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]
Ami Horowitz
@AmiHorowitz
My new video!
How bad is Antisemitism on campus?
Will Leftist college students give me money to kill Jews?!!!
The video linked to in the tweet starts with a clip of Horowitz talking to a San Francisco State University student whose back is facing us. Horowitz says,
“…And we want to fund operations against soft targets, schools, hospitals, Jewish cafes…“
The video then cuts to Horowitz talking straight to camera. He says,
“I’m Ami Horowitz and anti-semitism is rising precipitously across the globe. How bad is it? I’m here at San Francisco State University, one of the most left-leaning instersectional schools across the country.
I’m here to raise money to kill Jews.”
Horowitz, who, in case anyone is unclear on this point, is not actually trying to raise money to murder Jews but to warn how commonplace support for the murder of Jews has become at American universities, proceeds to politely stop various young people who are walking along the paths in the SFSU campus and solicit their support for terrorism against Jews. There is no obfuscation about “Zionists” or “Israelis”; Horowitz says “Jews” throughout and is abundantly clear that he is talking about physical violence. In the sequence starting at 1:02 he says, “Attack, blow things up … blow shit up … all we have a rockets and suicide bombers”. The SFSU students are fine with that.
I can sympathise with Rebecca Levin who said in the replies,
Can you release any full conversations without breaks? I find this a bit hard to believe even as a Jew who recently graduated from college and editing can be deceptive and well, I’d really like for you to be a fraud vs this actually being real.
I, also, would really like this not to be true.
It would be a good thing for Horowitz to release the full videos. Deceptive editing is on my mind right now. Remember the way that George Eaton of the New Statesman was nice as pie when he went to interview Sir Roger Scruton and then maliciously edited Scruton’s words to make it seem that Scruton believed that each Chinese person is “a sort of replica of the next one”, when what Scruton had actually said was how frightening it was that the Chinese Government was trying to force each Chinese person into being a replica of the next one? Remember how Eaton posted a picture of himself swigging champagne to celebrate how he had got Scruton fired from an unpaid government role?
Well, that same George Eaton is celebrating again now. He has just been made Senior Politics Editor of the New Statesman. Deceptive editing does happen and is no bar to a successful career in journalism. At least… not if the journalist is left wing, a protection that Mr Horowitz does not have.
Like Rebecca Levin, if Mr Horowitz’s video were to be revealed to be deceptively edited, the moment of annoyance I would feel of seeing left wingers gloat at the “gotcha” would be far, far outweighed by the relief of knowing that it was not really the case that 28 out of 35 San Francisco State University students Horowitz spoke to expressed support for killing Jews and 17 out of 35 students Horowitz approached pledged money to kill Jews.
But, even though I would like to see the full unedited videos, it is difficult to see how the girl with the black bag could claim to have misunderstood Horowitz when he told her at 0:36 that he was raising money to strike Jews “around the world, in France, in Germany, in Britain, wherever they are”. Conceivably he could have edited out her horrified objections to this proposed terrorism, but could he really have made her appear to say, as she does say at 1:14, “Because it’s like, part of their religion. Like, they wanted to take over”? She then pledges him $30.
Is contributing money that one has been explicitly assured (0:55) will be used to blow up “cafe’s, hospitals, Jewish schools, Jewish buses, synagogues, that kind of thing” legal in the United States? Whether it is or not, is there any good reason why the anonymity of sweetie with the black bag and the others who openly put their support, and in many cases their money, down for some Jew-killing should be preserved?
“Few phrases are as reliable as ‘my truth’ for identifying seasoned purveyors of cant and doubletalk. Truth isn’t something that can be identified or modified by a possessive pronoun. If my truth is different from your truth and your truth is different from her truth, these aren’t truths. ‘My truth’ is the device deployed to elevate the particular viewpoint of a member of a particular group or identity, by claiming the validation of the ‘truth’ for a narrow ideological cause.”
– Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal ($). He was writing about the views of the President of Harvard, Claudine Gay. As of the time of writing, Gay is still in a job, but for how long?
