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]
Literary critic Cyril Connolly said that the war between the generations is the only war in which everyone changes sides eventually. He was wrong. Politics is war, of course; and the Conservative Party switched en masse years ago. Unencumbered by any meaningful philosophy, they just marched from right to left.
Theresa May sounds for all the world like a Labour back-bencher buttering up the party big guns. It’s difficult listening. That said, I fully understand her desire to put the boot in. Who wouldn’t?
The death of the Tories is not a tragedy in and of itself. The carcass can rot for all I care. It’s what they haven’t done. What they failed to deliver. And all the fucking about.
One thing they did manage to do? Create a hell-ish environment in the institutions. Everything is in place. Labour will REALLY be able to wreak their identitarian havoc. Just wait and see. We’ll probably be asked to express our gender preferences through the medium of interpretive dance. And that’ll be the sensible option.
Seriously though – they’ll finish their revolution. And with it, the country. Nobody will be able to do a damn thing about it.
But grinding poverty is, so far as ministers are concerned, a price worth paying for the cult of net zero. Few independent experts pretend that either solar power or wind power are remotely adequate for the needs of heating and powering a country of approaching 70 million people. We are facing this serious crisis because of the demented opposition to nuclear power that has taken root in the last 20 years – a bacillus that entered the Conservative Party’s bloodstream with the leadership of Dave Cameron – and a chronic determination to make promises about improving our environmental record that would undermine the economy of any advanced country that relies on the generation of electricity, the heating of buildings and water and, of course, on moving people and goods around from A to B.
It’s a touching testament to the power of human irrationality that there are people who believe, with all the passion in their souls, that the Conservatives are a band of hard right-wingers. To believe that I suppose you have to believe that they are infinitely more incompetent than they are evil. After all, this supposedly anti-immigration, anti-environmental and authoritarian government has seen immigration soar to record levels, is pursuing net zero and has overseen a steep fall in crime detection and charge rates.
Varied attempts have tried to blame things on the Trots, the bourgeois, wreckers, whites, colonialism, The English, Rosicrucians and the Illuminati. But climate change, whatever we might think of how bad it is or isn’t, isn’t something being done to us – certainly not us rich world folk. It’s something we’re doing.
Consumer demand fuels these companies’ decisions, to be sure.
Well, yes. Without the demand to be able to transport ourselves, heat our lives, cook our food – even have food grown that we can eat – there would be no climate change. There also wouldn’t be 8 billion of us either and most human beings do rather like being able to live (that’s a testable proposition, the number who don’t equals the suicide statistics).
The fossil fuel billionaires are only such because we like to transport ourselves, heat, have and cook food and so on. There is no “other” forcing this upon us. It’s also true that there’s no solution to climate change – if one is even needed – without us out here changing our behaviour. Expropriating, eliminating, even topping on Tower Hill, those fossil fuel billionaires won’t change that in the slightest.
For some reason, it turns out that if someone suggests that there is something wrong with a white family having white offspring in front of a gazillion people, you are supposed to enthusiastically nod along and pass on your congratulations. Naively, I failed to comply and recklessly set out on a voyage of light-hearted piss-taking, asking immature questions such as ‘does everything have to be viewed through the prism of race, sexuality and culture?’.
Turns out the answer is: YES! And what’s more, your skin colour dictates the type of questions you’re allowed to ask.
And apropos that, the other day commenter Ferox made this remark:
My view has always been (and I have argued it here on this site) that if you need to know the color (or demographic trait in general) of the speaker before you know if you are offended or not, then the hate is coming from you – not from the speaker. What you hate is not what was said but the person saying it.
From what I have seen, AI tools can do amazing things. But is the problem going forward not their capability but rather one of trust?
You do not need to trust a pen or a piece of paper, before writing or drawing something. The penmaker, the papermaker, they really do not care, and more important do not know, what you have done with the tools they made.
But is that true with interpretive AI tools? The experience of the “Cthulhu Land Theme Park” art project using Midjourney AI suggests even if what you want is within the tool’s capability, it may simply not allow you to create such content.
Will an AI tool effectively be a pen that refuses to write words the penmaker disapproves of? Paper on which you cannot draw ‘bad’ images the papermaker dislikes? I am by no means an expert on the new AI tools but I am curious to see what people have to say on this subject.
For three years, I’ve been reluctant to say anything about the elephant in the room, the near-complete failure of libertarians to stand up to the lockdown and mandate regime. It was a moment in history that was tailor-made for them. Everything in their training taught them to be suspicious of government power and relentless in the defense of liberty.
Instead they mostly went silent. Worse, they became the Praetorian Guard of the lockdown Caesars, giving them cover when they deserved it least. The “radical” libertarians defaulted to a completely conventional careerism, even to the point of manufacturing rationales for terrible attacks on the most vulnerable.
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.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
