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]

“The progressive moment is over”

A good article by “The Liberal Patriot”, Ruy Teixeira: “The Progressive Moment is Over”. The four main points he addresses to his fellow Democrats are:

1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it.

Twenty-two years ago, alongside John B. Judis, Mr Teixeira was one of the co-authors of a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, which itself was inspired by a book written in 1969 by Kevin Phillips called “The Emerging Republican Majority”. Judging by the popular vote in US elections over the last two decades, Mr Teixeira wasn’t wrong, but all such theses have an expiry date. I would not care to place a bet on who will win the coming US election in eight days’ time, nor on the next one, but I would place a bet on the winners of the 2028 election not being progressives.

Samizdata quote of the day – …and that would be bad

‘We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.’

J.K. Rowling puts the boot in.

why does ‘diverse’ content spark backlash now when it didn’t before?

Several people have asked: why does ‘diverse’ content spark backlash now when it didn’t before?

I think it comes down to one thing: removal.

In the past, inclusionary moves didn’t try to clear out the previously enjoyed things. Kim Possible did not replace James Bond, she was just another secret agent you could watch alongside James Bond. In video games, serious action girls existed alongside miniskirted vixens, and everyone was fine with that. Avatar: The Last Airbender existed alongside Teen Titans. The Hunger Games existed alongside Harry Potter or Percy Jackson.

But now, the priority seems to be not addition, but subtraction.

It’s not enough to have a new Jedi; you have to remove the old ones. It’s not enough to have a female super-spy; you have to remove James Bond. It’s not enough to have serious action girls in your video game; you have to cover up or delete the vixens. It’s not enough to have new video games with modern sensibilities; you have to remove the old ones, or censor them in re-releases. It’s not enough to have new novels that fit modern ideological priorities; you have to censor the old ones.

Rawle Nyanzi, writing on TwitterX. I think he absolutely nails a key driver behind increasing radicalisation in the culture war.

Is libertarianism relevant?

Twenty years ago it was simple: to any problem, freedom was the answer. But in recent years I have become less sanguine. Some might say I have grown up. Still, I have this uneasy feeling that Western societies are beset with problems and that freedom is not always the answer.

I thought what I would do was to write down the biggest problems facing us here in Britain, write down the libertarian approach and assess in a blog post if it would be successful or not. Well, like many of my big ideas that soon ran into the buffers of indolence. But I did manage to identify what I think are the biggest problems – or crises as I call them – that we face. They are (in approximate order of importance):

    1. The Freedom of Speech Crisis. Cancel culture, de-banking, lawfare and actual punishment are being used to prevent people from expressing their opinions. Much of this is being done in the nominally private sector. If this continues the results will be disastrous.

    2. The Integration Crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people live in this country and have no affection for its people or its customs and more are coming every day. This is a recipe for an Ulster on the grand scale.

    3. The Debt Crisis. Government spending is unsustainable. Mind you, I was thinking that 15 years ago.

    4. The Housing Crisis. Young people cannot afford a home where they can bring up children.

    5. The Net Zero Crisis. OK, this hasn’t happened yet but when the electricity goes off, modern society will come to a halt.

    6. The Ukraine Crisis. Well, you can add in Israel, Taiwan and probably a few other places too. The West is under military attack by people who would like to see it destroyed.

    7. The NHS Crisis. Long waits for poor care and indifferent service.

There are a couple that tend to get mentioned regularly that I haven’t included. The Migration Crisis is really part of the Integration Crisis and part of the Housing Crisis. Wokery is part of the Integration Crisis (again) and also part of the Freedom of Speech Crisis.

People occasionally mention the Population Crisis – not enough babies being born. I tend to think this is either not a problem at all (the market will sort it out) or something that is beyond politics.

Is there anything I’ve missed? Do libertarians have the answer?

Am I Racist?

This is hilarious 😀

As fascism descends over Europe, one hope remains

“The far right can’t take away our hopes and memories. Culture is our weapon” writes Milo Rau in the Guardian:

Because all three of the values underpinning the revolution – liberty, fraternity and equality – are now disappearing into thin air in Europe, the birthplace of democracy.

And the political changes seem irreversible: In seven European democracies, far-right parties have entered government, and in several more states, including France, they are pushing at the gates of power. Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia and, of course, Russia, have quasi-autocratic governments. Last Sunday the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ), a party that even the conservative media describe as “radical rightwing”, won a general election for the first time. They campaigned on the slogan “Fortress Austria”, in effect advocating an ethnically and culturally cleansed country. The term is reminiscent of “Fortress Europe” – a phrase favoured by Goebbels.

