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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Then do we give them back their freedom? Not at all. Then we move the goalposts, making freedom conditional on more and more people getting the vaccine. Until we make it to so-called ‘Freedom Day’, a month later than originally planned, and Boris Johnson chooses then to tell young people that their freedom to do the things they enjoy will be dependent on receiving a vaccine.
A vaccine that uses experimental technology and was rushed through trials without waiting for the full safety data (trials which will never now conclude as the control groups have been vaccinated). A vaccine, or rather vaccines, which the authorities now acknowledge increase the risk of dangerous blood clotting and heart conditions, particularly in younger people. Vaccines for which there are now more reports of fatalities in the U.S. than all other vaccines put together for the past 30 years.
– Will Jones writing about The Great Betrayal
The path from…
“All we want is to be free to love”
to…
“Bake the cake or go to jail, motherfcker!”
is becoming quicker and more direct.
– staghounds
[Overheard on a train in UK]
Passenger 1: “Have you seen what’s happening in South Africa? The authorities have let order completely break down. It’s getting so bad even BBC is starting to show coverage.”
Passenger 2: “Yeah, it’s terrible, Natal is starting to look like Portland.
This is quite interesting, Tucker Carlson reading Darryl Cooper’s thread on twitter.
Same video on YouTube if you have technical issues. But it is unwise to rely on YouTube for entirely political reasons, hence the BitChute upload ‘just in case’.
I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you… that the communist BLM organisation supports the Communist Cuban government’s repression of protests.
At least her blasphemy law would be religiously inclusive. She namechecked Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Ram, Buddha and Guru Nanak as some figures whose dignity should also be protected, concluding: ‘When striking the careful balance to protect such emotional harms, can there and should there be a hierarchy of sentiments?’
So there we have it – a British MP in 2021 wondering out loud if people should be punished for disrespecting gods, messiahs, gurus and prophets. It goes without saying that if Shah were ever to succeed in this, it would be curtains for free speech any more than it already is: free speech was, after all, built on the right to blaspheme.
– Tom Slater
Some governments have also set up detention centres for international travellers entering into their countries, where they are forced to quarantine at their own expense while they wait for the results of their covid-19 tests. Shockingly, in early June 2021, the provincial government in Ontario, Canada, went so far as to announce that residents in long-term care homes would soon be permitted to engage in “close physical contact, including handholding” and “brief hugs” with visitors when both parties are fully immunized.
Unfortunately, instead of criticizing this state of affairs, the mainstream media and major social media platforms are fully on board. They have turned out to be willing collaborators of the governments in these matters by glorifying their oppressive and punitive measures, censuring critical viewpoints, and fostering a culture of surveillance, all while spreading fear. They have also been ceaselessly promoting the injection of experimental vaccines as the only solution that will bring totalitarian lockdown measures to an end.
– Birsen Filip
Yet in many ways, Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world, albeit in an unexpected form: in the worldview of those progressives who typically see “proto-fascism” lurking on the Right.
Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.
Indeed, Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet.
– Joel Kotkin
Democracy is this thing over here. Civil liberty is this other thing over here. They’re both desirable – as are apple pie and ice cream – but they are different things.
[…]
To get confused between these two ideas is to get close to ensuring that we achieve neither. Sure, we want democracy so we can throw the bastards out. We also want to have areas of life that simply cannot be affected by whoever is in power – those civil liberties and rights.
– Tim Worstall writing ‘If you confuse Democracy with Civil Liberty you’ll end up with neither‘.
Of course, none of this stopped the 40,000 England fans at Wembley on Tuesday evening. The popular “Ten German Bombers” might have been banned by the FA, but the fans sang it anyway. So too endless renditions of “Three Lions” and “Sweet Caroline”, without even a modicum of social distancing.
[…]
On Tuesday evening, after the match, I quietly celebrated Mass in church, without singing. While at prayer, we were being enthusiastically serenaded by the celebrations of a very different kind of communion in the pub over the road. I concede, given that our church was flattened by the Luftwaffe on the first night of the Blitz, I was not all that horrified at the thought of the RAF shooting down German bombers. No, the irritating thing about it was more visceral: others were allowed to sing while we were being silenced.
– Giles Fraser
I’m a boring trad Tory middle England bloke with a wife, two annoying kiddies, a cat that can’t be arsed to chase mice and a dog that eats the post. But when I read Chris Whitty was being hounded by activists, instead of being shocked and going tsk, tsk, my first thought was: good. I hope you were afraid, just like you made us afraid.
But then I thought about it. I’m a nominal Christian after all. Is that really the way to make things better? Is this ever the right thing to do?
And the conclusion I’ve come to is yes. Yes it is. Until people with authority & power feel their own lives & sense of security will take a turn for the worse as a consequence of them messing up so many other people’s lives, nothing will change, at least not for the better. I don’t wear a mask anymore, anywhere, and I just ignore the half hearted bloke on the door telling me to. I’m done. I visit my family whenever I want because I’m done. I am so utterly done with this madness. I’m at the point things kicking off ugly would be a relief because that way the bad things are going in two directions and not just one.
I want this to be just disobedience but I’m up whatever at this point.
– John Collier
No longer about health. Canada will prevent groups from gathering in order to stop the spread of ‘unauthorized information’.
The point has been reached where this has to be resisted ‘by every and any means necessary’.
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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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