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]
|
Samizdata quote of the day I’d love to have a few here walk with me through South Minneapolis, down Lake Street, maybe talk to a few of my friends who still haven’t been able to re-open and who now seem likely to simply declare BK and walk away, about how it is so much worse that “government” property was invaded for a few short minutes this week. It was “just private property,” after all.
Maybe we could linger in the remains of the burned-down Minneapolis police precinct building that somehow doesn’t represent “government” in their eyes. Burning down the police is somehow less civil-war-ish than temporarily occupying The People’s Chamber?
Several large communities in Minneapolis are still teetering on failure following the riots. But I should be concerned that government staffers felt ill-at-ease?
They are both bad situations. Cooler heads should have prevailed in both, but didn’t. This “oh, but this is so much worse!” handwringing is why liberty declines.
– Bobby B
|
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.
|
Indeed. Looking at the media & even many otherwise sensible commentators, you’d think there hadn’t been a year of widespread political violence in the USA & what happened in Washington DC came out of nowhere, like a bolt from the blue in the otherwise ‘mostly peaceful‘ USA
Private businesses go to the wall and private employees get terminated, yet not one of these government workers in Minneapolis, Washington DC or the other places affected by rioting, lockdowns or protests has missed a single pay check.
The Democrats are creating a national version of the machine politics that they have used to control a number of large cities for decades. A one-party media and biased social media platforms control the flow of information and prevent opponents from organising online. Paramilitary thugs prevent them from organising in real life while corrupt politicians tell the police to look the other way. The value of your property and your ability to defend it depends on having the right connections. It’s Chicago fascism, a merger of state and corporate power based on utterly cynical self-interest with a “woke” veneer to con the rubes.
Cool!
(According to Rasmussen, President Trump’s national approval rating rose today to 48%.)
Government property has also been invaded – and burned. Often in 2020.
The media did not care – because it was the left attacking police stations, court houses, and so on.
As for the plan to destroy small business enterprises – it is quite deliberate. The properties will be bought up by local government, or by large corporations. The majority of small business enterprises have already been destroyed in such cities as San Francisco – I would guess (from thousands of miles away) that the same is true in Minneapolis.
Over on LinkedIn, some retired military intel guy commented that what happened in DC this week was an attack on our institutions. Ha! It was an attack on a building and on police defending it. Not good. But the attack on our institutions lies elsewhere and has been underway much longer as all here know very well.
Be attuned to hearing such things going forward: “attack on our institutions”, “a new right wing insurgency”, etc. and be prepared to counter it. Recognize that it is projection by those on the Left spouting it–these are exactly the things they have been very consciously doing for a long time.
I’m not quite as pessimistic about all this as Paul Marks, but I’m close. Please give me a few reasons to be optimistic about the future of Liberty in America.
GregWA – I remain of the same opinion I expressed, before and during the event.
“Anything you do will be used as an excuse for a crack down – it will make things worse” – the words of the “retired military intel guy” (no one ever truly retires from the intelligence community) rather proves my point.
By the way – he is correct in one sense, it was an attack on the “institutions” which both left and right (there were both sorts of person in the Capitol building) CORRECTLY view as rotten to the core.
The philosopher who stressed “the institutions” of the state the most was Hegel – and he was quite wrong. In reality there are no “institutions” there are just human beings behind desks and other human beings (with firearms) who take orders from them. That has been exposed by the utter corruption of the “Justice” Department and the FBI – who have COVERED UP the crimes of the Biden family (and many others) for years.
“If you think you have been cheated in an election – go to court”.
And then the courts will not even hear your case – they invent “legal” excuses for not allowing you to even present your evidence. Thus showing what “the courts” in American actually are – just corrupt people in funny robes. They are not even subtle – the subtle thing to do would have been to make a great show of “fairly hearing both sides” and then deciding that the election was basically fine. But they did not do that – they, the courts, made it utterly obvious that they were corrupt.