The FPÖ manifesto calls for “two genders” to be enshrined in the constitution, “remigration” to be radically implemented and for the creation of a two-tier society in which only “real” Austrians are entitled to social benefits. In the words of the FPÖ, it wants to “gain full power over government, space and people”.

“Ethnically cleansed” … “Goebbels” … “full power over government, space and people” … With the mad courage of despair, in the next sentence Mr Rau gets down to specifics about what form this onrushing horror will take:

In the area of cultural policy, it wants to follow the example of neighbouring Hungary and Slovakia and cut public subsidies for “woke events”, such as the Eurovision song contest

I wasn’t expecting that.

and the Vienna festival, which I am the director of.

Ah, now I understand.

In the eyes of the FPÖ, “woke” is presumably anything that is not brass band music, operetta or Germanic-pop schlager music.

In doing so, it is politicising a trend that has been apparent throughout Europe for many years: I remember in 2019, when I was still artistic director of the NTGent in Belgium, we demonstrated against the Flemish region’s budget cuts. The process of allocating subsidies was akin to distributing scarce food after a natural disaster: institutions and independent companies were thrown together into a pool that had far too little money at its disposal.

In neoliberal fashion, the actual problem – namely, insufficient subsidies for the arts – was translated into a competitive conflict.

From what I have read about the FPÖ, it does seem that the party’s “far right” label has more substance behind it than is usual, but the party “cutting cultural budgets on the grounds that they are not economically viable” does not contribute to my having that opinion. Mr Rau seems to think that that the disbursement of government subsidies being a political matter, taxpayer money being treated as a finite resource, and subsidy-funded arts organisations actually having to compete with each other all constitute outrages against the natural order.

Samizdata quote of the day – socialists always seek to destroy civil society

Leftists weaponise these so-called ‘local identities’ by trying to emphasise their supposed distance from other ‘local identities’ in England. In the process of doing this, they (if only tacitly) also try to decrease the distance of these ‘local identities’, and indeed Britain as a whole, from genuinely foreign cultures: ‘a Cockney, a Brummie, and a Pakistani; all totally unique, but all Very British in their own way.’ An alternative, though slightly different, formulation of this strategy can be found in the attempt by left-wing Welsh nationalists to completely distance ‘Welsh’ from ‘English’, while readily accepting people into ‘Welshness’, no questions asked, with zero connection — ancestral or otherwise — to the British Isles as a whole. It is telling that one of the favourite pastimes of these socialist deviants is to have ethnic minorities put on a performance for them, getting them to memorise a few words of their funny language, entertaining the Welshmen while also stroking their egos. This is quite obviously unethical behaviour, although no-one has called them out for it yet.

Pimlico Journal

The strange case of the gender-fluid dachshund

“Cambridgeshire council admits to discrimination after a woman was labelled transphobic for criticism of a ‘gender-fluid’ dachshund”, reports the Telegraph, with relish.

Tim Sigsworth’s report says that:

A lesbian social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled.

Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender-critical views at a meeting of the authority’s LGBT+ employee group.

She had disagreed with a male colleague who claimed his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog to provoke “debate about gender” in January 2023.

Ms Pitt, 62, was formally disciplined by management after complaints were made accusing her of making “non-inclusive and transphobic” remarks.

However, the council later admitted liability for direct discrimination on the grounds of her beliefs.

I am glad that Ms Pitt won her case, but how did we get to a state of affairs where a county council actually believed that one of their employees taking a less than respectful view of another employee putting a dress on his wee dog and declaring it to be “gender-fluid” had had a “detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being of the complainants”?

When I read this account, I was surprised to find out that it happened as late as January 2023. Poor old Cambridgeshire County Council, puffing to keep up with trends that more with-it London bodies like the Royal Academy of Arts dropped in 2021. But the greater question is how and why this particular form of absurdity swept round the developed world so quickly. The wave is receding now, less quickly than it arose, but still very fast in historical terms. The “dropped in 2021” link describes how the Royal Academy of Arts abruptly withdrew the work of the textile artist Jess de Wahls from sale in its gift shop because she said “humans can not change sex”. After bad publicity, it backtracked. There is a certain irony about the way that progressive artists such as Ms de Wahls (“Her work is part of a movement to depict vagina and vulva in art”) spent their whole lives changing cultural norms with such success that their vulva-themed embroideries ended up in the Royal Academy gift shop, a development which might have surprised Sir Joshua Reynolds, only to see the wind change against them in an instant. Why did that particular memo go around in 2020? It wasn’t directly related to Black Lives Matter, but maybe that movement had something to do with it.