In the face of the endless garbage being churned out in US higher education, and the plight of Jewish students, it is good to know that new structures are taking shape:
Most university departments, therefore, are now under the control of professors who are very unlikely to hire scholars interested in non-radical perspectives on their disciplines (let alone conservatives). The solution for donors, though, is not to withhold all donations but to use their money to create new colleges or units within universities that will hire professors without prejudice. Trustees and presidents have the authority to set up new centers or colleges within a university and to appoint academically qualified people who will not engage in discrimination. We have excellent examples of such centers and colleges: the James Madison Program at Princeton, the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State.
This observation comes from John O. Mcginnis, the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University.
He concludes:
Universities today are at a crossroads. Externally, they are losing support among the public. Internally, they cannot perform their primary function of sifting and diffusing knowledge because of the intellectual orthodoxies that have seized control of administrations and inspired the faculty. The massacres in Israel and the response on our campuses might spark reform of these essential institutions, but only if they decisively break with the identity politics and bureaucracies that have led them to their present state.
In my view a broader and deeper problem is the sheer size and scale of higher education that is funded, in whole or in part, by the taxpayer. Yes, it is true that even private universities and colleges have been infected by some of these horrors, but no serious change in my view is likely until the state gets out of higher education.
In my recent post, “Peace-lovers love using the passive voice”, I asked you to supply particularly egregious examples of media attempts to downplay murders by Hamas and other protected groups. Ben did just that. From Canadian TV:
Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died. https://t.co/fR6XfiN9uE
In case it disappears, the tweet from @CTVNews says, “Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died.”
The use of “has died” rather than “is dead” makes it sound like she passed away in hospital within the last few days. Actually, she has been dead for a month because she was murdered on October 7th, alongside more than a thousand others. The only thing that has happened within the last few days is that they finally identified her remains. In most situations I would not read so much into a journalist’s slightly odd use of the present perfect for an event a month ago, but when every such oddity of phrasing works to push the murderers out of sight, it is not a coincidence, it’s a technique. Most headlines are written to grab the reader’s attention; these headlines are written to be forgotten. Like the small print in a dodgy contract, they are carefully crafted to meet the technical requirement of having been stated somewhere, but, in a betrayal of the normal function of journalism, those who write them would prefer you not to read on. That someone “has died” is scarcely news at all. Every morning’s news report gives its crop of vaguely prominent people who have died during the previous few days. They don’t want you to think about when or how she died. They don’t want you to think about the state in which Vivian Silver’s body must have been found, given that her remains were not identified for a month. They don’t want you to feel the horror of her murder.
I am going to post an image. If I have done this right, it will be hidden “below the fold”, so you must click the link in order to see it. I put it below the fold because it is horrifying. Am I doing the same as CTV in that tweet I was complaining about, then? No, the opposite. They do all they can to stop their readers ever thinking about the reality of terrorism. I am giving readers who cannot stop thinking about it the option not to see one particularly distressing photograph. The image I am talking about shows a poster put out by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in response to the La Mon restaurant bombing carried out by the IRA in 1978. These days people discussing this poster feel obliged to blur it out, but in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles they were not so sensitive. The poster shows what CTV and so many others in the modern media want to hide. Again and again, it says the word they will not say.
I like Vivek Ramaswamy. He says a lot of things that need to be said. But on Ukraine he is absolutely clueless. Actually, it’s a bit worse than that; he has negative knowledge. Denys Davydov explains:
Update Well, I did try to get it to start at the good bit but without success. The fun starts at ≈ 14:27.
“Liberals and centrists seem to have paid attention to conservative boycotts of Bud Light and Target. Then came the scandal surrounding Ibram Kendi’s antiracism center at Boston University. Having burned through over $20 million, he now faces an inquiry from the university. Kendi’s disgrace cracked the window—and the horrific responses to the Hamas attacks opened the door. And yet it is only now—after all the histrionic and outraged statements about #MeToo and BLM and Ukraine and Roe v. Wade—that universities are discovering the virtue of institutional neutrality.”
I suspect this observation from writer Katya Sedgwick that Mr Obama and his circle are increasingly driving the US administration, is going to gain ground and become noisier in the months leading to November 2024:
It’s clear that Joe Biden doesn’t have the mental agility to lead the country, much less control the nuclear briefcase. The subject of his dementia comes up fairly often, especially on the Right. Yet the question of who is actually leading the country is almost never raised, even though there is an obvious candidate. There is zero willingness to investigate the matter.