They made it utterly obvious because they, and the rest of the “institutions” (for example that farcical meeting in the Senate – in which none of the substantive complaints were even addressed)_were deliberately trying to PROVOKE people, and they succeeded in their task.
Sometimes one just has to “walk away” – not get provoked.
In a way old fashioned political systems do not have this problem – no one says that the old House of Lords was the “people’s house” (the Lords were there because of accident of birth) or that the King or Queen is “chosen by the people” (they are also there by accident of birth).
It is the PRETENCE that the system is “government by the people” when the results of the election were decided long before a single vote was cast – that is what is provoking.
As I said on the day – the situation is hopeless, WALK AWAY.
I had a look at the British newspapers today – a mistake for someone with COPD, but there we are (at least I avoid British television – which, I am told, is almost unbelievably despicable).
President Trump is still being used as Emanuel Goldstein – the writing and cartoons are utterly vile, and there is still not serious opposition to the “lockdown” in Britain – on the contrary the newspapers reported that the government (they said Prime Minister Alexander “Boris” Johnson – but he does NOT really come up with these ideas) wants even more extreme measures.
As I have often said in recent days – it is unfortunate that I have lived to see these times. I wish I had not lived.
The walk could be from Chicago and Lake, going North on Chicago. They burned the whole block, including my favorite bookstore, Uncle Hugo’s. Then, when Don Blyly (the owner) wanted to clear out the debris, they wouldn’t give him a permit until he’d paid the full second half of his Property Taxes, on a devastated hole in the ground. Then, when the debris was being cleaned, they decided the plans weren’t right and made the contractor stop so everything could be rearranged.
The Democrat city, county, and state governments are NOT friends of small business. It’s a surprise, I know, but they had to do what they did. Their regulations compelled it.
Now I’m wondering if the upcoming administrations will seize our money, tax it to death, or inflate it out of all reason. The spouse says “all of the above”.
Chicago style corruption: My Canadian born father immigrated to Chicago as a teenager. He died 25 years ago and retired 45 years ago, so you can imagine my sisters surprise when a letter from the Illinois Division of Employment Security arrived addressed to him, informing him that his application for unemployment benefits had been denied. A few days later a debit card from IDES arrived. My sister was able to determine that $17,500 had already been dispensed against the card. Of course, she realized it was a fraud and notified local, state, and federal authorities. Don’t know much about fraud but obviously this is an inside job and it appears to be a variant of the old ghost/phantom payroll con. According to the newspapers, this story is commonplace.
My maternal line has been in Chicago for more than 160 years. I can tell you that the pols of my childhood were greedy smarmy crooks but they didn’t hate America or working Americans, like their credentialed, manicured, and very greedy successors. This generation has no awareness of basic survival imperatives: don’t shit in your own nest, don’t eat the seed corn, and don’t kill the golden goose.
https://www.steynonline.com/10919/potemkin-parliament-pseudo-legislature
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-parler/google-suspends-parler-social-networking-app-from-play-store-apple-gives-24-hour-warning-idUSKBN29D34N
“ (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s Google on Friday suspended the Parler social networking service from its app store, citing posts inciting violence and demanding “robust” content moderation from the app favored by many supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Apple Inc on Friday also gave the service 24 hours to submit a detailed moderation plan, pointing to participants using the service to coordinate Wednesday’s siege of the U.S. Capitol building.
The actions by the two Silicon Valley companies mean that the network seen as a haven for people expelled from Twitter could become unavailable for new downloads on the world’s main mobile phone app stores within a day.”
Exasperated (January 9, 2021 at 5:32 pm), have you been able to verify whether your father has voted since he died, and if so how often?
Doubtless you know the old joke: “How does a Republican turn into a Democrat in Chicago? By dying.”
Does anyone have data on what proportion of Chicagoans become post-mortem voters?
Let’s not forget the insurrection in Seattle and the blatant intimidation of police and a mayor incapable of enforcing order. The toppling of statues of Grant, Jefferson and the defacement of Lincoln.
