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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“Which is it? Do you want to occupy the public space to express your dissent and invoke your absolute right to speak? Or do you want to beat on anyone who then exists in that same space and invokes their absolute right to document it?”
– a tweet from David Simon referring to a video posted by Logan Schiciano with the accompanying text “Unfortunately some protesters at Northwestern’s newly-formed encampment weren’t too thrilled with us reporting” in which a masked protester assaults the person filming them.
Remember the “Occupy” movement? The Occupy Paradox is this: “Upon what basis can an Occupy protest ask someone to leave?”
… because “This is private property” or any other version of “You have no right to be here” are open to some fairly obvious ripostes.
“We were here first” – “Er, not quite first. The actual owners of the space were there before you.”
“We are the 99%” – “We’re poorer than you, you middle class ****-ers”
“We represent the 99%” – “Who voted for you, then?”
“We are the official accredited Occupiers” – “We refuse to be defined by your oppressive structures, and hereby declare ourselves to be Occupying this Occupation!”
I only really cemented in my head which of those Billionaires Having Something To Do With the Internet Elon Musk was in February 2018, when he sent his Tesla Roadster into space. I loved him for that, but fell out of love a few months later over Musk’s behaviour towards Vernon Unsworth. Since then, my regard for Mr Musk has crept up again. It’s nice having freedom of speech on the internet back. I now – and I do know how sad this is – follow him on Xitter or whatever it’s called these days.
In contrast, I have been reading about Dominic Frisby on Samizdata as an financial writer, economist, film-maker, singer and comedian since early 2014.
Elon Musk has finally caught up with us.
… here it is on BitChute, just in case they take the final step and delete it 😉
The Guardian is all a-froth because the Garrick Club, one of the historic gentlemen’s clubs of London, is still, well, a club for gentlemen as opposed to ladies.
In response, the Telegraph’s William Sitwell advocates for freedom of association:
“All-male members’ clubs reflect our natural tribal desires – get over it or get your own”.
… that central charge of archaic, sexist exclusion is nonsense. First because of the idea that there is something wrong with men wanting to be in the company of other men.
It is possible to be a decent male member of society – who champions equal opportunities in the workplace, changes nappies, generally strives to be a domestic god and is (joyfully) surrounded by women and small children at home – and, at the same time, enjoy a lunch with the boys. In the same way that others might want to hang out at the golf club, or in the snooker room. Or similarly how members of the LGBTQ+ community might wish to hang out in a club or bar or pub with their folk, or players in an all-female hockey team might wish to spend an evening with each other sipping champagne in a hot tub.
Humans are tribal, gravitating towards those whom they look, act, feel and sound like. But that is not incongruous with supporting positive discrimination in society, promoting the visualisation of minorities in fashion or policing or politics.
For the values that represent you formally are not necessarily jettisoned when you’re having fun. Which is what clubs are for.
Douglas Young gives us a review of Jimmy Failla’s Cancel Culture Dictionary
Jimmy Failla’s Cancel Culture Dictionary: An A to Z Guide to Winning the War on Fun is a remarkably well-reasoned, witty, and surprisingly serious takedown of cancel culture. The book defines it, explains how it came about, profiles its tactics and contradictions, demolishes its arguments, and shows how to successfully push back against this dangerous assault on our freedom of expression since, as Failla sees it, “If speech ain’t free, neither are we.”
Echoing books last year from fellow anti-woke comics Kat Timpf, Greg Gutfeld, and Tyrus, Failla’s thesis is that “we need to stop appeasing the censorship brigades because they keep narrowing the lanes in which we can enjoy ourselves.” Indeed, “we absolutely need to get back to a time when the world knew the difference between a joke and a hate crime. Because any society that can’t take a joke is destined to become one.”
Superbly organized with subjects grouped alphabetically, the book quickly pinpoints the forces abetting the rise of cancel culture. A major one is iPhones, leaving Failla nostalgic for growing up in the 1980s when “the only one who spent all day obsessing about their phone was E.T.”
Of course, iPhones are merely a means to the narcotic of social media which “has created a world where what you say is way more important than the things you do. Empathy has become a brand instead of an actual character trait.” Furthermore, “social media made it trendy to look at ourselves as victims and blame society for all of your shortcomings.”
The rise of this cult of victimhood has armed the censorship warriors with a hyper-sensitivity to the remotest possibility of a slight. In fact, “a world that champions victimhood… [h]as taught way too many people to look for things to get offended by instead of living their lives in search of joy.”
So, while many years earlier comedienne Roseanne Barr got away with trashing the national anthem and satirically wearing a Nazi uniform, by 2018 a social media mob got ABC to cancel her TV series over a single ugly tweet about Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. In fact, standup comics now face fake fans armed with iPhones “to get attention for calling a joke out as offensive” by unleashing it on social media with no context to try to destroy a career.
Failla further contends that helicopter parenting germinated a generation of completely coddled children convinced they should be protected from ever hearing anything they dislike. Couple this with the Left’s equating words with violence and you have an ideal climate for a cancel culture mob to be generated by a single upsetting statement or even word.
All this toxic brew bubbled over when the Left’s nightmare candidate was elected president in 2016 “after breaking every social media rule there was.” Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House so shocked and enraged progressives that they became unhinged in their fanatical drive to destroy anyone deemed an enemy.
Failla is particularly perceptive about the sad, empty lives manning the cancel culture brigades who he sees as a misfit gang that is dangerously angry, bored, and narcissistic:
an online rage mob that knows nothing about you, save for the fact that they want to destroy your existence in the name of getting likes and showing the world they know better. That’s cancel culture in a nutshell. A collection of people who wake up every day looking for something to get offended by so they can leverage their victimhood into your firing and their clout. The trend has become so prevalent in society that scientists have a word for people who do this: they’re called losers.
