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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“So too is the Tory party a tragic paradox. It is led by a professional optimist, but weighed down with an almost superstitious pessimism, as commentators prophesy a shift in the “natural political cycle”. It believes in individual free will, but has surrendered to the apocalyptic terrors of climate change, and the inevitability of welfarism in an ageing society. It is repulsed by radicalism, but champions Net Zero and draconian lockdowns to stay in vogue with certain voters.”
– Sherelle Jacobs.. She is writing in the Daily Telegraph (£).
“We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality.”
– Johns Hopkins University, in a recent overview of the impact of lockdowns in handling COVID-19. JH is not some sort of fringe group. Big cheese billionaires such as Michael Bloomberg give oodles of their money to the place. Its standing as a place for medical research is very high.
In the very early days of covid, when information was only starting to come out and when some of the figures looked horrible, lockdowns for a few weeks might have been defensible, much as how one reacts often swiftly to a threat and learns to dial down the reaction later as more data comes in. But that didn’t happen, and in part because of a dangerous inertia, a manipulation of sentiment, and even the idea in some minds that locking down whole populations for months on end might be a quite good thing in its own right. The trashing of the Swedish approach, the demonisation of the Great Barrington Declaration, are all part of this.
Apologies: Link now fixed.
“The pandemic tempted governments and their elite allies to treat citizens as passive objects to be dictated to, bullied and coerced en masse—an attitude not unlike that found in China, Cuba and North Korea—instead of as active thinking subjects with whom government is in partnership. With few exceptions (the Nordic countries are the best examples), governments failed to find ways to affirm that despite the pandemic, citizens were still individuals imbued with inalienable rights and independent moral standing. This is, after all, how most people see themselves in modern society—as free autonomous beings rather than as laboratory rats in a series of social science experiments.”
– Arthur Herman, writing in the Wall Street Journal ($). Herman is the author of excellent books about the Scotland’s contributions to the world, the Royal Navy, and philosophy.
Not only is it impossible to find the climate change satire in Mr. McKay’s movie that he claims is there. Alas, there’s no market for parodying the aspects most in need of parody. Millions of us have grown too comfortable pronouncing ourselves passionate about a problem we don’t bother to understand. Our politicians have stopped asking whether policies advanced in the name of climate change (e.g., electric cars) would actually have an effect on climate change. A certain kind of Harvard left-winger won’t countenance any proposal that doesn’t also fight capitalism, racism and patriarchy. A cadre of scientists make a profession of believing whatever the media needs them to believe. They are easily recognized because they employ the modifier “existential” for a climate problem that doesn’t actually threaten human existence. In this sense, “Don’t Look Up” fails not on its own terms, but on the terms its director foists on it, because no movie would be brave enough to take on the shibboleths that have subsumed the climate debate.
– Holman W Jenkins Jnr, Wall Street Journal ($) He is referring to the Netflix film Don’t Look Up.
Contemporary experience and history demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that virtually all parents in a free society will take full responsibility for the education of their children (in varying degrees, of course) in the same way that they care for the physical health of their children. Contrast that with a society that does not respect and protect individual rights in the name of a universal “right” to an education. The result is a society that is both immoral and unjust and that also fails to educate most children on a daily basis. We should not be surprised that a moral and just system leads to good results while an immoral and unjust system leads to bad results.
The conclusion before us is now obvious. A free, moral, and just society is one in which all individuals shall have the right and shall assume the responsibility for educating their own children.
– C Bradley Thompson, on his Redneck Intellectual column, via Substack. The article I link to can be read here. Thompson is the author of America’s Revolutionary Mind, which is an excellent study, and a reminder of what a remarkable thing the Revolution in that country was, and of the intellectual and cultural antecedents of said. He also appeared on this interesting podcast about education issues.
