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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Just not in the way the Guardian thinks.
The Guardian view on Romania’s annulled election: a wake-up call for democracies
The unprecedented move by the country’s constitutional court last week to annul the results of the first round of the presidential election, amid allegations of Russian interference, is a landmark moment in the increasingly embattled arena of eastern European politics. The decision followed an astonishing surge to first place by a far-right admirer of Vladimir Putin, who had been polling in low single digits until the eve of the election. According to declassified intelligence reports, Călin Georgescu benefited from a vote that was manipulated by various illicit means, including cyber-attacks and a Russian-funded TikTok campaign. Analysts found that about 25,000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became active only two weeks before the first-round vote.
What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet.
When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try.
I saw this comment by Paul Marks to the previous post and thought, “This is huge. Why isn’t this story the main headline on every news outlet?”
It is being reported, somewhat less prominently than the Princess of Wales going to a carol concert. Heartwarming though that is, I would have thought that the fact that a Romanian court has annulled the first round of their presidential election because the Russians allegedly “ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round” was bigger news.
So what if they did? Where did this idea come from that the people of a country are not allowed to watch, read or listen to foreigners attempting to persuade them how to vote? Well, certain foreigners at least – those who promote this information Juche never seem to have a problem with the European Union’s taxpayer-funded propagation of its opinion.
I see “leaving X” is trending on TwitterX, presumably driven by people who like to be governed more & fear without the threat of pervasive algorithmic censorship, they might write something that gets them cancelled.
“You know who else should be on trial for the UK’s far-right riots? Elon Musk”, writes Jonathan Freedland, who used to be a liberal, in the Guardian, a newspaper whose very name was once universally understood to mean “Guardian of our Liberties”.
Mr Freedland writes,
Of course, it’s good that so many of those responsible for a week of terrifying far-right violence are facing an especially swift and severe form of justice – but there’s one extremely rich and powerful suspect who should join them in the dock. If the UK authorities truly want to hold accountable all those who unleashed riots and pogroms in Britain, they need to go after Elon Musk.
Freedland then accurately describes the way that pogroms throughout history have started:
In 1144, it wasn’t Southport but Norwich, and the victim was a 12-year-old boy called William. When he was found dead, the accusing finger pointed instantly – and falsely – at the city’s Jews. Over the centuries that followed, the defamatory charge of child murder – the blood libel – would be hurled against Jews repeatedly, often as the prelude to massacre.
There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that, so far and thankfully, these riots have not killed anyone – although given the attempts to burn down buildings with people inside, that seems more a matter of luck than mercy. But the common element in events nearly a millennium apart is that lies can wreak havoc when they spread. And that spreading now takes seconds.
So Mr Freedland describes a phenomenon that has recurred throughout history, citing an example that occurred 862 years before Twitter existed. He observes that this phenomenon has taken place yet again, but with the blessed difference that this time (when Twitter was present) no one was killed – and concludes that Twitter made it worse.
That does not make sense. Not only did the Norwich pogrom that Mr Freedland cites happen before the coming of Twitter, it happened almost exactly three centuries before the coming of Gutenberg’s printing press, with its terrifying ability to spread unvetted commentary right across Europe in mere weeks. “And that spreading now takes seconds”, frets Mr Freedland, but on these islands at least, the correlation between the speed of propagation of information and the frequency and severity of race riots and pogroms has been negative. As has been the correlation between these things and the freedom of the press.
Why?
→ Continue reading: Thank you, Elon Musk, defuser of riots
A year ago, Fraser Longden, the Chief Operating Operator of the DIY store Wickes, was in the news. On 16 June 2023, Internet Retailing magazine ran this story: “Wickes hits back at boycott campaign over COO’s comments that trans-critical shoppers ‘are not welcome’ in stores.”