The past 12 months in the USA have emboldened troublemakers of all kinds. This isn’t “whataboutism” . What happened in the Capitol was a disgrace. But…..there is a deeper problem of emotionalism and tribalism. I think some of this is rooted in education or rather, miseducation. That’s why one silver lining of covid has been forcing youngsters to study at home.
I’d be interested to see what happens to Republicans in the next few years. Where to go if you’re for free markets and realism in foreign policy? There’s a vacancy.
If only there were a tool to automatically convert Samizdata threads into home schooling teaching materials. History books by Paul Marks and Niall Kilmartin and friends. Free market lessons by the many City experts here. Etc. Sigh…
This.
It occurs to me that perhaps many colored revolutions that the USA has perpetrated on foreign countries were perhaps just Chicago style machine politics exported abroad and implemented top down through such humanitarian organizations as the CIA. What are colored revolutions if not largely Democrat City Machine tactics exported abroad and implemented by the CIA in foreign countries?
From Paul Marks:
Just 2 words:
Reichstag Fire.
Yes Myno: We need something like that. In our family we have doubled down on Math and coherent writing skills at home. There must be web sites dedicated to realistic STEM, history and social studies, that also do compelling documentaries.
There is no such thing as social studies. What does that even mean? Please cleanse yourself of communist/Woke vocabulary. There is history. There is politics. There is sociology. There is psychology. There is no social studies.
We will be seeing the USA transform into Transnistria on January 20th 2021, we live in interesting times.
Sorry, I don’t know but I forwarded your question to my sister.
I’d just like to add that government, like it or not, is a form of racketeering, albeit necessary. It always has been since the first elders demanded the first peons build the first stockade to keep the 2 legged and 4 legged predators out. The founders understood this, hence decentralization and separation of powers and limited government.
That said, the Chicago of my childhood was still a city that worked. The deterioration started with ACORN, by any and many other names, and its model of race hustling. Now add in corporatism, cronyism, and globalization.
My understanding is that it rose from 48% to 51%.
Shlomo, re “social studies”.
IIRC it was a subject that was forced on me in my first, or second, year at Scottish Secondary School before we were “streamed” into our O Grade subjects.
The one memory I have of it, imprinted in my memory is this:
We were asked to pretend we were pensioners and write a letter to a friend, also a pensioner.
I failed the assignment.
In my letter, I wrote to my imagined friend something along the line of : “the business is doing well, which is great because I don’t think I’d be able to cope on the state pension. I recently had an operation, and went private, because I’d have to wait forever on the NHS. ” and similar in that vein.
The only ‘+’ marks I got from the leftie teacher were the “can’t cope on state pension” and ” long wait on NHS”.
As I say, this was over 40 years ago, but I still remember it.
Last year was a huge further step; in June, Kamala Harris, said:
By that time, BLM had already killed at least 12 people; they would go on to kill another and then more.
But while the loud encouragement of Antifa/BLM beats everything that came before, let’s note some of what came before.
Pelosi hasn’t always minded her office being invaded:
While venting in 2018 about the (Obama-introduced) border detention policy, she seemed to call for riots:
The Dems and the MSM have seemed to be OK about invading State Capitol buildings :
(Kaine was arrested, and sentenced to a $150 fine, after all more serious charges were quietly dropped.)
And that was just one day. Back in 2011, leftist protestors stormed the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison and occupied it for four months, destroying property, impeding public business and violently assaulting conservatives – to much praise from the usual suspects. Assisting Democratic lawmakers left the state (to create quorum problems for the contentious vote, altering state employees collective bargaining rights). In the words of one protestor
Towards these demonstrators, the police, and various MSM reports, were tolerant and understanding.
The Michigan Capitol building was jammed with protestors in March 2011 to block a similar vote that (then) minority leader Gretchen Whitmer disliked.
