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 – What could possibly go wrong (German edition)? Do we have any historical data on what happens when a German Chancellor abolishes the concept of free speech? I’m assuming it goes really well.
– Wings over Scotland
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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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The shits in Westminster are no better but at least we only have to fight them in Westminster.
“Don’t anyone come to me with free speech!” We must “still be able to protect citizens from false information.”
But this is the myth of the free speech censors. We DO have the ability to protect citizens from false information — we do it by pointing out how the information is false and giving them the correct information. The solution to people saying things you disagree with is speaking up and correcting them or even better, getting offensive and mocking them — an important tool in the free speech toolbox.
The only people who want to ban free speech are people who don’t have good enough arguments to counter their critics.
Abolishing free speech is only BadWrong when those icky-evil National Socialists do it. When the Good and Benevolent International Socialists do it, its a Benison of Civilization and totally desirable.
Freedom of speech is a tool used to criticise the state. The state is the last party who should have any power over it.
It should be beyond the state’s power to restrict. Done by a US style constitution or a treaty between us and the crown along the lines of Magna Carta.
Or, we could just shoot people who try to stop our speaking.
I don’t say that to shock. That needs to be implicit in our demands for freedom. We’re not just asking that they be nice and let us speak. We’re telling them that we HAVE the right to speak, and that we’re not actually negotiating with them.
Never give up your guns. Without them, you’re just asking powerful people for favors.
Post-war Germany has always had a more qualified right to free speech than the USA. Article 5 of the basic law does guarantee press and speech freedom but there are restrictions regarding holocaust denial, anything deemed to be glorifying nazism and anything deemed hostile to the German constitution. The basic law was adopted by West Germany after being approved by most of the West German States and approved by the occupying allied powers (USA, UK, France).
Bobby b
It worked for the Barons.
Power is never given willingly.
@bobby b
Or, we could just shoot people who try to stop our speaking.
From what I have heard the free speech rights of people in prison are pretty limited, even more limited for people who are dead.
If you want to stand up to the state or even just the prevailing culture you have to gather enough of a group behind you to have some viability. One simple act of defiance is mostly futile. Although I am a big supporter of our rights to keep and bear arms, and I recognize its roots in the need to keep the government in check, to truly keep the government in check you need to be part of a much larger and harder to bring about political movement. Even if you feel that standing up to the government guns ablazing is the right way to go, you need to gather round you a very large people who agree with your aims. Otherwise you are just another Waco or Ruby Ridge.
And the culture is not friendly. I have been watching this trial in MA where one juror had the balls to stand against the “nobody is a criminal really” culture and suggest that a woman who brutally murdered her own children with her own hands deserves jail time and not molly coddling. And for this act of defiance against some of your classic white, liberal WASPs he is being persecuted by the whole country. It make me think about one of the great injustices of American history, namely the prosecution of Derek Chauvin and his colleagues. Can you imagine being a juror trying to stand up to the inevitability of that conviction? They would have crucified him, and I mean literally.
@Stuart Noyes
It worked for the Barons.
This analogy is misleading. Early Medieval Britain was more like a group of private armies vying for power with a king who, in many respects, ruled by the consent of those barons. They had real power over the king because his army was smaller than theirs, in fact his army consisted of those Baronial armies he could convince to back them.
BobbyB is not Duke of Minnesota and as far as I know does not have an army to rival that which the federal government can muster. Power comes largely from the barrel of a gun and BobbyB’s arsenal, though no doubt impressive, undoubtedly doesn’t even compare favorably with the local municipal police department.
Power is never given willingly.
No it isn’t. However there are two ways I know of historically that power is returned to the people. One is through massive wars. Not small wars, but bloody revolutions. One guy with a rifle does not count. Now a few guys on Lexington Green did count, did make the difference, but the seed was poured into well prepared ground, and the consequences, while bringing about one of the great turns of liberty in history, did so on the backs of piles of dead bodies, both guilty, innocent and collateral. Related to this, power is sometimes returned to the people by the courts, but the courts need these revolutionary transformations to the laws to allow them to act.
And it is worth saying that these revolutions are a toss up at best, the outcome is not what you’d always expect and want. Ask Robespierre if you doubt this. And unfortunately French revolutions are significantly more common than American ones. The precedent of defending our rights with a weapons may well lead to others defending their “rights” in a similar way, “rights” such as the “right” to your money an property, or the “right” get get rid of the colonial White, male cis-gendered oppressing them. This isn’t some theory, you need only to listen to the ANTIFA types to recognize this is true.
The other source of power to the people is technology. The main reason there is a growing desire to censor free speech is because the Internet and related technologies have made speech so much more abundant and cheap that the normal channels of control are lost to the powerful. Speech is the most obvious example, but technology is liberating in many other ways. And as AI is burgeoning you can see the powerful quaking again in their boots as it brings even more liberation to we peasants, the last thing they want to see.
