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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In general, escapism of any sort interferes with cultish indoctrination. Once people start imagining things, they might start imagining alternatives to your totalitarian utopia. Or they might start asking ‘counterfactual’ questions and discover the sheer incoherence of the worldview they had previously accepted by default. There are many features of modern culture (even apparently secular ones) every bit as poisonous as the most all-consuming cults.
Fun is also a reliable indicator that something is deeply wrong: The peasants must have some bit of spare time and energy to themselves which hasn’t been dedicated slavishly to the one true cause.
– Commenter Madrocketsci
Alfie Bown is the author of a book called The Playstation Dreamworld. I mention this so you can avoid it. The blurb says “it argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace a powerful arena for constructing…” oh for fuck’s sake.
In the Guardian, Alfie says that computer games are fueling the rise of the far right. “Far right” has come to mean “people who do not agree with me” and this article is no different. His examples are hilarious. XCOM is right wing because it is about expelling an invading force of “aliens” (extra-terrestrials). All strategy games are right wing because they are about territory acquisition. So, presumably, are Risk and Chess.
One wonders what a left wing game might be like, if these are the criteria. Not much fun, I would think. Ooh, lightbulb: Fun Is Right Wing!
The author does nothing to defend his assertion that games cater to misogynistic desires. This is annoying because I wanted to shoehorn in an interesting video about an interesting game. I will do it anyway. Perhaps violence and territory acquisition in games make the misogyny so obvious as to need no argument.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a good game, but you can not play as a woman. Is it misogynistic? Or is it because being a woman in the middle ages is no fun? An enthusiast who makes interesting videos about life in the middle ages discusses this. He thinks you could make a historically accurate medieval game where you play a woman, but it would be a different game. He briefly discusses how it was rare, not unheard-of for a woman to engage in sword fighting, adding:
It is not to say we don’t like that or encourage it, trust me. Guys have been trying to get girls to play with their toys since the dawn of time. I’ve been trying to teach my wife sword fighting since the day we met, and with only mild success. It is not this exclusive thing that guys don’t want girls to do the things that we enjoy.
What does Alfie think?
the rationale of gaming is to unite pleasurable impulse with political ideology, a process which renders gamers susceptible to discourses that urge people to follow their instincts while also prescribing what those instincts ought to be
What a load of wank. Why do the left struggle with plain English? I think what he means is that because games are often about stuff like killing bad guys and acquiring resources, they make you think a lot about that sort of thing when you should be thinking about how to be nicer to poor people. And since some people he does not like have been known to play games he dreams up some complicated nonsense about how one causes the other.
The reality is that gamers do not care about politics while they are playing games. Games are escapist. Alfie Bown’s evidence includes Gamergate, which was above all else about keeping politics out of games. Games are meant to be fun, and a lot of games are about blowing stuff up and acquiring resources because that is fun.
Key to the party’s operations in Australia is collapsing the categories of Chinese Communist Party, China, and the Chinese people into a single organic whole—until the point where the party can be dropped from polite conversation altogether. The conflation means that critics of the party’s activities can be readily caricatured and attacked as anti-China, anti-Chinese, and Sinophobic—labels that polarize and kill productive conversation. And it is only a short logical step to claim all ethnic Chinese people as “sons and daughters of the motherland,” regardless of citizenship.
– John Garnaut
“Versed in issues of social justice”? Oh? What if students protested against abortion? What if they protested in favor of gun rights? Or what if their social activism included mission trips with their church? Would these things hurt their Yale applications? I am certain that any student who wanted to get into Yale, and thereby join the American elite, would do well not to mention any non-progressive activism. The gatekeepers know the kind of people they want, and do not want. The message they are sending is coming through loud and clear.
Just two glimpses into how the culture and institutions of the elite Left make Trump voters…
– Rod Dreher
It’s clear that the wet Tory establishment is not keen on Jacob Rees-Mogg. On the surface that appears to be because he holds robust views that are at odds with theirs: he’s an actual Conservative, and they are, of course, anything but. But I wonder if there’s a deeper fear there as well: do they worry that if Rees-Mogg becomes leader then the party will slip out of their grasp in the way that Labour was taken over by hard-left, Momentum commies?
– Hector Drummond
Raskolnikov, the main character in “Crime and Punishment,” is not much of a role model.
But not to worry, because nobody whines about how literature has led them into ax-murdering or body dysmorphia or about how poorly the page represents reality.
They save those accusations for movies and TV.
– Amy Alkon
Recent reports only help raising more questions, and eyebrows, as a staggering 87% of Venezuelans are reportedly now under the poverty stats. When it comes to food, 6 out of 10 lost an average of 11 pounds of body mass in 2017, not for fitness purposes (don’t go getting any ideas, NHS, Corbyn) and 9 out of 10 are unable to afford daily food.
– Tamiris Loureiro
In North Korea they jail entire families because of one person’s alleged crime. Outside of North Korea we simply mob people with problematic parents on social media and get them fired.
– Damian Penny
What’s interesting about this Florida school shooting is that events are revealing themselves in such a way that not even the most statist of gun controlling media types are able to spin the narrative to their ends. The old adage that “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away”… well, that’s a pithy line, and it hits home. It also assumes that the police are minutes away. Not in this case. In fact, the police were seconds away, yet they didn’t intervene. In Parkland, it wasn’t that the state couldn’t protect you – no, it could have. Actually, the state wouldn’t protect you. You were on your own.
What message should the ordinary citizen take away from this? That it is clear and painfully obvious they need to protect themselves.
Best justification for the 2nd Amendment in my lifetime at least.
– James Waterton
There are really only two types of people: those who want to win in competition, and those who would prefer to shut competition down. The former are the strivers and entrepreneurs; the latter the monopolists and cronies. Philosophically, which are you?
– Arthur Brooks, for context follow the link.
The word baizuo is, according to political scientist Zhang Chenchen, a Chinese word that ridicules Western “liberal elites”. He further defined the word “baizuo” with the definition “People who only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”. The term has also been used to refer to perceived double standards of the Western media, such as the alleged bias on reporting about Islamist attacks in Xinjiang.
The use of the word “Baizuo” could be an insult on the Chinese Internet.
– Wikipedia
Noted 😀
Over the past 100 years, women have gained so much. Unlike those in 1918, we can vote, work, live independently, divorce, have sex without getting pregnant; we are free agents. Yet too much of contemporary feminism and mainstream politics seem determined to row back some of these hard-won freedoms. To mark the centenary of votes for women, prime minister Theresa May promised to make it illegal to intimidate politicians. She was largely spurred on to this by female politicians’ complaints in recent years that they face abuse online. In the name of ‘protecting women’, May is seriously threatening our right to protest against powerful people.
– Ella Whelan
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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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