, depends whether or not I blog about lightbulbs.
Heh.
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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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