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“Black students at the University of Oxford who feel traumatised by the killing of George Floyd will be able to apply for a reduction in workload and special consideration in their exams.” That line came from a a report in the “iPaper” from June 15th 2020, six years ago today. The report continued:
The extra support was outlined in an open letter sent to students by the university on Monday.
Signed by the vice chancellor Louise Richardson and the heads of Oxford’s colleges, it was apparently sent in response to concerns raised about the welfare of black students, following the police killing of Mr Floyd in the US last month.
Click on the link to read the “Open letter to Oxford students from the Vice-Chancellor and Heads of House”. Besides devaluing the degrees of all black Oxford students who took their finals in 2020 whether the students wanted “special consideration” or not, the letter said much else of interest. For instance:
“While much is being done by many committed people, we acknowledge that we are rightly reproached for our collective failure to address the issue of systemic racism properly, and that we have work to do.”
At any one time there are several hundred Americans studying at Oxford. The terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11th 2001 killed 2,977 people. Oxford University did not offer its American students special consideration in their exams for the trauma of seeing their nation attacked and thousands of their compatriots murdered. Oxford did not declare itself “rightly reproached” for its collective failure to address the issue of anti-Americanism properly, though a much clearer line could be drawn from the output of certain Oxford academics to the 9/11 attacks than could be drawn from Oxford to George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department.
In the quarter century since then, scores of other countries have had their citizens murdered en masse by Islamist terrorists. I would hope and assume that students whose family members were murdered in the name of Islam were offered special consideration in their exams, but if the leadership of the university publicly offered it to all students from Indonesia, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, India, Pakistan, France, Russia, Kenya, Nigeria, Iraq, Canada, Australia, Yemen, Syria, Denmark, Tunisia, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Turkey, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Somalia, Niger, Lebanon, the Philippines, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Uruguay, Ivory Coast, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Iran, Finland, the Netherlands, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Austria, and, above all, Israel when their respective countries were attacked, I never heard about it.
I listed many nations above, but when the University said “We’re determined to support our Black students in every way we can” after some of them said they had been traumatised by George Floyd’s death, the support was offered to those students on grounds of race, not nation. Did it offer white students, or brown students – or black students, come to that – similar support when people of the same race as them were murdered in large numbers by Islamists to the support it offered black students when one man was killed by the American police? Did the leadership of the university issue a public invitation to Jewish students of all nationalities to claim extra time in their exams for the trauma of having to read about, hear about, or see on video the copious and horrible evidence of the thousand-plus murders of Jews on October 7th 2023? When Henry Nowak died just as George Floyd had, pleading “I can’t breathe” to the police officers restraining him, did Oxford “reach out” to its white students to “stand with them during these difficult moments”?
Many dismiss the type of arguments I have made above as “Whataboutery” or “whataboutism”. “Whataboutery” is the older term, having originated in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The idea behind it was that when every attempt to get people to agree that some particular terrorist act was wrong was immediately countered by the cry of “What about [insert similar atrocity by the other side here]?”, it became impossible to de-escalate the conflict. Perhaps it did make sense to disparage the practice of endlessly citing old injustices in the Northern Irish context, but I think that to cite a current or historical parallel and ask “Why are these two similar situations not treated the same way?” is more often right than wrong. People of all races should be treated equally. That is the only form of “racial justice” that is actually just. Individual justice is also the only form of racial justice that is stable. Every deviation from the simple yet profound principle of equal treatment, however well-intentioned, is like stretching an elastic band. Either the elastic snaps back, which might cause injuries from the speed of the contraction but at least restores balance, or the elastic breaks – in which case society goes to the other stable pattern, that of considering those outside the tribe to have no rights at all.
Remember that photo of Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement? Leaving aside the question of whether George Floyd’s death was murder – the late Niall Kilmartin thought it was not – it was inevitable that people would eventually ask why, if the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was obliged to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness because the police in a foreign country had killed one man, should not Muslim leaders and opinion-formers make some similar acknowledgement that all these thousands upon thousands of murders preceded by a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” had something to do with Islam? Why can’t there be – why is there not – a “Kafir Lives Matter” movement?
Sir Keir Starmer is set to announce sweeping reforms tomorrow banning under-16s from 10 major social media platforms, including X, but not the Left-wing platform Bluesky.
The huge influxes of research funding for compliant scientists have made it difficult to oppose the fable of a threatened planet. Any scientist who speaks up against the cacophony of nonsense about a climate threat is treated like Dr Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People. Rather than being thanked for discovering that the water of his town’s popular spa is contaminated with deadly disease organisms, Dr Stockman and his family are viciously ostracised by most of the town’s citizens, who are making a good living by promoting the supposed health benefits of the spa.
Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history where it belongs. But the longer the cult goes on, the more damage is done. We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.
I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it. But it rests on three factual errors, and it’s worth looking at them calmly.
Error 1: Elon’s fortune isn’t a pile of cash. It’s ownership of factories, rockets, and satellites. “Taking half his money,” in concrete terms, means forcing the sale of half of SpaceX and Tesla. The money doesn’t come out of a safe; it comes from the companies themselves, which fall under the control of foreign funds or states. You’re not redistributing cash; you’re dismantling a tool of production. It’s the difference between harvesting apples and chopping down the apple tree.
M. Le Pogam goes on to politely describe two other errors that his interlocutor is making regarding how the richest person in the world got that rich, and how an astonishing percentage of the the poorest people in the world have been lifted out of absolute poverty in my lifetime.