I was aware of the boycott but did not join in. We do buy stuff from Wickes on occasion. It is useful that they open at 7am and close at 8pm. I certainly was not going to give up that utility because the company had gone woke. If I were to boycott all the companies who waste their substance by hiring “inclusion and diversity” teams and whose senior staff members gush about it to the media, I would have to live like a hermit. Still, it was foolish of Fraser Longden to first tell Pink News that “Creating a culture where everybody can feel welcomed – can be their authentic self, can be supported – is about modernising our business” and then tell the same Pink News that, in his estimate, ten percent of the UK population are “not welcome in our stores anyway”. I did not know whether my position on these issues, which I like to think of as nuanced, would have allowed him to welcome me through the rainbow-festooned portals of Wickes. Nor did I care. Wickes can hate me and still sell me screws.*
No, the thing that has made me decide to boycott Wickes happened a mere seven months ago, but I must have missed the story at the time. On 4 November 2023, the Telegraph reported, “DIY giant Wickes fails to shut down website accusing it of being ‘woke’”
The DIY giant Wickes has been accused of stifling freedom of speech after its boss tried unsuccessfully to shut down a website criticising it as “woke” after its boss told trans-critical “bigots” to shop elsewhere.
[…]
In response [to Mr Longden’s comments], Timothy Huskey set up the protest site featuring the headline “Woke Wickes” and claiming “the UK calls for a boycott of Wickes” due to its “highly controversial sexual agenda”, claiming that the company “hates” customers who think there are only two genders.
[…]
In July, the home improvements store’s lawyers contacted Nominet, the body which oversees UK domain names, to complain that the website was abusing the company’s trademarked name, contained “malware capabilities” and was being used for “phishing”, a reference to the use of emails and online platforms for fraudulent behaviour.
Papers filed with the watchdog also said the site was set up for commercial gain and intended to “unfairly disrupt” Wickes’s business.
In response, Mr Huskey, who is American, said he set up the site as “legitimate criticism” of Wickes, and made it “abundantly clear” it is not connected to the company, even offering visitors the address for the company’s official website if anyone wanted to shop with them. He insisted it was not used to make money or for any phishing fraud and contained no malware.
The adjudicator, who ruled on the dispute, found the use of the word “boycott” in the protest site’s name meant visitors would not think it was linked to the official Wickes’s site.
They concluded the company’s claims the site was malicious or set up for “phishing” fell “well short of what is required to support its serious allegation”.
They added that Wickes had not proven that the criticism on the website was “of such an exceptional nature” to merit the site to be shut down. They were also satisfied it was not set up for commercial or illicit purposes.
Wickes’ use of obviously spurious claims about malware and phishing to attempt to silence a critic enrages me. I am glad the attempt failed; https://www.boycottwickes.co.uk/ is still there. Mind you, so is Fraser Longden. Obviously the earlier boycott did not damage their bottom line that much. And I do not delude myself that my little mini-boycott will leave their accountants a-tremble. Mr Longden is right about one thing, most grand resolutions fizzle out when it’s 6:30pm, everywhere else is closed, and you desperately need a screw.
Nonetheless, given that companies will count an expensive advertising campaign a success if it increases custom by one or two percent, they would be wise not to do things that cause even a few of their customers to get into the habit of looking elsewhere first. That is how most of my “boycotts” end up. In 2019 Nigel Farage had a milkshake thrown over him for the first time. Someone in Burger King’s social media team proved their worth by putting out a tweet saying, “Dear people of Scotland. We’re selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun. Love BK. #justsaying”. The net worth of most companies’ social marketing teams is negative: until then I had often used the Burger Kings at motorway service stations because, like Wickes, they remain open when other outlets are closed, and because a family member gets a discount, but their encouragement of political violence led me to declare a boycott. Predictably, my resolve wavered. I have eaten several Burger King burgers at motorway services since then, when BK was the only place selling food open, or because it was what other members of the party wanted. But five years of looking elsewhere first adds up.
*I meant the type of screw that comes in Metric, Imperial or Whitworth. Although having started that line of thought, I did not have the strength not to follow the Wikipedia link that told me that all screws have inherent male gender.
I only really cemented in my head which of those Billionaires Having Something To Do With the Internet Elon Musk was in February 2018, when he sent his Tesla Roadster into space. I loved him for that, but fell out of love a few months later over Musk’s behaviour towards Vernon Unsworth. Since then, my regard for Mr Musk has crept up again. It’s nice having freedom of speech on the internet back. I now – and I do know how sad this is – follow him on Xitter or whatever it’s called these days.
In contrast, I have been reading about Dominic Frisby on Samizdata as an financial writer, economist, film-maker, singer and comedian since early 2014.
Elon Musk has finally caught up with us.
