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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If you find yourself moved to attend a public protest in the UK, but are not a member of a group that your local Plod choose to kneel in support of, might I suggest you protect yourself, because it is likely violent thugs may decide your protest is unwanted.
A good way to do this is by attending future protests with a good (but generic) motorbike helmet (which also means you are wearing a ‘face covering’, for Covid-19, you understand) and stout boots to protect your feet. Full biker leathers (also generic and unadorned) are optional but also have much to commend them, and these can be armoured and reinforced in all sorts of way.
And so, an alcoholic stalker of ex-boyfriends, and who bases intimate relationships on revenge, has fathomed society’s problems. And it’s all Whitey’s fault.
– David Thompson.
I urge you to read the whole article (from 2018) as it is, to use the technical term, fuckin’ hilarious 😛
There is a noticeable aspect of the language used when the people protest against a left-wing dictator like Lukashenko: You won’t see him identified as left-wing.
– John Anderson
The shift from “it’s immoral to tell another culture’s story” to “it’s impossible to tell another culture’s story, but in any case, one shouldn’t try for moral reasons” is part of a process Pluckrose and Lindsay describe as “reification”, which emerged after I’d left the ivory tower and commenced moving companies around and drafting commercial leases for a living. Once reified, postmodern abstractions about the world are treated as though they are real things, and accorded the status of empirical truth. Contemporary social justice activism thus sees theory as reality, as though it were gravity or cell division or the atomic structure of uranium.
The correspondence theory of truth holds that objective truth exists and we can learn something about it through evidence and reason. That is, things are knowable and we gain reliable information about them when our beliefs align with reality. It’s termed “the correspondence theory of truth” because a statement is considered true when it corresponds with reality and false when it doesn’t. Reality, of course, is the thing that does not change regardless of what you believe.
– Helen Dale
We can tell when it’s politics being talked about for the solution to a current problem is always whatever it was that the person wanted to do anyway. If the economy’s growing then we must reduce inequality, if the economy is shrinking then we must reduce inequality and when the Sun rises in the east we must reduce inequality.
– Tim Worstall, modestly suggesting we need to sacrifice a few more virgins to the NHS
Whilst I would hardly describe Sweden as a bastion of civil liberty, when one looks at the place in 2020, the justification for a great many things in a great many other nations starts to look increasingly hard to credit.
One might imagine that civil liberties organisations would have something to say about the authoritarian groupthink creeping from the leftist fringes of British politics. But amidst the predictable statements in support of Black Lives Matter it seems Liberty’s central campaign is the possible infringement of rights posed by facial recognition software, rather than the real and present threat to livelihoods and liberty of those with heterodox opinions. Indeed, earlier this year Liberty, Amnesty International UK and Human Rights Watch signed a joint statement arguing that ‘dehumanising discussions and ‘debates’ lead to human rights abuses.’ One wonders how an organisation like Liberty, which claims to ‘challenge injustice, defend freedom and campaign to make sure everyone in the UK is treated fairly’ can fulfil these laudable aims without free and open debate.
– Josephine Bartosch
Take the roiling absurdity outside America since the death of George Floyd. What does the death of a foreigner killed by a foreign policeman in a foreign land say about the state of Britain? The facts of the Home Office’s homicide index are clear enough. Between April 2016 and March 2019, 500 whites, 45 blacks and 38 others were convicted in England and Wales of murdering 583 white victims.
Over the same period, 81 blacks, 11 whites and nine others were convicted of murdering 101 black victims. Roughly 3 per cent of Britons are black. The idea that there is a racial tsunami of murder in this country is monstrous, let alone — “hands up! don’t shoot!” — one waged by our unarmed police. We are being asked to fight against a fantasy.
– The Critic Magazine
Might I suggest people subscribe to this new very high quality magazine, a fine antidote to the debased opinion makers of yore.
Cut off by your gas company for wrongthink? What’s stopping you drilling your own North Sea well?
– Tim Newman, nicely describing why certain strains of libertarian thought are self-defeating.
1. I’m fairly convinced at this point that anything I say can be interpreted as racist and staying silent is also racist.
2. Race, on the other hand, is a terrible idea that the woke children wish to set in stone instead of getting rid of. That’s not to claim that genetic ancestry has no impact on people’s health etc., only that skin color should be no more meaningful than hair color, but expressing such an ideal these days will get you canceled by those who claim to fight bigotry.