The gossip about Joe’s presidency being Obama’s third term has been around for some time. In a fantastic conversation printed in Tablet, David Samuels and Obama biographer David Garrow discussed that possibility. Samuels noted that although there is a lot of talk in the capital about the 44th president running the executive branch out of his D.C. mansion, journalists are reluctant to investigate.
The “reluctance” of journalists to investigate issues unflattering to the Obama/Biden administrations – with honorable exceptions – is almost a default assumption of mine these days. (The Hunter Biden laptop episode, etc.)
Texas Senator Ted Cruz recently made a statement that Barack Obama is running the Biden Administration. But this stands in contrast with the rest of the establishment’s silence. And if an occasional quip about the nature of the regime pops up in the media, maybe in the form of a meme, there is no discourse, no attempt to make sense of what is going on in the Oval Office. Even the Right is more comfortable talking about large, powerful groups like the globalists or the swamp ruling through bureaucratic institutions than to consider the meaning of a senile president embodying the executive authority of the U.S. government. This summer, a vague song about power called “Rich Men North of Richmond” became an instant social media sensation. I can’t help thinking that it’s not the single wealthy individuals that we want to hear about, but one specific man, our clandestine leader.
And because we are a country obsessed with race, our first black president can’t be revealed to be subverting our constitutional order. Interracial relations took a dive during Obama’s second term and continue to worsen. The news that the former president is pulling the strings for the incapacitated Biden could bring them to the boiling point.
The idea is too dark for most Americans to consider. Even conservatives who continuously warned that Obama, born in Hawaii to a foreign father and raised abroad, is not aligned with our mentality are not ready for the hard crash of the hope and change circa 2008. It’s one thing to warn about voting for a questionable candidate, and another to see that same candidate upend the constitutional order.
Obama was in many ways a very bad president. On foreign policy, his stance towards Iran and subsequent views on it, for example, looks like being a disaster, as we are now finding out. Or consider the domestic side – if you cast your mind back all the way to his encounter with Joe the Plumber (RIP), and his “you didn’t build that” speech, it is a reminder of how hostile this man is to the sort of small business free enterprise that is the backbone of the US. It was not all bad – Obama appeared to pursue a policy of benign neglect around private spacefaring, giving an opening for Elon Musk and others to perform wonders. Maybe Obama just wasn’t interested enough. In any event, he did not try to screw with it, and neither did he – at least that much – try to shut down fracking. (Again, I suspect that he just isn’t that into things like engineering.)
OK, I will try and be fair and make the point that I am sure Obama isn’t the first ex-POTUS to try and pull the strings of a successor – as is claimed – but the sheer frailty and mental decline of Mr Biden (I don’t think this is any longer a controversial statement) makes the point all the more serious if it is true. (In the UK there are suppositions that Tony Blair is exerting a lot of influence over the Labour Party again, which if true is also troubling.)
As regulars might know, I am not a Trump fan at all, and I hope for a better choice of GOP candidate to run against Biden, but given the way the Republican Party has developed an almost cult-like devotion to him, almost because of his problems and very serious flaws (his stance on lockdowns and latitude to Fauci hasn’t impressed some conservatives), we are where we are. As a Brit, it bothers me that the choice at the next US elections is so poor. We need someone who could be a two-term POTUS to undo so much of the damage of recent years and be free of the lawfare that is bound to be a relentless feature of a second Trump term.
Back on the back-seat driving allegation vs Mr Obama, an issue is that it is easy to make that accusation on sort of circumstantial grounds, hard to back it up without smoking gun sort of evidence. And to be honest, I imagine that all presidents do at times take advice from former holders of the office. They may even keep and retain cabinet members from previous administrations (such as Robert Gates at Defense, or how Volcker and Greenspan stayed on at the Fed under different regimes). The question here is more whether, because of Biden’s physical condition and the fact that his vice president is clearly unfit for the job, the back-seat control is more glaring, and more dangerous to notions of democratic accountability.
This matters a lot, particularly given the Irsrael horror. It may be that Biden is taking the decisions on what the US ought to do, but given the involvement of Iran in bankrolling Hamas and other terrorist groups that want to destroy Israel, it would be nice to know that a former POTUS whose judgement on Iran was so poor is spending more time writing another set of self-glorifying memoirs rather than influencing policy.