Dear Mr MacFarlane,
In general, I am a fan of “The Orville” the soft science fiction series of which you are the creator and star. The other day I watched Episode 5 of Season 2, “All the World is Birthday Cake”. During the course of my viewing I said some things about your work as the writer of that episode that I now regret.
I said that the crew of the Orville had no cause to sneer at the inhabitants of Regor 2 for their unscientific beliefs, given that their own protocol for First Contact with an alien species seemed to be to sashay in to the welcome banquet and start quaffing, without having done the five minutes of research necessary to find out the basic organising principle of the aliens’ society. As this reviewer said, despite possessing advanced computers and translators and all that, the crew “blindly go in, interfere in their culture and cause animosity between the Orville and a first contact species”. Not just animosity towards the Orville, either, the Regorian species is now hostile to the entire Union.
I also said that there was no way that two supposedly elite officers of the Planetary Union like Bortus and Kelly Grayson could be so stupendously foolish as to try to escape from that prison camp where they were being held. What on Earth or off it were they trying to achieve? Where did they think they would go? Both of them were visibly aliens, the only two aliens on the planet! How did they think being outside the camp would improve their situation? Surely they would have known that by far their best chance of freedom was to sit tight and wait for Captain Mercer to get them freed by diplomatic means or by the use of the Orville’s superior technology. And after all that gushing about what a joy it was to welcome a new species to galactic society, Grayson and Bortus straight-up murdering a bunch of prison guards came as a bit of a surprise. Yes, they had been unjustly imprisoned and treated badly, but (I asked sarcastically) would Mr MacFarlane recommend that Americans unjustly imprisoned in foreign jails today should grab a gun off a guard and start shooting to kill? Bang goes the last chance of ever persuading the Regorians to reconsider their rejection of contact. The Regorians were perfectly justified in sentencing Bortus and Grayson to death. In fact they should have gone ahead and executed them both even after the “new star” appeared, to save the Union the trouble.
Mr MacFarlane, I admit with shame that I insulted your skills as a scriptwriter. I made remarks to the effect that it was completely implausible that people who were depicted as having gone through a rigorous selection process to get the positions they occupied could be so lacking in forethought, so stupendously arrogant, so utterly stupid.
I humbly apologise and withdraw that untrue statement. In that respect your script was entirely plausible. Elite people at the top of their profession really can be that stupid.
Take those highly educated, highly paid software engineers working for Google, for instance. The “most powerful company in the world” created and launched an AI called “Gemini” that would produce images of people in response to text requests. Imagine the ingenuity that goes into creating such a marvel. But because they are woke, Google told Gemini to make sure that the people it portrayed were anything other than white males. All that concentrated intelligence, and they still didn’t see what would inevitably happen next… → Continue reading: Seth MacFarlane: An Apology
“I hate this framing because the “freedom” vs “order” tradeoff is not real. Russia has a higher homicide rate than the US. life there is shorter and more violent. if you’re choosing between freedom and order autocracy will get you neither”
Seva Gunitsky is referring to Jon Stewart telling Tucker Carlson that the reason why the US ‘can’t have clean functioning subways or cheap grocery prices like they do in Moscow is “the literal price of freedom”‘.
I am sure Jon Stewart would decline with horror an offer to work as one of Putin’s worldwide army of propagandists. But Putin does not need to make the offer when Stewart and many others are spreading his message for free.
Many working people who currently have no choice but to endure the aggressive begging, foul smells, and frequent violence in the subway systems in New York and other U.S. cities run by progressive Democrats would count freedom (a political abstraction that they are constantly being told is an outdated white patriarchal construct) as an acceptable price to exchange for getting to go to work in something more like the gleaming Moscow Metro.
Sure, they would eventually realise that they made a poor bargain. A Professor Gunitsky says, the cleanliness and order of the Moscow subway is like one room of a generally filthy house that is obsessively kept clean in order to impress visitors. → Continue reading: The condition of New York’s subway system is not the price of freedom, it is the price of voting for left wing Democrats
I have a dilemma. I want to write a post about how creepy it is to take a photo of a stranger and put it on social media with a deniably mocking comment. The easiest way to illustrate this would be to post the tweet that caused me to write the post. But if I do that, I am guilty of the same behaviour. Then again, to have any hope of turning public opinion against this trend, people like me who object to it have to demonstrate that it actually happens.
