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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O’Doherty unintentionally summed up the real problem with this judgement. That is, that private businesses should never have to offer ‘justification’ for discriminating – not to the state, the Equality Commission, or anyone else. Just because you run a bakery, that doesn’t mean the state gets to intervene in your matters of conscience. What’s more, this case is not clear-cut. While Lee claimed he was discriminated against on the basis of his sexual orientation, McArthur insists that Ashers refused to make the cake because of the message on it, not the sexual preference of the customer.
Now, many people said that Ashers should have made the cake because it offers a public service. But this simply isn’t true. It is a private business. There is an enormous difference between discrimination by public services, which are run by the state, and private businesses, which are run by individuals. Public services must be freely accessible to all. But private individuals must be free to run their businesses according to their own moral judgement.
– Luke Gittos
I received the following e-mail from Airbnb:
The Airbnb Community Commitment
Hi,
Earlier this year, we launched a comprehensive effort to fight bias and discrimination in the Airbnb community. As a result of this effort, we’re asking everyone to agree to a Community Commitment beginning November 1, 2016. Agreeing to this commitment will affect your use of Airbnb, so we wanted to give you a heads up about it.
What is the Community Commitment?
You commit to treat everyone—regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias.
How do I accept the commitment?
On or after November 1, we’ll show you the commitment when you log in to or open the Airbnb website, mobile or tablet app and we’ll automatically ask you to accept.
What if I decline the commitment?
If you decline the commitment, you won’t be able to host or book using Airbnb, and you have the option to cancel your account. Once your account is canceled, future booked trips will be canceled. You will still be able to browse Airbnb but you won’t be able to book any reservations or host any guests.
What if I have feedback about the commitment?
We welcome your feedback about the Community Commitment and all of our nondiscrimination efforts. Feel free to read more about the commitment. You can also reach out to us at allbelong@airbnb.com.
The Airbnb Team
I have added emphasis to the words religion, gender identity and judgment as they particularly leapt out at me. So I am being told by Airbnb that I must not judge someone based on a prescribed list of things, some simply matters of genetics or location, but others being ideas someone has chosen to believe or adopt, which is a very different category to race for example. This is the first time I have ever had a company or indeed anyone ask me to sign an agreement to interact socially in a certain manner as a precondition to doing business, or they will cancel any existing bookings I might have in their system and prevent me from making any in the future. Well that is their prerogative of course, but does anyone else find this utterly bizarre?
Now I have travelled to a great many places on this planet over the years (well, not by Michael Jennings standards perhaps, but most would say I was very well travelled). I am also a straight white atheist who thinks all religion is arrant nonsense. And yet I have stayed in hotels, motels, yurts, boats and b&bs owned by Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Animists, Homosexuals, Heterosexuals, and goodness knows Whateversexuals, and never once had any problems due to the owner’s religious beliefs or personal peccadilloes, because I am really a very tolerant person. And yet none of the proprietors have required me to sign an agreement not to ‘judge’ their religion or what they do in bed, so such topics really never came up, which is just as well because when I am asked what I think, I typically say what I think (unless the person is pointing a gun at me).
But if a hotel ever sent me a confirmation e-mail for a booking and included a rider stating: “as a precondition of this booking, please confirm that you will not judge our religious beliefs…” or perhaps “as a precondition of this booking, please confirm that you will not show bias against my demands to be called Doris even though I have a beard and a baritone voice…” well my terse reply would be: “Cancel reservation”. Yet this has never actually happened, because most people who run hotels or B&Bs are just not that stupid. Perhaps making such demands does not seem like unhinged behaviour at Airbnb HQ in San Francisco, but that is indeed how it strikes me.
And so even though I have never once in my entire life had a problem renting a room anywhere in the world, I will be closing my Airbnb account, deleting their app, and telling Airbnb to get stuffed for their sheer effrontery and presumptuousness.
Lacan’s collected Écrits, published in 1966, were one of the sources drawn upon by the student revolutionaries in May 1968. Thirty-four volumes of his seminars followed, published by his disciples and subsequently translated into English, or at least into a language that resembles English as closely as the original resembles French. The influence of these seminars is one of the deep mysteries of modern intellectual life. Their garbled regurgitation of theories that Lacan neither explored nor understood is, for sheer intellectual effrontery, without parallel in recent literature. Unexplained technicalities, excerpted from set theory, particle physics, linguistics, topology, and whatever else might seem to confer power on the wizard who conjures with them, are used to prove such spectacular theorems as that the erectile penis in bourgeois conditions is equal to the square root of minus one or that you do not (until worked on by Lacan) “ex-sist.”
