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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Samizdata quote of the day Readers may find it odd that students are being encouraged to express solidarity with totalitarian terrorist movements that set booby traps in schools and boast of using children as human shields, and whose stated goals include the Islamic “conquest” of the free world, the “obliteration” of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people. However, such statements achieve a facsimile of sense if one understands that the object is to be both politically radical and morally unobvious.
– David Thompson ruminates on the perverse intellectual incentives that face academics
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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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It isn’t just academia which is affected by this behaviour. The BBC is riddled with it too, and it affects their ‘analysis’ of the news.
Also, our councils, schools and other public organisations are full of people keen to show the rest of us how perceptive they are on all sorts of things. The result is called political correctness.
I work in a university and I was actually ashamed when showing a visiting Israeli postgrad around. There was virulent anti-semitic and pro-Hamas propaganda all over the place.
One of the current bugbears is trying to get the university to boycott an Israeli bottled water company. I suppose Jewish Israeli businessmen are somehow culpable for the supposed crimes of their government. Anti-Zionist not Anti-Semitic my ass. They are trying to punish someone for their location and their race.
How people can support Totalitarianism as a good thing whilst thinking they have any kind of moral or intellectual credibility escapes me.
Unfortunately, the jewish people, and the little patch of ground they have claimed as their home, are once again in the unenviable role of being the canary in the coal mine.
The virulence of the current wave of anti-semitism is simply astounding.
If the so-called “world community” allows, or even encourages, the destruction of the jewish community in the Mideast, and in other places in the world as well, we will know that something truly foul and deadly has once again crawled out of the cess pool of humanity’s psyche, to prowl the earth like a rabid animal.
There is a post above about the Battle of Britain. For over a century, western civilization has been fighting against one doctrine of absolutism and collectivism after another, in wars both hot and cold.
We are once again, or still, involved in a deadly struggle with two variants of the collectivist myth: one theocratic, and one semi-secular.
The stakes are every bit as high as in earlier conflicts, and the object of the opposition every bit as deadly towards any last bits of freedom and liberty remaining in the world.
We do not know the day, nor the hour, at which we might be called to defend all we have and all we hold dear again, as earlier generations were summoned in their turn.
As long as their are men whose damaged souls long only for power over others, the threat to free men and women may wax or wane, but will never disappear completely.
But when you see jewish people dying, just for being jewish, and the world applauding, know that the hour is close at hand.
“Mene, mene, tekel upharsin”. “You have been weighed in the scales, and found wanting.”
I pray that such words are never written on the wall about us, but they will be if the freedom of the peoples of the world is allowed to die as we stand around stuttering and wringing our hands.
I am an old man now, and I fear my children, and their children, will face threats every bit as deadly as a failed Austrian painter, or a Georgian cutthroat.
Whether he issues fatwahs or calls for another socialist revolution, the answer must always be the same, “Talk all you want, but if you try anything to force your nonsense on free men and women, we will destroy you, and everyone who follows you.”
Nothing less will do.
The liberal left adopted the “all cultures are equal and are to be respected” dogma many years ago and steadfastly stick to this, even though it is obviously apparent that a culture that allows free thought and free ideas is vastly superior to one that doesn’t, history has proved this time and time again.
The entire “small government” principal is seen as a “right” political movement, so the left shy away and the more extreme go full on towards totalitarianism as the “solution”.
In reality “small government” isn’t “right” or “left”, it’s just bloody obvious and would benefit a socialist ideology just as much. I wish it’s proponents would start touting it as such.
Socialists often slip into presuming monopolistic and coercive action to establish their collectivism. That needs a big State.
Either way, Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism are the kernel of a large state. Plurality and voluntarism are as Anti-Matter.
As always Very Retired has it right.
And, of course, universities have long been this way – in the past it was the Marxists, but there is a connection, as I will make clear at the end of this comment.
In the 1960s’and 1970’s the student movement (in the United States and elsewhere) accused the United States of “murdering millions of people” and even of “genocide” and they supported the Communists who REALLY WERE MURDERING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE – AND (AT LEAST IN THE CASE OF CAMBODIA) PLANNING GENOCIDE.
The leaders of the various student movement were just taking to its logical conclusions the stuff most academics were telling them.
As Ludwig Von Mises pointed out long ago it is after the MOST intelligent students (not the dumb people) who become Marxists – because the confused doctrines that are taught in universities are (if one reasons them out) based on Marxist ideas and assumptions, and the most intelligent students work that out and take these ideas to Marxism.
“But the students changed Paul” – no they did not (at least often they did not), the idea that they “changed” is the great comforting MYTH.
Sure people like Valerie Jarett (spelling alert) Obama’s “sister” (as he calls her), became a very wealthy property developer (like most of the student socialists her family were wealthy and well connected – the latter is very important in a corrupt city like Chicago), but they remained socialists (there was no contradiction in their minds between being very wealthy and being socialists).
As V. J. (and this lady is one of the most important people in the Whitehouse) said of the Communist Van Jones when she made a speech announced his appointment as “Green Jobs” commissar.
Barack and I “have been watching your work closely since you set up in Oakland” – what had Van Jones created in Oakland California?