These are Hillary Clinton’s own words, calmly reported by the Guardian as if there were nothing unusual about a politician in a democratic country calling for forcible deprogramming of their political opponents:
Supporters of Donald Trump may need to be “deprogrammed” as if they were cult members, Hillary Clinton said.
“Sadly, so many of those extremists … take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure,” the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president told CNN.
“He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? Because at some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen.”
Hillary Clinton said those words during an interview conducted on 5th October by CNN’s Christine Amanpour. Here is CNN’s own video report about it:
The section about deprogramming starts at 1:40. Note that Christine Amanpour raises no objection to the proposal but merely enquires about the practicalities.
I get press releases. Here is the text from one of them, via Ideas Beyond Borders. I repeat most of the content, and I am sure IBB won’t object.
New standards for library book removal left students, parents, teachers, and board members of the Peel District School Board confused recently as they noticed the number of books in various school libraries drop by what may be as much as half. Adding to the confusion is the assertion by some that books, including significant titles such as Harry Potter, The Hungry Caterpillar, and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, were removed simply because they were published before 2008. The situation has prompted so much discontent that Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce wrote to the PDSB around September 13th, requesting a halt to the removals.
Like most school districts in Canada and other countries across the globe, libraries periodically conduct a process sometimes referred to as “weeding,” where some books are added, some removed, and some replaced with newer editions. Unheard of, however, is removing a book solely because of its publication date, particularly one as seemingly arbitrary as the year 2008. Getting a straight answer to what happened hasn’t been easy for parents, students, community members, or the media. The board’s education director, Rashmi Swarup, said in a statement, “PDSB teacher librarians have not been given the direction to remove all books published with a publication date older than 2008, nor has the board received provincial direction to remove particular books from our collections.” The chair of PDSB’s board of trustees, David Green, claims staff were told to focus on books published around 2008 or older as that was when there was last a major weeding. Students and other community members claim staff told them they were told to remove anything pre-2008.
Documents obtained by a group of parents, teachers, and other community members known as Libraries Not Landfills show that PDSB formulated their weeding methodology to comply with a directive issued by (plot twist!) Education Minister Stephen Lecce himself based upon a 2020 report commenting on systematic discrimination in the district. According to the documents, the first step of the process apparently places the age limit in question before two other measures aimed at improving equity and diversity. The district’s guidelines were written by the non-profit Canadian School Libraries (CSL) and are known as “MUSTIE”.
● M (Misleading) – a book is factually inaccurate/obsolete or contains stereotypes
● U (Ugly) – a book is torn, dirty, moldy, etc.
● S (Superseded) – a book has a newer edition
● T (Trivial) – a book has no literary/artistic merit or is poorly written
● I (Irrelevant) – a book doesn’t interest or serve the needs of its target community
● E (Elsewhere) – the book’s info can be better explored in another book or format
Some of these guidelines seem obvious – nobody wants a moldy book lying around. Others can be left to a troubling amount of interpretation – whether or not a book is trivial or irrelevant can vary wildly from student to student. Weeding out books with stereotypes is tricky too – what constitutes a “harmful” stereotype is somewhat subjective, and the line between that and accurately depicting certain cultural tropes can be quite blurry. Too heavy-handed an approach on this metric could lead to such important Canadian authors as Richard Wagamese, Margaret Atwood, and Dionne Brand being unfairly targeted for removal because they tackle race, ethnicity and gender in a manner some may find uncomfortable.
So what happens to the books that get weeded? The physically damaged ones should be thrown away, but what about those that don’t meet the trusted MUSTIE standards? Donating them might be nice, but no, apparently not. According to the documents obtained by Libraries Not Landfills, PDSB is straight up destroying many of the weeded books because “they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate” and therefore “not suitable for any learners.” Tom Ellard, the founder of Libraries Not Landfills, says a landfill in the area told him they’re looking to hire extra staff because of all the discarded books they’ve received. That’s pretty astonishing (assuming it’s accurate) and incredibly troubling, evoking images and memories of tactics used by authoritarian regimes across history.
