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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Bouattia argues that a ‘Eurocentric’ curriculum is problematic because BME students ‘don’t see themselves in what they’re studying, and can’t relate to it’. According to her, any body of knowledge produced solely by white people is inaccessible to BME students. Presumably, this includes the plays of Shakespeare; the ancient literature of Suetonius, Tacitus and Plutarch; the political economy of Adam Smith and Karl Marx; and the science of Pythagoras, Archimedes, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.
BME students cannot relate to these classical authors, she says. But there would be no point in BME students going to university if they refused to learn anything that didn’t relate to their immediate lived experience. If it were applied, Bouattia’s approach to education would limit the potential aspirations of BME students, leaving them without access to the necessary historical, philosophical and intellectual grounding they need to develop as thinkers.
– Courtney Hamilton
My lack of enthusiasm for Theresa May is long on record, so there were no real surprises for me in her typically Blairite speech. But I am very happy is was poorly received (and predictably so).
Mrs May’s speech was the opposite of pragmatic. We call on the Prime Minister to abandon her ideological attachment to interventionist economic policies, look at the evidence, and accept that it tells us that markets, not the state, are the solution to our problems.
– Sam Bowman
Never forget that May opposed Brexit and has been consistently terrible on pretty much every issue. But once we are out of the EU (and realistically long before then, as the underpinning assumption on all sides of the spectrum have now shifted to trying to shape the post-EU realities), there is one less massive Brussels-sized shield between the British state and the people who wish to roll it back, compared to the situation on June 22nd of this year. The battle we won over Brexit was not the end, it was merely the end of the beginning. It was essential so that we can now fight on a battlefield where the arrows we shoot rain down on our real enemies, the ones in Westminster. And sooner rather than later, one of those arrows needs to end up in Theresa May’s eye, ideally whilst the disarranged Labour Party is still lead by an unelectable anti-Semitic Worzel Gummidge clone.
I admit I LOL’ed when I saw this 😀 What else could go wrong, I wonder?
Of course, those left-wingers, Labourite or otherwise, fingered as anti-Semitic never think of themselves as such. They’re anti-Zionist, they say. It’s the Israeli state they’re opposed to, not Jews as a whole. Yet the distinction rarely holds up, not least because their opposition to Israel, indeed the obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is so overdetermined. It’s not born of some actual, let alone vested, interest in this one particular conflict out of all the other conflicts in the world. No, it’s fuelled by their opposition to what Israel represents – its nation-building futurity, its embrace of liberal capitalism, its sheer modern-ness. And ultimately, that image of Israel, as the exemplar of capitalist modernity, both feeds into and draws on what anti-Semitism has always held Jewry to represent: the moneyed power behind the throne, and the source of the world’s problems.
– Tim Black
I was at the UN general assembly in New York the other day and talking to the foreign minister of another country. I won’t say which one, since I must preserve my reputation for diplomacy. But let’s just say they have an economy about the size of Australia (though getting smaller, alas), plenty of snow, nuclear missiles, balalaikas, oligarchs, leader who strips to the waist… you get the picture.
– Boris Johnson, in fine form as usual 😀
The concepts that we need to grasp here are folk marxism, oikophobia and conservatism by proxy.
Most modern leftists haven’t read a line of Marx. But his odious creed has passed down to them in a diluted form in which people are to be divided onto groups and all relationships are to seen as being between oppressor and oppressed. Needless to say that the oppressed are always noble and the oppressors all evil. This gives us identitarian politics.
Oikophobia then comes into play, as the leftists see their own culture as an oppressor culture.
Another symptom of leftist thinking since the time of that scoundrel Rousseau is the admiration of the noble savage which I call ‘conservatism by proxy’. This has a religious element in that it is often given voice by those tiresome people who’d never go near a church in their own countries, but will wax lyrical about the ‘spirituality’ of monks in Cambodia, Laos or some God-forsaken place like that. In Australia the modern leftist’s conservatism by proxy is usually satisfied by the simple expedient of admiring Aboriginal culture because: “It has been around for 40,000 years.”
Thus do lefties satisfy their need to admire tradition and obtain the joy that conservatism brings, without suffering the awful fate of having to be labelled ‘conservative.’
Add to these three, the zero sum fallacy view of the economy, the inability to understand the distinction between speech and deed or between ought and is and you have a good summary of the neuroses and intellectual bigotries of many leftists.
– Peter from Oz
This is a comment I saw on Sp!ked that I thought was right on the money (reproduced with a few typos corrected).
We are trying out a plug-in that lets people edit their comments on Samizdata for five minutes after posting them… no more eye watering typos, right? This is just an experiment to see if this causes anything else to break.
Liberty, Guns, Beer & Totty.
The desired end-state
Finally it all makes perfect sense.
Hurrah! The struggle for the leadership of the Nationalsozialistische Britisch Arbeiterpartei has been won by Jeremy Corbyn, and the re-branding as the Party of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists is now complete! I look forward to reading of this momentous moment in the Great Leader’s memoirs, which I assume will be titled “My Struggle”. Our friends from Hamas and Hezbollah are thought to be very happy with this outcome, as well they should.
But what is that sound I hear off in the distance? Gunfire? Has the revolution started already? Ah, no, it is the pop of champagne corks coming from 4 Matthew Parker Street in London!
Update: strangely not everyone is happy 😉
I just heard, on the telly, the leader of the Lib Dems repeat his support for a return by Britain to the EU. Other Lib Dems on the same show are echoing him. The Empire Loyalists of our time. They’ll attract a small lump of enthusiasts, who will spend the rest of their lives insisting that they were right to oppose Brexit. And everyone else will watch and say: so what? Even most of those who voted Remain themselves. Regret is not a policy.
– Brian Micklethwait
This was too perfect not to warrant a little post of its own.
Let’s be clear: No deal is better than a bad deal.
– Richard Tice, discussing Brexit.
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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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