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 – Yet again, the process is the punishment I remember him announcing this on YouTube. It was, frankly, appalling. Classic police overreach and the school complaining was typical of the thin skinned using lawfare to shut down critical voices. Yet it all came to nothing as the case was dropped. As any reasonable person would expect it to be. The correct approach to the initial complaint would have been to warn the complainant of the penalties for wasting police time.
Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel at the Free Speech Union, said the force, as well as others across the country, should “never repeat this mistake.”
But they will, because it wasn’t a mistake. Until there are personal consequences, this will continue to happen.
– Longrider
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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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Where liberty is not a PRINCIPLE – where everything is decided on the basis of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (Jeremy Bentham) with the state deciding what that means, then the authorities will abuse the people – they will abuse the people because they CAN, because they are no set principles to stop them.
In a once famous essay (to be found in collections of his essays) David Hume mused about the “euthanasia of the constitution” – he did NOT say he supported the destruction of the unwritten principles of the British constitution (the principles laid out by such people as Sir John Holt – Chief Justice from 1689 to 1710, about a year before Mr Hume was born), but he did not say he was really against this either – he was indifferent.
Well we have reached that point now – the unwritten constitution is dead (dead as dodo) there are no principles of liberty limiting the state here – none. But it is not an unlimited monarchy as in Louis XIV’s France – it is an unlimited bureaucracy, with officials doing what they like and the monarch just a figurehead (so, before someone jumps in, I ACCEPT that out situation is different from the one Mr Hume was writing about).
Partly this collapse of liberty is due to cultural decline – of which there was an example recently….
A teacher at an “elite” private school (yes private – so those parents who spend thousands of Pounds a year on private schools thinking they are saving their children from “Wokeness”, Critical Theory Marxism, are wasting their money) was on a visit to Malaysia and Singapore with the students – and he made the off hand (and truthful) comment that “no gum or gays” (no chewing gum or homosexual acts) were allowed in these countries – the sort of trivial remark that would been common a few years ago, but in modern “tolerant” Britain he lost his job – and was driven to suicide.
Again, before someone jumps in, I am not saying that Mr Hume, or even Mr Bentham, would have approved of what happened to this man – on the contrary I am sure they would have been horrified by it. It is just an example of the horrible, liberty hating, society we have become.
I’ve tried, seriously, to find anything offensive in ‘No gum or gays.’ And I can’t find anything offensive in it.
the claim would be the statement is normative instead of descriptive or a normative statement hiding as a descriptive statement. the problem is the people accusing him of making a normative statement would be engaging in mind reading. possibly, the reason they are so sure he is making a normative statement is they engage in this kind of shadow speech themselves so they just assume everyone else is doing the same thing.
IIRC, I read that the student body is quite wealthy, and is comprised of your basic spoiled rich-bitch kids who GET WHAT THEY WANT, and the school panders to them out of fear of their wealthy parents, and some student complained, and . . . that was that.
Less politics, more simple venality.
So who is homophobic? (or gumphobic?). The teacher who quips about it or the country that brutaly enforces it?
I have much more to say (do you folks wanna hear? – I’ve a busy schedule ahead) but that must wait because it is late.
But, suffice to say, a man was hounded from his job for a joke about an absolute fact and driven to suicide by forces in the UK. They only flog gays in Malaysia*. Which country is less liberal?
Yeah, I know it’s complicated depending on where has sharia law but it is punishable one way or another everywhere in Malaysia.
James Strong, ben, bobby b and NickM
As you know – this incident is, tragically, the tip of the iceberg. And “simple venality” is very much connected to politics – and to philosophy, to the nature of human beings – their honour or failure to be honourable, both the people who control the school and the parents themselves (and the students).
Western society, particularly in Britain (perhaps, perhaps, more in Britain than any other nation) has become brutally intolerant – ironically in the name of “tolerance”.
It has not happened over night – it is part of an historical process that goes back (in its origins) a very long time.
And a defense of liberty that amounts to “this is how we do things here” or “this is British [or English] culture” is no help at all – as liberty is clearly NOT how we do things here, and liberty is NOT part of the culture of the place – and even if it was, that is NOT an argument.
At the start of his “Constitution of Liberty” (1960) F.A. Hayek argued that we could abandon the “Old Whig” view of what human beings are (free will moral agents – souls, in the Aristotelian sense) and still keep “Old Whig” (pro liberty) politics – he was mistaken, as we can NOT.
The pro liberty politics of the “Old Whigs” is based on basic principles about what a human being is – that we are capable of moral freedom (of choosing to do other than we do), that we are persons (moral agents – human BEINGS). The philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume (what they defined a human to be – their rejection of the “I” – the person, the human BEING) rejects all this – which is why this philosophy was REJECTED by the Old Whigs – and by Tory folk, such as Dr Johnson, as well.
Jeremy Bentham also rejected the traditional view of “the nature of man” (what humans are – that we are beings, moral agents, that the “I” truly exists – is not an “illusion”) – and it was a tragedy that some (some) liberals, fell into his philosophy – of which his proposed 13 Departments of State (dominating human life) was the natural outgrowth. The bad philosophy led to the bad politics.
If “politics is downstream from culture” (as the late Andrew Breitbart used to say) – then culture is downstream from philosophy, the false philosophy of the elite eventually corrupts ordinary culture.
You can not get to the Bill of Rights (British or American) from the philosophy of Hobbes, Hume and Bentham – and, eventually, you can not have a decent society where such philosophy (directly or indirectly) dominates – for it undermines respect for, indeed denies the existence of, human BEINGS.