Mr Van Jones had set up “STORM” the Communist Revolutionary Group – that is what “Barack and I” thought was so good that Mr Van Jones had to be brought in to help in the Whitehouse.
Nor is this an isolated case of how the Communist movement has put on a suit – but has only “given up the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose, in favour of the deep satisfaction of the radical end” (Van Jones – filmed speech).
The leaders of the Communist terrorist “Weather Underground”.
Mr and Mrs Bill Ayers – both Obama associates of several decades standing, neither one has ever repented their campaign of bombings.
And remember Mrs Ayers was the original “kill the babies” person – decades before the “New Black Party” was created.
They are leading “intellectuals” – and Mr Ayers writes the (Marxist) textbooks that are used in the leading teacher training colleges (although perhaps that may change – at least in Texas).
And the other surviving leader of the Weather Underground?
Jeff Jones – a man whose only regret is that he did not plant more bombs.
Presently based in New York City – and leading activists in the “Apollo” group (an organization that puts the money of “progressive”, and very corrupt and foolish, businessmen, into the hands of Marxists such as Mr Jeff Jones).
The Apollo alliance were (for example) the main people writing the almost one TRILLION Dollar stimulus Bill of 2009 (source of this information – Harry Reid, Senate Majority leader of the Democrats).
“But Paul – what has any of this to do with Islamists?”
All the radicals have mentioned above (including Barack Obama) have been working with Islamist groups – and have been for years.
The leaders of both sorts of groups (Marxist and Islamist) visit each other’s houses (for example in the Hyde Park area of Chicago) and they give each other money, jobs, and contracts (and support from local and other levels of government).
The Islamists and the Marxists are in alliance – and their aim is the utter destruction (the “fundemental transformation”) of the United States as they know that if America falls the rest of the West can not stand.
We are no longer talking about naughty deals in Chicago or the San Francisco Bay area.
They now control the Whitehouse -and they have influence over the Justice Department (does anyone believe that ERIC HOLDER is interested in opposing them – and the FBI and so on can hardly combat these threats if THEIR POLITICAL MASTERS ARE IN DIRECT ALLIANCE WITH THEM). Of course Barack Obama is happy to kill some Islamists (not all Islamists are happy with the alliance – and find the mixture of Marxism and Islam that is “Islamic socialism” unappealing), but that does not alter the fact that he has worked is alliance with other Islamist groups for decades (as have the other Marxists around him).
The situation is very serious – and yet still some people think of Barack Obama as “just a Demcratic machine politician”.
This is not 1968 – the Marxists are not just on the streets of Chicago “fighting the pigs” (although even then the media coverage was totally biased in favour of the Marxists – even covering up the fact that they were Marxists, although some libertarians, such as Murry Rothbard, could not get that into their minds either).
These days the Marxists (and those who have chosen to make deals with them) are in the big chairs.
However, they still (in spite of the brainwashing of the education system and the mainstream media) face an population that would be hostile to them if the people knew the true face of those who sit in the big chairs.
Even today the possibility of near victory turning into utter defeat haunts them (for example Indonesia in 1966 is something the Marxists often discuss among themselves – and Barack Obama himself is particularly interested in this case of defeat, which he partly attributes to the Communist Party there making inadequate efforts to reach out to the Muslim majority of the population).
That is why the chief hatred of the Marxist (and their “Islamic Socialism” allies) is directed at people who seek to expose them.
For although the Marxists (and their allies) hate all people who are not working with them (for everyone is either “on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressors” you see, at least according to the doctrines of both, Marxist, “Liberation Theolgy”and “Islamic Socialism”) they do not hate everyone equally.
They hate some people more than they hate other people.
That has moral consequences for people like ME – not because it effects me personally (I am far too unimportant for the people of power to have ever heard of me), but because of the people we push forward.
If one encourages certain people in their radio and television broadcasts to say the above (and that is exactly what people like me encourage certain people to do – people who knew none of this stuff only a few years ago) then one is PUTTING THEM INTO DANGER.
If one “pushes other people forward, rather that being in the fight” (as my late father used to say) – well there is a moral problem with that.
One can not say “here – have information and knowledge, warn the people, expose the true nature of the powerful” and then say “but I have no responbility at all for anything that happens to you as a consequence of this”.
For this moral problem I have no answer.
Although it is often said that the modern left are ‘moral relativists’, I must admit to have never encountered a genuine left-wing moral relativist. In fact, when you hear a typical modern leftist shriek about feminism, gay rights, and the supposed evils of racism, it seems to me clear that they believe their values are superior to the values of everybody else.
As Dr Paul Gottfried says: ‘ When was the last time a feminist, socialist, or gay activist made the argument that a conservative Christian’s values were as good as his/her own? Moral fanaticism and not the equal acceptance of all value-systems has become the hallmark of the cultural Left.’
Very good points M.
Although, it should be noted, that Barack Obama himself (the God of the student and academic left) has (as far as I know) never claimed to be a “liberal” or a “moral relativist”.
Barack Obama has always claimed to be a “Progressive” (a term that covers both Marxists and non Marxist leftists), and Progressives (by definition) regard their cultural principles to be superior to those of “conservatives” or “reactionaries”.