His post is well worth reading for the eloquence of his arguments. But there is another, quite separate reason to give it your attention. You see, Brivael Le Pogam never actually wrote “I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it.” He wrote, “Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent.” The thought behind them was in French, but the English words I read and admired for their eloquence were written by a computer program. Over the last couple of years we have quietly reached and passed the point where automatic translation is, for most practical purposes, invisible.
But let us take the question seriously, because it deserves to be. What does it actually mean, to be fit to govern?
It is not, I think, what the managerial mind supposes. It is not a glossy CV, nor a safe pair of hands, nor a tidy communications grid. Strip away the cant and ask the question the common Englishman (and our Scots, our Welsh, our Ulstermen will forgive me the shorthand, for the inheritance is theirs every bit as much as ours) has always put, plainly, to anyone who would rule him: what is government actually for?
The answer is older than any party in this room, older than this Union itself, this Union, our great Union. It is this. Defend the realm. Keep the peace. Hold the law level over the head of the richest man and the poorest alike. And then, having done those few hard things well, leave us our liberty and our property, and get out of the way. That is the whole of it. That is the inheritance of the common law, the law that stood here before Parliament and will stand here after it, the law that William Blackstone, Oxford’s own, took down out of the air and set in order so that every man and woman in these islands might know their rights. Measured against that standard, fitness to govern is not a question of experience. It is a question of spine.
And that is precisely where the parties opposite fail, and Reform does not. For fitness, properly understood, is the willingness to say what you want and to mean it, and to bring with you a team ready to put its shoulder to the national wheel and push.
– Gawain Towler giving an absolutely stonking speech.
The technological reality of Sir Keir Starmer’s demand is extraordinary: that every smartphone in Britain must be child-locked. That means two enormous changes for every one of us: first, our phones will restrict our internet access to child-friendly content only, and second, government-mandated AI software will constantly monitor our messages, video calls and photo albums for verboten activity.
The only way to escape Starmer’s Great British Firewall and get regular internet access is to undergo a digital ID check on the device to register yourself as an adult user.
Convenient, perhaps, for a Prime Minister who has failed to get a digital ID system through the front door.
This is a total reshaping of modern civil liberty – a remodelling of internet access, a strangulation of freedom of information, and a death sentence for online anonymity and privacy. That such extreme, illiberal measures could be more appealing to our politicians than the more natural and effective solution of parental responsibility reveals a deeper malaise in British culture.
The uncomfortable truth is that many parents no longer want the burden of supervising their children in the digital playground. Too many, stretched by work and time pressures, would rather outsource that responsibility – first to big tech as both the playmate and the nanny, and ultimately to the state to act as Big Brother.
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But the price that the rest of the country will pay for the slide towards infantilising control of the internet is significant. In every other democracy, smartphones are portals to the largest library in human history. In Starmer’s Britain, those same devices are being devalued to become, in effect, state-controlled spyware in our pockets.
Our leaders usually condemn the disorder and violence that follows, but will refuse to discuss the triggers in any depth. Anyone who asks what can be done about horrors like that inflicted on Stephen Ogilvie will be accused of stoking division, exploiting a tragedy and courting the far right.
But something can and must be done. It is simply no longer sustainable to force working-class communities to endure such levels of terror, to bear the brunt of the elites’ open-door experiment – to pay the ‘blood price’, as Brendan O’Neill describes it, of the establishment’s virtue-signalling. Practically every day brings new horrors that ordinary folk are simply expected to put up with. On the very same day as the Sudanese suspect was charged with attempted murder, four Afghan nationals appeared in court, all charged with the alleged rape of a Bristol schoolgirl. From gang rapes in Brighton and grooming gangs in Norwich to child rape in Warwickshire, countless British citizens continue to suffer at the hands of men who shouldn’t be here. Yet this barely seems to trouble our cloistered political class.
In hundreds of studies that [Sholto] David looked at, scientists claimed to have found an effect on a tumour-suppressing gene called p16-INK4a, but had instead ordered the wrong antibody from commercial suppliers. They had bought an antibody that detects the activity of a different and irrelevant gene called p16-ARC, probably because it’s listed alphabetically first in the online catalogue.
As a result, teams of scientists from Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and even Wuhan have published results – often in high-impact journals – that make no sense. Yet the experts involved often claimed to have validated their hypotheses anyway.
As David put it: “What are we to make of cases like this where the wrong antibody was used but the authors still manage to rustle up interpretable results?” He blames “a mixture of outright fabrication, selective reporting, writing errors, and some teams blindly publishing contradictory findings without further questioning or curiosity”.
For too long, many people held back from denouncing these perversions of the scientific method for fear of “damaging public trust in science”. This, of course, allowed the bad practices to continue and spread. I trust science as much as ever, but as Musa al-Gharbi pointed out in his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production”, what is often labelled as the loss of public trust in science is more accurately described as a loss of public trust in scientists. If you, reader, are an honest scientist who wants to regain that trust, then you need to be less collegiate.
Matt Ridley continues,
Scientists, like all of us, are prone to confirmation bias, where they look for evidence to support their hunches and prejudices rather than to challenge them. What kept them honest in the past was that they relished the chance to challenge each other.
Now, with the insistence on “consensus” – another word for groupthink – and a monopoly of funding channels, dogma has been increasingly allowed to stifle debate. It does not help that science reporters, unlike those who tackle politics, the arts or business, often have a culture of deference rather than critique.
The self-correction mechanisms of scientific debate are no longer working well. Yet instead of tackling the problem with humility and reformation, the scientific establishment is inclined to lecture the public for our irrationality. Perhaps it should take a look in the mirror.
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.
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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