I will compromise by linking to this tweet but not in a way that makes a picture of it show up on the page. The tweet’s already viral; any extra clicks I send its way will make little difference. The tweet says,
SHABS
@JoeShabadu
this guy reading the wetherspoons menu for 15mins on the train yesterday
The accompanying photo taken from a few feet away shows a unremarkable-looking old man. Like it says, he is sitting on a train, minding his own business and reading a Wetherspoons menu.
The picture itself doesn’t make him look stupid or anything. The thing that makes me begin to dislike Joe Shabadu, whoever they are, is that caption about the old guy reading the menu for fifteen minutes.
It being a Wetherspoons menu is relevant. For the benefit of readers overseas, Wetherspoons is a chain of pubs operating in the UK and Ireland. As Wikipedia says, “Wetherspoon targets a mass-market offering of low-price food and drink.” Though I have always found them to be pretty good for the price, your local “Spoons” is not where the cognoscenti go. Some people boycott Wetherspoons because the chain’s founder, Tim Martin, was loud in his support for Brexit.
So we have it pointed out to the world that this old chap was reading a pub menu for fifteen minutes, and the pub concerned was one associated with the proletariat. I think the tweet was meant to make us laugh at the old man for being a bad reader, or for going to Wetherspoons, or both. The person who wrote the tweet tries to claim otherwise, but I was not convinced.
The general tone of the replies was heartening. A typical one was, “Let the man be. Why take a photo and post it? Doing no harm.” Another said, “Maybe he struggles to read and doesn’t want to be embarrassed when he gets there? Shame on you.” Other replies were more light-hearted. Someone speculated that he could be one of those “mystery shoppers” paid to sample the pub’s fare anonymously before reporting back to the management. I related to this one: “You’re acting like you don’t read shampoo instructions when you run out of battery on the toilet.” When I used to commute on the Victoria Line I always had a book or a newspaper with me. Mostly this was because I find it hard to go an hour without reading. Partly it was so that I could escape in spirit when a stranger’s gaze rested on me for too long.
Hold fast to the old ways.
Fight the Power, Oxford Antifa! “On Saturday 18 February, fascists and climate deniers are planning a “community day” in Oxford to exploit concerns and tensions around traffic filters. We won’t allow it!”
Hat tip to Andy Ngô.
I have not looked that hard into this “15-minute” city business. This article by Henry Grabar on Slate dismisses opposition to it as a ludicrous conspiracy theory. Well, the first few paragraphs do. However nine paragraphs down he is not sounding so sure:
In Oxford, however, the urbanists’ ambitions are more serious. Next year, the city plans to implement a souped-up toll network on major roads. But it’s not to get cars out of the city core, which has had a hefty congestion charge since February. Instead, the city’s six new “traffic filters” will limit daytime car travel between Oxford’s neighborhoods, which stretch from the medieval center to its ring road like slices of a pizza. There are the usual exceptions for buses, taxis, emergency services, people with disabilities, freight, and so forth, but other drivers will face camera-generated 70-pound fines for motoring across town on local streets. The intention is to unstick the jams that slow the city’s major streets to 5 mph in the mornings by diverting traffic to the ring road and encouraging residents to use alternative transportation.
The result, they hope, will be faster traffic, a functional bus network, and cleaner air. The goal is to reduce car trips in Oxford by 25 percent; grow bike trips by 40 percent, and cut road fatalities in half by 2030. Planners project traffic downtown could fall by more than 50 percent.
Oxfordians will not, in fact, be banned from visiting their mothers, as the conservative provocateur Katie Hopkins suggested last month. You can take the bus or ride a bike. You can drive all you want for free, so long as you use the city’s ring road to cross town. You can also drive through the traffic filters after 7 pm. And locals are entitled to 100 free driving days per year. (This last part, I have to confess, seems like it might be both messy and annoying.)
Still, these “traffic filters” are pretty bold as anti-car measures go, and the controversy has not been confined to red pill anti-vax forums.
Despite Oxford Antifa not giving their permission, the demonstration did take place. Dave Vetter, an Oxford-based climate journalist, was there, and took a lot of pictures and videos. He called the demo “an intoxicating mix of far-right conspiracy slogans, antisemitism and really terrible hip-hop.” I’ll believe him when he says he talked to one person who said Ashkenazi Jews were “not like us”; all demos attract a certain proportion of lunatics. But one would think that if antisemitism really were a big part of the Oxford crowd’s motivation, he would have had no trouble finding loads of placards proclaiming it to photograph.