Coverage of the removals has been non-existent since Lecce’s letter to Peel District School Board in which he requested the current removal process to “immediately end.” His initial statement was, “Ontario is committed to ensuring that the addition of new books better reflects the rich diversity of our communities. It is offensive, illogical and counterintuitive to remove books from years past that educate students on Canada’s history, antisemitism or celebrated literary classics,” which seems to be a defense of the program overall while criticizing the scope and severity of the removals. His office has not commented since.
Canada has become a shitshow, politically and culturally. People like to go on about how “nice” Canadians are, but I always thought that something a bit patronising about that. The Canadians who hit the beaches at Normandy in 1944, liberating the continent from the Nazis, were magnificantly not “nice”. The truckers who objected to the Trudeau insanity over vaccine mandates had some of that old grit. That country could sorely use that spirit now, assuming any of it is left.
In his book, After America (published in 2011, which already seems a loooong time ago), Mark Steyn wrote this:
“Any visitor from the Fifties would soon discover, in a bleak comment on the limits of predictive fiction, our brains didn’t get bigger. But our butts did. If DC Comics had gone with the `Super-Ass of Jimmy Olsen,’ they’d have been up there with Nostradamus. `Our culture’s sedentary character – our strong preference for watching over doing, for virtual over real action – seems closely related to our changing body shape,’ wrote the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. `We now consume significantly more fats and carbohydrates than we actually need. According to the standard measure of obesity, the body-mass index, the percentage of Americans classified as obese nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 21 per cent, between 1991 and 2001. Nearly two-thirds of all American men are officially considered overweight, and nearly three-quarters of those between 45 and 64. Only Western Samoans and Kuwaitis are fatter.’ We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor from consumption unmoored from production.”
And:
“Our `changing physical shape’ (in Ferguson’s words) seems an almost literal rebuke to the notion of republican self-government. Never mind the constitution, where are our checks and balances?” Mark Steyn, After America, pages 225-6.
Steyn is connecting two things: a government/central bank policy mix that focuses on consumption, rather than production, and ties policy to that, including welfare policy (ideas such as Univeral Basic Income, etc). Also, the risk-adverse, Precautionary Principle of our time seems to go against humans being adventurous, taking calculated risks, getting up and going places, etc. For example, he notes how young adults today can go through their teens and early 20s without having a job. When, as I did, you worked on Saturdays and during the summer holidays (paper rounds, working on farms, in shops, etc) there were various consequences – all good – including the fact that you had to be physically active. (Glenn Reynolds writes in a similar vein on why teenagers should work before going to college.) Now, the idea of young people working is treated as being on the same plane as evil Victorian mill owners out of a Dickens novel. But Steyn is also making the point about production – and a very anti-Keynesian point. As the “Austrian” school notes (as in George Reisman’s book Capitalism), to consume, you have to produce and that means accumulate capital (physical capital, and mental capital, such as skills and habits). So much present policy seems to work against accumulating capital (taxes, regulations, inflation, the general demonisation of wealthy people, etc). And we print or have printed money to fill the gap. So our economy becomes zombified on ultra-low rates, and like someone who hasn’t taken a regular walk, lifted weights or performed physical work, we get bloated and sick.
Much of what Steyn wrote 12 years ago was accurate, and many of his predictions hold true. I think where the book is a bit off is that he thinks the threat from fundamentalist Islam was the biggest threat to the US while he did not write lot about China, although China does figure in this book quite a bit, to be fair. And the idea of Russia running amok in Ukraine or wherever, while he hints at this risk, it does not really figure all that much. I am quibbling, though. This is a book that holds up well. Its conclusion – that we have to shrink the State, remains as valuable as ever.
An unprivate death.Instapundit met with some opposition when he showed the famous photograph of a man falling to his death upside down, having leapt from the burning World Trade Centre.
You can’t help wondering: did he know as he jumped that he’d turn in the air and spend his last seconds upside down? Mortal insult added to mortal injury. If he had known, would he have chosen the other death? I had a friend who died when both parachutes failed to open. I think of her when I see that picture. I don’t know if she fell upside down. I hope not.