“Political correctness is a moral atrocity and an infallible symptom of social and cultural rot, in essence, of a reluctance to confront reality and a manifestation of the unholy terror of plain honesty. It instils a fear in ordinary folk of calling things by their right names, of speaking truth, of even of telling jokes that might offend some sensitive soul or of uttering something that seems to violate yet another in a burgeoning tally of social taboos. The result is that a culture that hides from itself cannot expect to hide from its enemies. And America, probably the most litigious country on the planet, is in the grip of this mortal disease.”
– David Solway, Notes From a Derelict Culture, page 228.
“It is not simply scandalous that civil servants and advisers had fun while none of us could; it is scandalous that they were the ones who imposed those rules on us and are yet to apologise for them.”
– Marie Le Conte
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
– Martin Luther King, another of those dangerous, probably anti-social individualists who thought people’s moral agency and capacity for self-responsibility was more important than their skin colour.
Today is Martin Luther King Day in the US, for those outside the US who weren’t aware.
“Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.”
– Matt Ridley
For some time it has been one of those views that acquire the status of conventional wisdom that our politics has gone through a period of “re-alignment” and people don’t really divide on whether they are for a small State versus a Big State any more. For example, Stephen Davies at the UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs has been arguing that the divisions over Brexit, for example, have driven a 10-ton lorry through old divisions that have been in place for decades. I have heard Dr Davies make this argument many times.
It seems quite persuasive, although even when I first heard it I wondered how it will fit with issues such as Net Zero. All those “Red Wall” voters in the North and Midlands who shifted from Labour to the Conservatives did not seem all down with the idea of being forced to buy electric cars, install expensive heat pumps, and all the rest. Economics, in other words, still seems to count for quite a lot in framing political allegiance. The pandemic and the lockdowns reinforced how there are those who do very well out of Statist controls of lives, and those who don’t. While not always mapping along conventional party lines, Covid has again reminded us that economics is a big deal (which is all the more reason why it is appalling that the UK government has paid so little heed to it until relatively late.)
Anyway, I thought of these points when reading the daily CapX roundup of articles today, including this excellent item by Kristian Niemietz, also of the IEA and a colleague of Dr Davies:
It is a commonly held view that ‘socialism vs capitalism’ was yesteryear’s divide, while ‘woke vs unwoke’ is where the action is now: pronouns are the new tax rates, and cancellation is the new nationalisation.
The problem with this argument is that it is only true on one side of that divide, namely, the ‘un-woke’ or ‘anti-woke’ side. The opponents of Wokeness do indeed tend to get far more animated about the latest Culture War shenanigans than by the latest economic policy announcements. They also find it easy to form loose coalitions over a shared cultural outlook with people with whom they disagree on economic issues. (For example, a left-wing critic of Cancel Culture can easily get a piece published in a centre-right publication.)
But it would be a huge mistake to assume that something similar must be true on the other side of that divide, i.e. that on the progressive Left, woke identity politics has somehow crowded out socialist economics. Quite the opposite is true. It is hard to think of a prominent woke culture warrior who is not also a committed anti-capitalist.
This makes sense to me. I have noticed quite a few cases of people on the “right” almost sighing with joy at finding “un-woke” lefties with whom to hang out, seeing them as converts. Up to a point, Lord Copper. A person who has subscribed to Big Government views all their lives, but who has a nasty experience of being attacked for views on, say, transgender rights (JK Rowling comes to mind), does not therefore suddenly become a champion of classical liberalism, individual liberty and capitalism. Of course, their being bullied by advocates of Critical Race Theory or whatever might make them stop to reflect on whether some of their ideas on other subjects were also mistaken, but in all the recent jousting that has gone on, I haven’t come across many examples of socialists who have abandoned socialism, possibly apart from US personality Dave Rubin.
“Meeting people is part of the education. Online is great but not for everything.”
– Academic and writer Tyler Cowen, going out on a limb.
“The data show that from 2000 to 2021, the number of global weather and climate disasters declined by about 10%, which is very good news and completely contrary to conventional wisdom.”
– Roger Pielke Jr
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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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