Failla is convinced this lonely lot cares nothing about whatever issue happens to be trending on social media that day. It is only interested in cheap virtue-signalling and scoring the “digital dopamine” that comes with “destroy[ing] anyone who achieves something in showbiz that they themselves couldn’t dream of pulling off.”
Recalling Kat Timpf’s You Can’t Joke About That, Failla chronicles what is likely the worst trait of “the outrage mob,” a merciless bloodlust to ruin lives for a typically trivial verbal faux pas because, “whenever somebody says something dumb, online prosecutors always recommend the career death penalty.” This is not only grossly disproportionate, but “losing one’s job the first time you say something stupid isn’t a great strategy for any of us to endorse in the long run, given how flawed we all happen to be.” More ominously, “If someone is so devoid of nuance and empathy that they’re willing to destroy your livelihood for one step out of bounds, do you really think they won’t be on board with jailing you for it someday down the road?”
→ Continue reading: Savvy and Witty: a review of Jimmy Failla’s ‘Cancel Culture Dictionary’
The captain of the Australian women’s football team, Sam Kerr, is awaiting trial in the UK on a charge of “racially aggravated harassment” for allegedly calling a London police officer a “stupid white bastard”.
Craig Foster, a prominent former player for the Australian national team, the Socceroos, intially said that Kerr should resign if convicted, because racism is bad.
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“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.”
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“Craig Foster apologises to Sam Kerr after arguing her alleged remark to UK police officer was racist”, reports the Guardian.
Foster last week urged Football Australia to strip Kerr of the Matildas captaincy if the allegation was proven, to make a stand against racism. He said: “Interpersonal racism against a white person … is still racism.”
But on Saturday he explained that he had changed his mind.
“Like many, I mistakenly thought that comments that referenced any colour and were discriminatory, demeaning or hostile were a form of racism. I apologise to Sam for that mistake,” Foster wrote on X.
“Judging from the coverage, comments and conversations we’re all having, every day, there were major gaps in knowledge about how to deal with situations where the descriptor ‘white’ is used in a derogatory way.
“As many experts and leading anti-racism groups have pointed out, interpersonal comments can be offensive, abusive or inappropriate, however, racism can only be perpetrated against a marginalised person or group, which anti-racism frameworks are specifically designed to protect.”
Four points:
1) Anyone believe Craig Foster’s claim that he thought calling someone a “white bastard” was racist until “experts and leading anti-racism groups” told him otherwise? His apology was so obviously made under pressure that it came across almost as parody.
2) Calling someone a “white bastard” is racist. Obviously.
3) Calling someone a “white bastard” is not “racially aggravated harassment”. It was just words. It must be annoying being a cop and having people insult you quite often, but the only difference between this and a thousand other drunken outbursts is that the presence of the word “white” enabled the cop concerned to slap a ridiculous charge on Kerr.
4) I have a low opinion of the conduct of all of Sam Kerr, Craig Foster and the police officer.
I have long been of the opinion that Google’s old motto was merely lacking in the proper punctuation. Whenever a Google employee thought, “Should I do the right thing?”, they looked to the company motto for their answer: “Don’t. Be Evil.”
– Anon
Are you ever tempted to give the mainstream media the benefit of the doubt? After all, in many areas of life cockup is more probable than conspiracy. I can sympathise with a journalist who is told to get 500 words out about an unfamiliar subject in twenty minutes and then gets it wrong or omits important details. One must also bear in mind that many Guardian journalists, for instance, still get their news from the Guardian. Similar naivety famously led the Independent and many other newspapers worldwide to claim on the day that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted that the three men he shot were black. As pointed out by Glenn Greenwald in that tweet, all these people had “reporting on current events” in their job description, but had evidently never even glanced at the TV footage of a trial watched by millions. However they were almost certainly deceived rather than deceiving. They would not have chosen to look so stupid.
See, I am capable of sympathy. Then along comes something to remind me that though many in the MSM are merely gullible and lazy, many others put a lot of conscious, careful effort into what they do.
Here is a Guardian report by Gloria Oladipo about a church shooting in the US: “Shooter at Joel Osteen church bought weapon legally despite history of mental illness”
→ Continue reading: Suppressing inconvenient facts requires skill and hard work
“The feminist double standard was born. Women could invade men’s spaces, but men could not do the reverse. Girls could play for the boys’ high school soccer team if they were good enough, but boys could not play on the girls.’”
Wanjiru Njoya is correct, and the point is general. Defend the rights of others as you would defend your own rights. Because you are defending your own rights.
While the desire on the part of modern conservatives to divorce themselves from ‘neoliberalism’ is understandable enough, the simple truth is that there is a very good and obvious reason why parties on the economic left tend towards being left on culture, too.
And it is simply this: a State which minutely governs the economy is one which minutely governs society as a whole, because economy and society are not in fact separate phenomena, but an integrated whole. This means that if the State is big vis-a-vis the economy, it is going to be big in all areas – and it is going to want to squash or co-opt competing sources of loyalty and authority (like the family, religious and community groups, businesses, etc.) which the right holds dear accordingly.
The truth of the matter, then, is that conservatives and libertarians both fundamentally need the same thing (a small state) and that the ‘left on the economy and right on culture’ meme is just that: a slogan without a genuine cause.
– David McGrogan
The Tory failure is, as Helen Joyce mordantly details, spiritual too. The care of souls is what Trans extremists have squarely set themselves at, and this Tory government has, in law and administration alike, conceded to them. Penny Mordaunt, Maria Miller and Caroline Nokes head a very long list of Tory MPs who have not just done the bidding of Stonewall et al, they have cheered them on and denounced their critics.
– The Critic Editorial
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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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