And the Federal Capitol in Washington DC was not always so sacred. I assume we all recall how, during the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, demonstrators interrupted business in the Capitol, shouted down senators and pounded on the doors of the Supreme Court. Strangely, I cannot recall their being shot – or harshly spoken of by the MSM/Dems – or even (but correct me if I’m forgetting) being quite as harshly spoken of by the major commenters on our side.
All this prompts a question: how much would be different if the crowd had gone to the north lawn, and never entered the Capitol? I had vaguely expected a crowd outside and a debate inside, with speeches explaining the evidence for fraud that I expected to be travestied in MSM reporting but thought might be at least covered. Instead – well, we know there was at least one BLM activist involved in the entry and the filming of it, but I continue to think the woman who was shot was a Trump supporter. Regardless, if the protestors had not been able to enter, and then to be shot, would the coverage of the arguments for voter fraud have been any less missing? What happened matters, it was exploited, but if we assume – as we may do on current information – that no deep-laid plot provided the particular narrative the MSM used, we may ask, as was said by a prior Dem candidate “At this point, what difference does it make?”
I think it made some.
I submit that “unavoidable” is somewhat more appropriate than “necessary”.
@AndrewZ,
The Chicago fascism you speak of is actually CCP fascism, very similar to Singapore style politics. The CCP approached it from socialism, the US approached it from capitalism.
At least our elections are fair though. Our relatively local scale makes shenanigans harder to pull off.
@Shlomo Maistre
“ (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s Google on Friday suspended the Parler social networking service from its app store, citing posts inciting violence and demanding “robust” content moderation from the app favored by many supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump.
FWIW, when I read that yesterday I felt like someone had poured ice water down my back. The thing with Parler is far more significant than Trump’s banning from Twitter and FB. It reminds me of the the hundred flowers campaign in China. Mao, needing new ideas, ask for “a hundred flowers to bloom” encouraged intellectuals to express their ideas freely without fear of reproach, to help improve the state. He then used these ideas to identify “subversives” and then had them shot.
Here we have this beautiful thing, the internet, a transformation in human society making free speech available to everyone, without censorship. And platforms like Google and Apple have opened the doors, “welcome to all ideas, welcome the new new world of free and open discussion.” And then, then they trapped everybody in the hall with free food and snacks, free accommodation, and a “generous” spirit; “don’t be evil” they promised. Then, “Bang” they locked the doors, rubbed their hands together and declared, “we have you, now you will all be our slaves.”
To me this is a Berlin wall moment, but in reverse. It is a deeply troubling development in human history, and with an unyoked, uninhibited China, who will not only eat our lunch but our breakfast, our dinner and all our grain storehouses, it is the beginning of the end of western civilization, democracy, freedom and, in a sense, the enlightenment.
They have shut all the doors, closed off all the windows, and there is no way back. Those of you who think that “in two years the Republicans will win back the house” are deluding yourself. The plan is this:
* Remove the senate filibuster.
* Give citizenship to DACA guys (which they can do given the control of congress and no filibuster)
* Later, give citizenship to illegal aliens (which they can do given the control of congress and no filibuster)
* Eventually expand the USSC ((which they can do given the control of congress and no filibuster), though I don’t think they are in a rush to do this
* Add DC and PR as states (which they can do given the control of congress and no filibuster)
Now they have twenty million new democrat voters, four permanent new senate seats and they can get all that done before the next election.
The possible impeachment of the President is obviously purely symbolic. It is, though, a manifestation of both their unbridled power, their arrogance and their raw mendacity. Moreover, they need to make it clear that anyone who should dare to challenge the power of the governing elites again can be sure they will end up in a meat grinder.
Shlomo Maistre,
It looks like Parler is getting dumped from Amazon’s AWS as well, so they may be offline for a week while they find another host.
Parler saying they have prepared for this and aim to be up on Monday. Not heard a peep about this on MSM – this is epoch defining news and it’s not being covered.
When I was at a comprehensive school in the early 1970s the site was divided into science, languages and social studies. Social studies back then meant history and geography mainly. There was also a subject called environmental studies which had a different meaning to what you would think now. It was basically a study of the geography of the local area and involved a lot of field trips.