3. There is an immense amount of actual racism in the world. Which is not good enough since that can be dealt with, if not easily, at least rationally. So virtual racism is the omnipresent threat the revolution needs.
That makes it all so poignant to me is the people who wrote these things have jobs and do not feel they can speak openly. Anyone who thinks there is no culture war going on is simply wrong.
The college kids thousands of dollars or pounds in debt with a gender studies degree, are the equivalent of the younger sons of Norman lords who were never going to inherit land and had nothing to do but foment rebellion and war
– Ed West
A man in Minneapolis was asphyxiated by a policeman, all the while with bystanders pleading with said cop to let the man breathe. Yes, I know the victim had past convictions and was being arrested as a suspect in another crime, but so what? He was effectively tortured to death in a street, slowly over nine minutes, whilst intermittently begging for his life when he could actually speak. The whole ghastly incident was captured on video by bystanders; an open and shut case of grotesque police brutality, no doubt about that.
This incident soon leads to riots and looting, ‘Antifa’ & other assorted political scavengers and opportunist thugs using this egregious crime as an excuse, and it all kicks off nationwide. At the time of writing, many American neighbourhoods are in the process of being trashed, including many largely black ones (not that it should make any difference whose neighbourhood is being looted and burned). This is an American tragedy, the whole thing, no doubt about that either.
Now we all have differing interests and it is unreasonable to expect everyone else to share our own particular obsessions. I am British, and for all the problems we have in Britain, the police here very rarely kill people. And whilst race relation can be fraught at times, UK lacks the all consuming obsession with race that poisons discourse in the USA, despite constant attempts by advocate of identity politics to import such sensibilities here.
And so, whilst I found this crime appalling, I saw no reason for the death of one man somewhere in the USA to dominate the headlines in Britain, particularly as widespread police brutality in France scarcely gets reported at all. Likewise, police violence in Hong Kong is also greatly underreported (albeit a bit better than official thuggery France). But if all you watch is the BBC, you might be forgiven for thinking the only places violence happens is in America and Palestine.
Being British, goings on in France are of concern to me, what with them being the place I get my claret from and our nearest major neighbour (sorry Ireland, it’s a size thing). Likewise, Britain has long historical links to Hong Kong, given ours was the nation that signed the treaty with China, turning the place over to Peking under the ‘One Nation Two Systems’ doctrine.
Those are my interests. And if you do not share them, well okay.
Then I turn on the stupid screen and behold a large pustule of iPhone wielding bourgeoise leftists gathering in Britain to protest what happened in America (the murder, not the riots, naturally). Do they march on the US Embassy? No, of course not, they assemble in Trafalgar Square and then shamble past Downing Street to scream at the Metropolitan Police, as if the local Plod are culpable for some psycho cop strangling George Floyd to death on the other side of the fuckin’ Atlantic.
Okay, I get it now. This is not really about police brutality in another country, it is a certain sociopolitical ilk of people, tearful that Dom Cummings and Boris don’t give a damn what they want, and bored by the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown. This is about having a nice day out in the sun, emoting their virtue and then posting it on Instagram. Were they chanting for the battered, crippled and dead students in Hong Kong? Do they give a flying fuck about some Gilets Jaunes getting the living shit beaten out of them in France? How about Spanish riot cops putting the boot in to separatists in Barcelona? Nah.
Fine, like I said, we all have our own obsessions, but I hope such folk marching in London, Berlin and Amsterdam understand why I think their public concern for what a man’s murder in Minneapolis represents is daft posturing, basically cosplay.
Then I scroll through Instagram, which for me at least is for pictures of food, cocktails, holiday snaps, cats and fit babes-in-bikinis. How odd, I see a hitherto non-political photographer in France has posted a solid black graphic, a blackout in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter. Sigh. Unfollow.
And a rather fetching model in Prague has done the same, along with an incoherent something something racism platitude. Unfollow. Trendy furniture designer in Dublin whose work I quite like, they have just posted a black square. Unfollow. Italian actress, black square. Unfollow. Unfollow. Unfollow. Unfollow. I have probably unfollowed a hundred people today thus far, not kidding, and the day is still young. Seriously, just fuck off.
Perhaps ironically (or perhaps not), I have not unfollowed a number of commentators on both ‘left’ and ‘right’ who frequently discuss such topics, even though they felt the need to post black squares. It is not the topic itself that annoys me, I have written rather a lot about civil rights myself over the years, it is the sheer fashionable vacuous insincerity of it all.
The Great Unfollowing continues 😐
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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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