I say, show it. Show it often. I know all about hating to see it: like most of you I can remember first seeing that picture on September 11 – only in my case it was September 11 2002. Out of all the hundreds of hours of film and the thousands of photos taken of the slaughter on September 11 2001, I saw only a few seconds of footage until a year later. On that day I didn’t want the children seeing people die on camera (though we talked about it, of course), particularly as I didn’t know if there were more attacks to come. My fear of the children seeing it flowed from my fear of me seeing it. I’ve always disliked even fictional images of modern-day, realistic violence, the sort of violence that can happen to me and mine; and this dislike has hardened into almost a (controlled) phobia since I had children. It’s a thousand times worse when the images are real. Yet my hunger to know more about what had happened was as primal, as voracious, as anyone’s. That hunger is a survival trait. (Refined and systemised, it is also a victory trait: the defining victory trait of Western civilisation. It will win us this war, too – if a fatal squeamishness more sickly by far than my purely visual queasiness doesn’t rot our guts first.)
I have nothing to add to what I wrote twenty years ago, and nothing to subtract either.
I had never heard of Noam Dworman before today. Apparently he is the owner of a comedy venue in New York and he does podcasts. I had vaguely heard of the Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, and I had certainly heard of the Washington Post. Woodward. Bernstein. Watergate. Like thousands of others, after seeing ‘All the President’s Men’, I dreamed of being an investigative reporter.
The WaPo is not what it was, judging from Bump’s performance on this edition of Dworman’s podcast. When Dworman called it “Live From The Table: Philip Bump Battles Hard on Hunter Biden” he was too charitable. The main thing Bump battles to do is not acknowledge the steaming great news story in front of his nose and to extricate himself before someone asks a reporter at the Washington Post to investigate the President.
I often think it is a valuable exercise to type out extracts from videos so that what is in them has a better chance to reach the quite large number of people who don’t watch videos. So I tried to transcribe what was said in the last few minutes of this podcast, starting at 1:10:25. There were several places where Bump and Dworman talked over each other, so forgive me if I didn’t get every word. All the bold type was added by me.
NOAM DWORMAN: What do you take from the text message to his adult daughter where Hunter says, “I have to give 50% of my income to Pop”?
PHILIP BUMP: I have no idea what that means. I don’t. I have no idea what that means.
I would have thought it was clear enough.
NOAM DWORMAN: Well, it’s, it’s –
PHILIP BUMP: I know it’s circumstantial evidence and you’d prefer that…
NOAM DWORMAN: What – what could it be?
PHILIP BUMP: I have no idea.
NOAM DWORMAN: Well does it – ?
PHILIP BUMP: I appreciate your asking-
I could not hear whether Bump then says that he appreciates Dworman asking the question or that he appreciates Dworman asking him to be on his podcast, but judging from his repetition of the line later, it was probably him trying to end the session.
NOAM DWORMAN: Has anybody asked her?
PHILIP BUMP: I don’t know. I don’t know.
NOAM DWORMAN: Don’t you think that somebody should ask her?
PHILIP BUMP: “OK, like I’m – I just said I don’t know what to make of it, so I have nothing to say. What do you want me to say?
NOAM DWORMAN: Yeah, but you say, ‘There’s no evidence, no evidence’ but then there’s a text message where he says, ‘I give Pop 50% of my money. That’s – that’s evidence.
PHILIP BUMP: Okay, well, what, fine, fine. It’s evidence.
For a very brief moment I thought that Mr Bump was about to say that the Washington Post would fearlessly grab the story and not let go.
NOAM DWORMAN: So…
PHILIP BUMP:. I appreciate you having me on.
NOAM DWORMAN: It doesn’t…? That something like that…?
PHILIP BUMP: I feel you want me to leave, like just walk out in the middle of this so you can…
NOAM DWORMAN: You can go, but is this the standard, really, is this the way, that the Washington Post handles people who disagree with them?
PHILIP BUMP: When I agreed to be on for 45 minutes and then I get on for an hour and fifteen, then, yeah, after a while I go. Thanks for having me on. [He leaves.]
When Mr Bump was a little boy, did he watch All The President’s Men like I did? Did he dream that one day he would be a journalist at the very same newspaper as Woodward and Bernstein, and that he too would have evidence of Presidential malfeasance put before him, and that he would see it for what it was, and that he would…
…complain that he’d been sitting in the same seat for half an hour more than he was booked for and say, “Yeah, after a while I go.”
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.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