Similar to my Illinois public grammar school education in the 50s. Apparently the definition has changed.
Niall’s comment in this thread on January 9, 2021 at 11:02 pm is excellent and really important for everyone to read. Should be a post itself imo – very important stuff there.
https://www.samizdata.net/2021/01/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-1384/#comment-808198
https://www.timesofisrael.com/schwarzenegger-capitol-raid-like-kristallnacht-trump-a-failed-president/
Damn. To whom can I turn for moral teachings if not Arnold? I am bereft. I’ll have to pick another woke celeb. Who’s that blond ditz on Friends?
For people with more than a tenuous grasp of reality:
* the BLM/antifa riots were, and are, and will be, the equivalent of Kristallnacht;
* the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 was the equivalent of the Reichstag Fire.
But of course Arnold has a tenuous grasp on reality. He was great as Conan and Terminator. That’s because he was not supposed to be an intellectual.
Lisa Mac,
This appears to precisely be the situation.
The forces arraigned against liberty have rapidly obtained extraordinary powers, enabled by technology, in recent years. They have used these extraordinary powers to wage information warfare against The People to such an exceptional degree that no propaganda in all of human history even comes close to the scale and intensity of this campaign. What we are witnessing is beyond the wildest imagination of Heinlein, Asimov, or Orwell and it is, indeed, terrifying.
The current situation in America appears to be very, very terrifying – on so many different levels. The demonization of the one side is extraordinary and the extent to which the other side’s elites control the flow of information is likewise extraordinary. There is little reason to be hopeful, which is why I am…
I am not hopeful that we will again see a President of the United States like Trump. I am not hopeful that the fake coronavirus hysteria will stop being used to eliminate our civil rights. I am not hopeful that we will get government spending under control. I am not hopeful that the intelligence services systemic violations of our civil liberties will be rolled back. I am not hopeful that the fake police brutality hysteria will cease rolling back the culture and laws that ensure law and order. I am not hopeful that America will stand up to China. I am not hopeful that public and private debt will cease ballooning out of control.
I am hopeful about one thing, though. 2020 marked the beginning of a Great Awakening. Only the very beginning.
This Great Awakening will take decades if not centuries to bear fruit.
Wanna know what keeps them awake nights?
ANFO has been problematic ever since its last big bang. The AN side of things basically became a controlled substance.
Remember that weird little guy that blew up his RV in Nashville a few weeks back? Kinda disappeared off the news. For the amount of damage done, it disappeared very fast.
Seems that, through tinkering and some help, he figured out how to put together a cheap and easy and relatively low-mass thermobaric. And it put out one heck of a bang. And it’s now all over the internet.
So I think that power always flows downhill. And these techies always have physical facilities. And I know I shouldn’t derive so much glee from this, but I’m weak.
Agreed Snorri – and agreed Shlomo. “Arnie” is inverting reality – but then I have come to expect that of Hollywood celebs.
The only thing that I have to add is that the last few days have been a real “eye opener” for me in relation to certain libertarians, their behaviour (essentially siding with the emerging Fascist Corporate State) has shocked me.
Clearly I am not as cynical as I thought myself to be – as I have been totally blindsided by how some libertarians have behaved. I did not expect it – some of the people I admired and trusted most have behaved in ways that I can not bring myself to write about further. If it is possible for a man to be “heartbroken” then I am – and if that makes me sound “womanish” then so be it.
Paul:
Perhaps you can name names?
I second Shlomo Maistre
(January 10, 2021 at 11:12 pm):
Niall Kilmartin’s comment
(January 9, 2021 at 11:02 pm)
is a worthwhile summary of relevant ‘whataboutism’ 🙂
(There is good whataboutism and bad whataboutism, and i am not going to define how to distinguish them, not here.)
In particular, the first storming of Pelosi’s office did not come to mind before Niall reminded me.