The ratio Nikole Hannah-Jones got for this tweet is a sight to behold:
I’ve tagged it “self-ownership” because it’s a self-own. Sue me.
For those that don’t know, Nikole Hannah-Jones (who gets to appropriate the historic name of Ida B. Wells, a pioneer of the civil rights movement, as her Twitter handle) is the developer of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, though presumably not the author of all the edits the NYT had to stealthily make to it later. She is also someone who has stated that “All journalism is activism”. Thomas Sowell is the author of…
1971. Economics: Analysis and Issues. Scott Foresman & Co.
1972. Black Education: Myths and Tragedies. David McKay Co. . ISBN 0-679-30015-5 .
1972. Say’s Law: An Historical Analysis. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-04166-7.
1974. Classical Economics Reconsidered. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-00358-0.
1975. Race and Economics. David McKay Co. ISBN 978-0-679-30262-9.
1980. Knowledge and Decisions. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-03736-0.
1981. Ethnic America: A History . Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02074-7 .
Chapter 1, “The American Mosaic .”
1981. Markets and Minorities. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04399-2 .
1981. Pink and Brown People: and Other Controversial Essays . Hoover Press . ISBN 0-8179-7532-2.
1983. The Economics and Politics of Race. William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-01891-2.
1984. Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-03113-7.
1985. Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. Quill. ISBN 0-688-06426-4.
1986. Education: Assumptions Versus History. Hoover Press. ISBN 0-8179-8112-8.
1987. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles . William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-06912-6 .
1987. Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays. William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-07114-7.
1990. Preferential Policies: An International Perspective. ISBN 0-688-08599-7
1993. Inside American Education. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-5408-2.
1993. Is Reality Optional?: and Other Essays. Hoover. ISBN 978-0-8179-9262-0.
1995. Race and Culture: A World View. ISBN 0-465-06796-4.
1995. The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-08995-X.
1996. Migrations and Cultures: A World View. ISBN 0-465-04589-8. OCLC 41748039.
1998. Conquests and Cultures: An International History. ISBN 0-465-01400-3.
1998. Late-Talking Children. ISBN 0-465-03835-2.
1999. The Quest for Cosmic Justice . ISBN 0-684-86463-0.
2000. A Personal Odyssey. ISBN 0-684-86465-7.
2000. Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy (1st ed.) . Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-08145-2.
2002. Controversial Essays. Hoover. ISBN 0-8179-2992-4.
2002. The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late. ISBN 0-465-08141-X.
2003. Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One. ISBN 0-465-08143-6.
2004. Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press . ISBN 978-0-300-10775-3 .
2004. Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy (revised and expanded ed.). New York: Basic Books.
2005. Black Rednecks and White Liberals. San Francisco: Encounter Books. ISBN 978-1-59403-086-4.
2006. Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays . Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. ISBN 978-0-8179-4752-1. OCLC 253604328. ASIN 0817947523 .
2006. On Classical Economics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12606-8.[118]
2007. A Man of Letters. San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books. ISBN 978-1-59403-196-0.
2007. Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (3rd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00260-3. OCLC 76897806.
2008. Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One (2nd ed.). Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00345-7 . OCLC 260206351 .
2008. Economic Facts and Fallacies . Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00349-5. OCLC 1033591370. ASIN 0465003494.
2009. The Housing Boom and Bust. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01880-2.
Chapter 5, “The Past and the Future.”
2010. Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (4th ed.). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02252-6.
2010. Dismantling America: and Other Controversial Essays. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02251-9 . OCLC 688505777 .
2010. Intellectuals and Society . Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01948-9 . Lay summary .
2011. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02250-2.
2011. Economic Facts and Fallacies, 2nd edition. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465022038
2013. Intellectuals and Race. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-05872-3.
2014. Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (5th ed.). New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-06073-3.
2015. Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective.[119]
2016. Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective (2nd ed.). ISBN 978-0-465-09676-3.
2018. Discrimination and Disparities. ISBN 978-1-541-64560-8.
2019. Discrimination and Disparities (revised, enlarged ed.) ISBN 978-1-541-64563-9.
2020. Charter Schools and Their Enemies. ISBN 978-1-541-67513-1.
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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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