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.
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Earlier this week three girls were stabbed to death in Southport. Several others are still in hospital. A 17-year-old of foreign ancestry has been arrested. This has led to protests which in turn have led to disorder. The communist establishment has blamed the disorder on “far right” outsiders. Given how widespread the protests/riots have become we will soon have to conclude that the whole of the British “far right” live at 10A Acacia Terrace, Nether Wallop.
So, who are these “far right”-ists? Well given how often Tommy Robinson and his supporters are labelled “far right” it would seem that either of the two demos he has organised in London this year would be good places to find out. As it happens I attended both of them.
Both times I drafted but didn’t publish a light-hearted piece for Samizdata. For the second – which took place what seems a very long week ago – I imagined what a Nazi might make of it. The long and the short of it was not much but given the events of this week it didn’t seem appropriate to post it.
Given the crowd and their flags one would have to conclude that the “far right” are people who are proud of their countries of origin whether they be England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland (both bits) or Britain as a whole, Canada, Israel or pre-revolutionary Iran. One would also have to conclude that many are far from the stereotypical pissed-up, white, working-class male.
Given the speakers one would have to conclude that they are extremely sceptical about mass migration, deeply suspicious about the way the law is being administered, in favour of freedom of speech, pro-Christian, mostly Reform voters and of all the colours and sexes under the sun.
And very, very angry.
 Belfast today. Is there nothing the far right cannot do? Update I have taken on board Mr Ed’s quite correct comments and kicked myself appropriately. And Natalie’s too. The use of the word “foreigner” is, I accept, contentious.
“Flashback: Harris fumed at Americans for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ before illegal migrants got protections”, Fox News reports:
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris warned Americans not to say “Merry Christmas” until there was permanent status for some illegal immigrants — amid a Trump-era battle over protections for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
“And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas,” she said at a 2017 press conference, a video of which was obtained by Fox News Digital.
Speakers pushed for the passage of the Dream Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors, NBC News reported.
Here is the video and here is the 2017 NBC article to which the article refers.
This clip has got a lot of play because it shows Kamala Harris as a purse-lipped woke puritan. Fair enough, she is one. Even if one completely accepted her point of view that passing the DREAM1 Act was a desirable objective in 2017, why should that not having been done be the thing that made it outrageous for Americans to wish each other “Merry Christmas” until it was done? There were plenty of worse things going on in the world in 2017: wars, famines, natural catastrophes, terrorism, poverty, crime. Why were these miseries not enough to prompt the curtailment of Christmas greetings until they were solved? Nor were these evils limited to the year 2017. So far as I know the DREAM Act has not been passed to this day. So we must assume Kamala Harris has now personally abstained from “speaking Merry Christmas” for six years and seven months and is still saying “How dare you” to anyone else who does it.
Yet in her defence, gestures of self-abnegation as a demonstration of commitment such as Harris made have a long history. In 1601, during the Dutch Revolt, Archduke Albert of Austria was laying siege to Ostend. His wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, declared that she would not change her shift until the city fell2. Since that did not happen until September 1604, her underwear got a bit grubby, giving rise to the colour term “Isabelline”.
Now that’s what I call commitment. If she wants to be taken seriously, Kamala Harris needs to follow the example of Isabella and urge her followers to do likewise.
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1No offence, Yanks, but for introducing the idea of bills or laws whose titles spell out aspirational words, your entire nation deserves to suffer the fate of Ostend.
2This story has been fact-checked to the standard expected of the Guardian or the New York Times.
Douglas Young ponders how close to the edge our lives are.
In the wake of the near assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, a large number of Americans have wondered if he survived solely “by the grace of God.” Indeed, many believe that the Almighty Himself must have altered the direction of the assassin’s bullet so that it grazed Mr. Trump’s ear instead of hitting his head.
But if we accept this and are logically consistent, do we not also have to believe that God guided the assassin’s bullet that killed the devoted father shielding his wife and children at the event, as well as the bullets seriously wounding two other men? Or that He simply did not care about them?
