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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Something horrible flits across the background in scenes from Afghanistan, scuttling out of sight. There it is, a brief blue or black flash, a grotesque Scream 1, 2 and 3 personified – a woman. The top-to-toe burka, with its sinister, airless little grille, is more than an instrument of persecution, it is a public tarring and feathering of female sexuality. It transforms any woman into an object of defilement too untouchably disgusting to be seen. It is a garment of lurid sexual suggestiveness: what rampant desire and desirability lurks and leers beneath its dark mysteries? In its objectifying of women, it turns them into cowering creatures demanding and expecting violence and victimisation. Forget cultural sensibilities.
– Before you click on this link to see who wrote this about burqa-clad women, take a guess…
That’s really what is annoying [Mark Thompson, CEO of the New York Times]. He’s got a newsroom with 1,000 or more people turning out perhaps one, possibly two, pieces each a week. All to impeccable journalistic standards as to process and near no diversity of viewpoint nor thought at all. Then along come some bunch of teenage scribblers, some of them even without Masters degree in journalism, producing stuff that people actually want to read. How Very Dare They?
– Tim Worstall
I have never seen so many lefties attacking a Labour leader. And I have never seen so many grass roots Tories attacking a Tory leader. It is a bizarre race to the bottom in which who wins the next election will be based on which despised leader least nauseates their own side.
– Perry de Havilland
And then there’s that rather larger point that if the censor gets to decide what can appear on Facebook then what about claims in the wider media? The opinion pages of all newspapers carry pieces which at least some, on any particular point, will claim is fake including – oft with respect to Oliver Kamm – the use of and and/or or. That a genetic male claiming they are female is correct or not? Which answer – no they ain’t, only if they have surgery or whatever they say – is fake news or not?
To give anyone the power to decide upon fake news on any part of the media is to give the same prodnoses and authoritarians the power to censor it all.
Well, except the Guardian, obviously – “It accuses them of profiting” – if you’ve not made a profit in a decade then you can’t be accused of that now, can you?
– Tim Worstall
Now, on top of all of that, if some Muslim goes ahead and dares to criticize her religion, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, you also see a lot of liberals turn against her. I have my political differences with Ayaan, but really, if someone is rejecting Islam because she likes liberal Enlightenment values, because she believes in gender equality and human rights and freedom of speech, then you’d like your Western counterparts to support her. But often they don’t. When Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses, which was his right to do, many liberals just shunned him.
– Ali Rizvi
Since nasty, backward British voters cannot be trusted to believe in or vote for the right things, we need human rights imposed on us at a European level, so that present and future UK governments could not dial back certain rights or entitlements even if they wanted to. This is predicated on the belief that democracy, popular will, should not trump everything, which is actually a perfectly reasonable position – any good constitution should have checks and balances built in to it in order to prevent the passion of the moment finding its way onto the statute books without due discussion, diligence and consideration of the rights of dissenting minorities.
But the academic Left’s naive approach assumes that the EU will always be a force for the kind of socially progressive agenda that its academics seek to champion. By defending a structure which permanently paints the UK as the authoritarian bad guy and the EU as the right-dispensing good guys, it provides no defence in the event that the EU flips and takes a less expansive view of human rights than is currently the case. And this is more than a theoretical, irrelevant supposition – with the rise of populists and authoritarians throughout Europe, a time may eventually come when some decidedly illiberal policies flow down from Brussels. And what defence would Britain then have, given that the Left trust European voters and politicians over British people to be the final arbiter of rights and freedoms in the UK?
Thus, at best this “resist Brexit to preserve women’s rights” movement is guilty of exceptionally short-term, two-dimensional, narrow thinking in which the policy thought most likely to guarantee certain rights and entitlements today is mistakenly held as the optimal policy for the longer-term, and at worst it is as contemptuous of women as it is of democracy itself.
– Samuel Hooper
As Mr Monbiot put it in Wednesday’s article, he believes that “… the ultra-rich [have] learned how to buy the political system.” If this were true, what would we expect to observe? For example, would the share of aggregate income tax paid by the highest one percent of earners have increased or decreased? (It has increased.) Would government spending on state schools, to which the ultra-rich rarely send their children, have increased or decreased? (It has increased.) Would Remainers or Leavers have won the Brexit referendum? (Leavers won.)
These look like disconfirmations of Mr Monbiotis hypothesis. He does not bother to explain them away, being apparently unconcerned by consistency with observed facts. Nevertheless, I am sure he could if he tried. This is not because his hypothesis that the ultra-rich have bought the political system is true, but because it is merely a slogan. It has no testable implications. It does not answer to reality in the way that scientific hypotheses do. It is, thus, what Popper deemed pseudo-science.
– Jamie Whyte
Jeremy Corbyn and his party of enablers have mainstreamed anti-Semitism in Britain in ways Oswald Mosley could only dream about, so I hope the Brownshirt Left will understand why their grimaces and posturing about ‘extremism’ might not be awfully credible
– Perry de Havilland, referring to this.
Agatha offers sage advice to another worthy:
I think you should undertake a single-handed voyage around the world. I know you have no experience of sailing, but that’s never stopped you taking on other jobs. Just think of the advantages. It would put a tan on that pasty pudgy face. It would take you out of circulation for a year, which would do wonders for your reputation and the quality of your newspaper. You could easily get sponsorship from some of your Russian friends, and announce you’re doing it unpaid for charity, maybe the Clinton Foundation? Go on, do it!
Oh boy, who can this person be?
As Mr O’Toole says it doesn’t need a majority just enough people that are prepared to use intimidation, at which point I look at Antifa and their habit of turning up to peaceful events masked and almost in uniform to make sure that those events aren’t peaceful. To see who’s using intimidation to suppress opinion and freedom of association we need to point the camera in the opposite direction to where Mr O’Toole would have us look. We’re seeing that tricky step of people getting used to extreme cruelty and violence with the readiness that people took to “punch a Nazi”. Which rapidly became “punch anyone that looks a bit like a Nazi” and then “punch anyone we disagree with”. Which groups are being dehumanised and widely portrayed as a threat, depends on which reel you’re watchdog from the one side it’s numerous protected minorities particularly those of certain faith which cannot be criticised, from the other side the threat is the racist proles that votes for Brexit, like the football and are starting to become interested in politics.
– Anonymong
Imagine that we did have some arbiter of what was true, what was not. Then the definition of truth will be whatever the consensus is, wouldn’t it? Something which might well benefit those who agree with that status quo in beliefs but does rather militate against the basic ideas of either free speech or a free press.
Yes, of course, actual free speech and press is messy, chaotic and not as many would like. But that’s rather the point, so is liberty those three things. Trying to limit that press and speech will be a constraint upon that liberty too.
– Tim Worstall
Dear “Shrill Voice,”
This is difficult. Normally I tell has-beens and never-has-beens (and you seem to be both) to rake in the loot and live comfortably. But you’ve already done that. Clearly domestic political office is out because nobody likes losers. And you couldn’t win international office because all the countries you bombed would vote against you. Clearly, you have to make some Hard Choices.
Why not trade on the fact that you are not the most loved and respected person in the world? License virtual reality game arenas named after you in which contestants would face 100 avatars of you in various settings and have to kill as many as possible. This would be incredibly popular, and players would readily pay $100 a game, with the money going, of course, to the “charity” of your choice.
Hmmm, I wonder who Aunt Agatha is referring to? 😉
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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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