– Roger Scruton on Slavoj Žižek, a man who has raised complete gibberish to an art form.
Anyway, my point is that it was the dissatisfaction of a large number of people with the mainstream media’s coverage of a major global event that drove the growth of blogging, both in the US and Britain. We are now in a period where people’s dissatisfaction with the mainstream media is plumbing new depths as it behaves abominably over issues such as the US election, immigration, and a whole load of others which people care deeply about. Twitter and Facebook have already shown they are prepared to censor unwelcome opinions, which has left more than a few people voiceless (at least until Gab picks up and develops a smartphone app.). Indeed, I’ve always been surprised how many bloggers – who had full control of their own hosting platform and content – switched to Twitter, where they had none of the former and now, we discover, not so much of the latter either. The beauty of blogging for me was always that I run the site and its content is wholly mine and subject to nobody’s approval. There is no “report inappropriate content” on this blog.
This period in the runup to the US Presidential Election is starting to feel a lot like the spring of 2003: plenty of angry voices and a feeling nobody is listening. If Trump loses, the opposite side will try to silence them. One way of making themselves heard is via a blog, leading me to believe that we might see a renaissance of blogging in 2017.
Either way, I’ll still be here. Hopefully.
– Tim Newman, very accurately describing what caused the blogosphere to appear seemingly ab nihilo, and why similar conditions of widespread alienation may well be coming into alignment to cause a new media surge tide once again, perhaps this time ab Milo.
I am not a huge fan of twitter but sometimes it is a good place to get a sober heads up on breaking show biz stories…
Elfwick is a genius.
Steven DenBeste, who ran a blog called USS Clueless back in the early days when we were all known as “warblogs”, has pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del and gone to the great blogroll in the sky. Steven and I often agreed on things, for he was certainly not an ‘idiotarian’, but we often crossed swords as well. Like me he was an atheist but nevertheless, Godspeed Good Sir, you were part of the social media New Wave before anyone called it social media.
Why is the Prime Minister not being dragged over the coals for this? Whilst she and Boris Johnson blather on, the fur is flying practically under their noses! How can Her Majesty’s Government be trusted to manage Brexit and national security if they cannot prevent employees at the very heart of government from acting like soccer hooligans?
John Oliver seems to do extremely well out of telling sophisticated, educated Europeans and Democrat-voting Americans how thick Americans are. But he’s preaching to the converted: they’re not laughing because he’s funny, they’re laughing because he is telling them what they want to hear and allows them to feel smugly superior. A decent joke shouldn’t depend on who you want to win an election.
– Tim Newman
Oh yeah. I was going to tag this post as ‘humour’ (not being a ‘u’ starved American) but I decided not to 😛
I was looking an article by Louise Mensch over on Heatstreet in which she mentions “being hacked by Russia” and I was a bit surprised to see some dyspepsia on display. Why? In spite of the many nice anti-Putin remarks, a great many sidebar “news feeds” off Heatstreet lead to Sputnik News, a Putin-fetishist Russian state propaganda site, which has always made me very suspicious. So maybe the boys at 55 Savushkina Street have been told she has finally gone too far off the reservation by supporting Hillary Clinton in spite of the friendly feeds 😛 I admit that Louise Mensch reminds me far too much of Arianna Huffington (but with way better legs) for me to ever really trust her.
I find this headline bizarre as clearly the Labour Party has been working tirelessly on the subject of anti-Semitism, so much so that they have moved support for anti-Semitism into the mainstream (sometimes under the guise of ‘anti-Zionism’ but increasingly Labourites are not even bothering with that fig-leaf). In my opinion the last thing we need is the Labour Party doing even more on anti-Semitism! 😉
950 years ago today in 1066, after arriving in England a few days earlier, my ‘migrant’ ancestors rode up Senlac Hill to introduce themselves to the waiting locals 😀
“I say, chaps! Will you be voting IN or OUT today?”
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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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