I think the July 13 assassination attempt is all the more disturbing because it highlights so starkly just how huge a role luck plays in our lives. It is sobering to realize that, no matter how good or careful we think we are, very often we have no control over whether we get terminal cancer, crippled or killed in a car wreck, or even shot.
I suspect the major novelist Norman Mailer was right that this is why we prefer conspiracy theories to make sense of senseless tragedies. So instead of a total loser like Lee Harvey Oswald being able to kill President John Kennedy and change history all by himself, we much prefer to believe that only a massive cabal involving the CIA, our military-industrial complex, the Mafia, the Russians, or the Cubans could have managed such a massively consequential crime.
Now, despite clear evidence of recent rank incompetence at the U.S. Secret Service, we are sorely tempted to believe that last month’s extremely close call with the GOP presidential nominee had to be the result of a well-coordinated plot involving the CIA, other government officials, and/or even the Secret Service – anything but that awkward and lonely assassin barely out of his teens acting by himself. Yet almost every shooter of an American president has been an utter failure who somehow single-handedly pulled off what was assumed to be almost impossible.
In 1835, President Andrew Jackson survived an assassination attempt by a deranged man convinced he was a 15th century English king. In 1881, President James Garfield was murdered by a lone gunman and likely schizophrenic whose life had been a complete catastrophe. In 1901, President William McKinley was shot to death by an unemployed socialist-anarchist. In 1963 President Kennedy was cut down by a mentally ill high school dropout who had become a communist. And in 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot by an insane loner hoping to impress a famous actress he had not even met.
→ Continue reading: This precarious life
“Yes, the Chinese put on a display of thousands of co-ordinated drummers, itself an extraordinary physical feat, but hey, WE HAVE DRAG QUEENS, DECAPITATION, AND A FAT SEX-SWAPPED JESUS.”
– David Thompson.
Of course, maybe the French organisers of the Olympic opening shindig wanted to bring a bit of Eurovision, or even better, Eurotrash, back into the limelight.
On a separate note, Ilya Somin has this thought-provoking post on how to fix the “dark side of the Olympics”.
And finally, gender fluidity comes for boxing.
I was going to write a post about the riot in Southport that followed the random knife murders of three young girls in that town carried out by Axel Rudakubana. Prior to Rudakubana’s name being released, a false rumour spread on social media that the perpetrator was a Muslim, leading the rioters to attack a mosque. Then I remembered I had already made the same points in this post about the riot in Dublin that took place in November 2023 following the attempted knife murder of three young children by Riad Bouchaker. I am not re-using the old post merely to save time: I am doing it to demonstrate that the two incidents have a great deal in common.
“Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive”
In the following quote, replace “Irish” with “British” and “would-be child murderer” with “child murderer”:
It does not excuse the riots in the least if the rioters are correct to think that the would-be child murderer is any or all of a migrant, legal or illegal, or a Muslim, or from an ethnic minority. But the obfuscation from the Irish authorities and media on this point is making the situation worse.
The usual flashpoint for riots throughout history has been a rumour of crimes committed by a member of Group A against Group B. The riots in the Lozells district of Birmingham in 2005 have been almost forgotten because whites were not involved, but they were a typical example of the type, having been sparked by a completely unsubstantiated story that a black girl had been gang-raped by a group of South Asian men.
Sometimes the rumour is true, sometimes it is not.
If, as in that case, the inciting rumour is not true, the best tool for squelching the false claim and quelling the violence is a trusted press, taking the term “press” in a wider sense than just newspapers. If the rumour is true, the best tool for quelling the violence is still a trusted press. It can do things like publicising condemnations of the crime from leaders of the group to which the perpetrator belongs. What a pity that Ireland, like much of the Western World, no longer has a trusted press because it no longer has a trustworthy press.
It’s not “Despite police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”, it’s a damn sight closer to “Because of police not revealing the suspected knifeman’s identity or motive, far-Right thugs emboldened by “misinformation” descended on the streets of the capital”. If the official sources of information won’t do their jobs, don’t be surprised when people turn to unofficial sources instead.
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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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