Fraser Orr:
I should distinguish that I’m not advocating for actually shooting.
I’m advocating to always leave some insecurity in the minds of the powerful that their power isn’t absolute – that they face danger too.
To me, the empowerment comes from the powerful always feeling a little nervous. Their treatment of me will reflect this nervousness. (Can’t push it too far, as they might feel endangered enough to simply neutralize me.)
To know that citizens are never armed is to know that they can do whatever they wish to them. Much as the UK government seems to do now.
I want them a bit fearful. I think I get a better deal from them that way – a little more respect, maybe.
“Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”
Credit: A certain failed Austrian post-card painter.
From: Hitler’s decree for the “Protection of the People and the State” in 1933.
Free speech is already pretty much a dead issue in much of Europe [including Britain] and here on my side of the Atlantic. Our media is functionally controlled by the Left, and in Canada’s equivalent of our Bill of Rights the government is granted the power to suspend any of them.
Subotai Bahadur
The “defense” for the denial of Freedom of Speech in Germany is “it would have stopped the National Socialists” – which ignores the fact that the Weimar Republic had these restrictions on Freedom of Speech (what are now called “Hate Speech Laws”) and this did NOT stop the National Socialists.
Also it is interesting to note who gets persecuted and who does NOT get persecuted – for example, the German Green Party is filled with hatred of Jews (thinly disguised as “Anti Zionism”) and various other National Socialist doctrines (indeed its Environmentalism itself has National Socialist roots – see the beliefs of Himmler and the SS), yet one does not often see members of the German Green Party people being arrested and punished by the courts. The same is true of the Left Party – which is openly Marxist, the Marxist movement being responsible for the murder of over 100 Million People around the world (see the Black Book of Communism on the general record, and the works of Robert Conquest on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Frank Dikotter on the People’s Republic of China) – yet members of the Left Party are not often persecuted. It is only AfD people (or people mistakenly thought to be pro AfD) people who tend to get persecuted in Germany.
There is also the elephant in the room – the same German establishment (or rather the German branch of the international establishment – for it is the same in Britain, France, the United States and-so-on) that claims to care about Jews (“Never Again”…..) has imported, and allowed to increase, an Islamic (not “Islamist” – Islamic is what Muhammed himself taught and practiced, there is no “Islamist”) population that wants to wipe out Jews – as well as crush all other “infidels”.
At first in Germany it was done via the “Guest Workers” trick – then, in the early 1970s, the “guests” (far from being sent home due to rising unemployment in Germany) were allowed to bring in their families, and (at about the same time) policies were enacted to reduce the fertility of the host population.
Again not a special German case – this was a general Western establishment set of policies (including in the United States) from the 1960s onwards (policies designed to utterly transform the demographics of historic nations – whilst claiming it was “paranoid conspiracy theory” to mention this) – including attacking Freedom of Speech as a way of trying to crush opposition to these policies. Even in the United States, with the 1st Amendment, a special government unit (created under the 1964 Act) was established to push the “correct” opinion on these matters and to discourage “unhelpful” opinions, for example if a white person was murdered – family members were “encouraged” (just was later the case in Britain) to come out with statements that would be “helpful” rather than “cause harm”.
People expressing dissenting opinions (trying to warn others) were hounded from their jobs and generally denounced – what was, much later, called “cancel culture”.
The first major case I know of was John Enoch Powell – who was sacked from the “Opposition” Front Bench after his Birmingham speech in the 1960s – in Germany today, Mr Powell would likely be sent to prison. In spite of Mr Powell serving in World War II – and having a long record of DEFENDING both Indians and Africans against what he believed were injustices in British rule – for example sleeping on railway platforms in India rather than going to segregated accommodation, and denouncing the treatment of Mau-Mau suspects in Kenya in the 1950s.
It must be remembered that both Winston Churchill and Charles De Gaulle (the leading ANTI National Socialists of the 2nd World War and before) held opinions that would today be described as both “racist” and “Islamophobic” and would, today, likely see them sent to prison in Britain or France – not just Germany.
Today wanting to keep your own country is declared “Nazi” – this would have utterly baffled the people who fought AGAINST the National Socialists during World War II.
As a World War II veteran told his BBC interviewers (before they shut him down) – this is NOT the Britain his friends died for, and they would hate what Britain has become, as he does.
There is no way knowing why chancellor Merz produces those lapsi linguae, except that he seems indeed deeply annoyed about nobody being impressed by his good intentions. But all this political haggling seems marginal compared with the BIG UNCHANGED ISSUES:
– Uncontrolled immigration
– The fatal energy revolution
– The stranglehold the EU has on it’s countries
Everything else seems at least possibly negotiable, but these three are, in spite of all rhethoric, all promises otherwise, unchangeable.