“Swiss colonial exploitation”

I have just returned from a holiday in Switzerland, where I often go to do deplorable things. While visiting a country, I try to keep an eye on which news stories are trending there. The almighty algorithm has observed my interest in things Swiss and even after my return keeps sending stories from the “swissinfo.ch” website my way. I am sure you can guess what it was about the following story that struck me as odd:

Swiss colonial exploitation highlighted by National Museum

Switzerland’s colonial history is the focus of an exhibition at the National Museum in Zurich. Based on new research, it looks at the country’s role in colonialism and slavery, and considers its legacy today.

If it were not for the way that every museum in the Western world has scrubbed out and re-written the labels on its displays to be “anti-colonialist”, I might consider this exhibition to be a welcome corrective. The Swiss are an admirable people, but they do have a slight tendency to think that their neutrality and their benign absence from the indexes of history books are entirely the results of virtue rather than geography. As the exhibition points out, many Swiss were happy to profit from slavery. Then I read further:

It [the exhibition] tells the story of businessmen who took part in the transatlantic slave trade or made their fortunes trading in colonial commodities and exploiting enslaved populations. In particular, the exhibition presents the whips and handcuffs used on slaves on coffee and cocoa plantations in Ghana, which enabled Swiss businessmen to make their fortunes.

It also tells the story of people who traveled the globe as missionaries or left Switzerland to found settlements and exploit territories considered uninhabited.

Why are traders in colonial commodities, missionaries and migrants lumped in with slavers, as if trading with other peoples, trying to persuade them to believe in the same things you do, or moving to a place you thought was uninhabited were evils in themselves?

It looks to me as if this exhibition is less about telling the stories of the forgotten victims of Swiss oppressors than about classifying the Swiss as an oppressor people, or, to be more exact, about making sure the Swiss know that little things like never having had any colonies are not enough to acquit them of being members of a colonialist race.

*

Related post: “N star star star star, not N star star star star star”.

Entryism Wars

In the comments of Disparu’s video responding to a journalist on the subject of the failure of the Star Wars TV series The Acolyte, commentariopolitico1014 writes:

These people act as if they purchased a famous and profitable steak house chain, show up wearing “Beef is Murder’ t-shirts, change the menu to vegan, and now are complaining that all customers are gone and leaving 1/2 stars!

Williamlitsch5506 replies:

I think that this is exactly what they are doing, on purpose. A vegan doesn’t buy a steakhouse by accident. They do it with the intent to punish and admonish steak eaters. They do it because they don’t want to build a vegan restaurant accross the street and compete for who has the best lifestyle. They want to top-down smash the competition and other lifestyles using money and power. They don’t want to compete in the marketplace of ideas. They don’t want to tolerate the existence of alternative lifestyles. They have high religiosity, belong to a powerful cult, and have no principled opposition to authoritarianism. They believe they are better than you, but know they can’t compete.

All institutions are vulnerable to this. In entertainment, at least, market forces limit it. In open source software, projects can be forked. In politics, the threat is far more subtle and difficult to defend against.

Samizdata quote of the day – Hamas’ culpability

We are witnessing a kind of unwitting absolution of Hamas. It seems the West’s cultural elite, drunk on woke, can only interpret this war through the warping prism of identity politics. So ‘white’ Israel is seen as the only true, conscious actor in the war, while ‘brown’ Hamas are the victims, or at least hapless players whose actions are not worth dwelling on for long. In this twisted vision, Israel acts, Palestine is acted upon – even though it was Hamas’s acting upon Israel on 7 October that started the entire thing. It’s time to stop blaming Israel for everything. It’s time to talk about Hamas’s culpability. It’s time to give evil its due.

Brendan O’Neill

Reader discretion is advised

I have given this BBC story the “Health & Medical” tag due to its description of traumatic events:

‘Trauma’ as Pride flags vandalised for fifth time

Pride flags vandalised for the fifth time in north-east London have left residents “traumatised”, a local LGBTQ+ organisation says.

The flags, which are on the pavement near Forest Gate railway station, were covered with white paint on Monday.

They were also vandalised on 9 March, as well as on 23 and 26 June and 19 July.

Rob DesRoches, founder of Forest Gayte Pride, external, said the organisation would work with Newham Council to repair or replace the flags, adding: “We feel that people have been traumatised by the repeated vandalism, which needs to be sorted out now. The healing process needs to take place.”

The Metropolitan Police previously said it was treating the vandalism as a homophobic and transphobic hate crime.

I send my good wishes for the progress of this deeply necessary “healing process” to the traumatised people of Forest Gate, especially to the approximately 25% of them who are Muslim. Despite my view that we would all be better off if there were no such thing as public property, I do not approve of individuals taking it upon themselves to inflict criminal damage on public property. But the line taken by the left since the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston is that it is fine to destroy street furniture of which you disapprove. So – anyone taking odds on how long it lasts till next time?