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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I have seen the light. The man who convinced me of the truth of MMT was someone called Daron Medway, who replied to a tweet by Richard Murphy that said,
The government can never run out of money https://youtu.be/2m3BXdkDJYI?si=cjSA5MJ5AcDWkKgJ
Politicians, commentators and journalists all like to claim that the UK government could run out of money, but that is total nonsense. The UK government can always create the money it needs to pay its debts. It is the one and only organisation in the UK that can never, as a result, run out of money.
with this extremely persuasive point:
This is great! I guess I can keep all of mine then?
“Flashback: Harris fumed at Americans for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ before illegal migrants got protections”, Fox News reports:
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris warned Americans not to say “Merry Christmas” until there was permanent status for some illegal immigrants — amid a Trump-era battle over protections for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
“And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas,” she said at a 2017 press conference, a video of which was obtained by Fox News Digital.
Speakers pushed for the passage of the Dream Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors, NBC News reported.
Here is the video and here is the 2017 NBC article to which the article refers.
This clip has got a lot of play because it shows Kamala Harris as a purse-lipped woke puritan. Fair enough, she is one. Even if one completely accepted her point of view that passing the DREAM1 Act was a desirable objective in 2017, why should that not having been done be the thing that made it outrageous for Americans to wish each other “Merry Christmas” until it was done? There were plenty of worse things going on in the world in 2017: wars, famines, natural catastrophes, terrorism, poverty, crime. Why were these miseries not enough to prompt the curtailment of Christmas greetings until they were solved? Nor were these evils limited to the year 2017. So far as I know the DREAM Act has not been passed to this day. So we must assume Kamala Harris has now personally abstained from “speaking Merry Christmas” for six years and seven months and is still saying “How dare you” to anyone else who does it.
Yet in her defence, gestures of self-abnegation as a demonstration of commitment such as Harris made have a long history. In 1601, during the Dutch Revolt, Archduke Albert of Austria was laying siege to Ostend. His wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, declared that she would not change her shift until the city fell2. Since that did not happen until September 1604, her underwear got a bit grubby, giving rise to the colour term “Isabelline”.
Now that’s what I call commitment. If she wants to be taken seriously, Kamala Harris needs to follow the example of Isabella and urge her followers to do likewise.
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1No offence, Yanks, but for introducing the idea of bills or laws whose titles spell out aspirational words, your entire nation deserves to suffer the fate of Ostend.
2This story has been fact-checked to the standard expected of the Guardian or the New York Times.
We rarely comment on current affairs here, but the V-P has made an address to the Nation.
So we are in for a hot summer.
“If I messed up a funny story around my relatives, they would go ‘That’s not how you tell that joke. The prostitute has to be behind the drapes when the wife comes in.’ You went to Duke—that is an unbelievable privilege. I now have an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters degree from Duke University. And if I can figure out a way to use that, I will. I haven’t figured anything out yet. I think it’s pretty much as useful in real life as this outfit I’m wearing. But so what? I’ll take it. My point is we’re embarrassed about things we should be proud of and proud of things we should be embarrassed about.”
– Jerry Seinfeld drops some humorous truth bombs at a college speech.
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.
This is, well, epic: Every Epic Quest.
As you know, the lore demands that every Samizdata post has a political point hidden in it somewhere.
Your quest is to find it.
Why we can’t leave the Houthi’s to shoot at us in peace is completely beyond me.
– the indispensable Zarah Bukake MP echoing nice Mr. Corbyn.
“I stayed up last night… Not so much to welcome the new year, but to make sure the old one leaves…”
– Ben David, in the comments to the previous post.
Still, hope springs eternal in the human breast. 2024, here we come.
Just Stop Oil march gets hijacked by stag-do leaving protesters furious
Video courtesy of the Daily Mail via Instapundit.
The Mail writer reveals an unexpected talent for understatement:
The demonstrators are then seen continuing their march, looking displeased.
For those not following, the woman you saw bearing the sword in today’s proceedings is Penny Mordaunt MP, twice-failed candidate to be leader of the Conservative Party, whose previous peak as a search term on Google Images was when she did a belly flop in a TV diving contest. In 2019 she held the post of Secretary of State for Defence for 85 days. When Boris Johnson became prime minister and promptly fired her, she probably thought her days of exerting the traditional politician’s privilege of being photographed in close proximity to weaponry were over. But having landed the somewhat-ancient office of Lord President of the Council (“Unlike some of the other Great Officers of State, the office of Lord President is not very old”, sneers Wikipedia because it only dates from 1529), she got to carry the king’s sword and at least look capable of chopping off the heads of any enemies of the realm who might try to reach him via her.
Dennis the Peasant had a point. It’s all a bit daft. But I think history shows that when the illogical mess of tradition is stripped away from a people, what they find to replace it is rarely pure reason.
“We are all capable of hypocrisy. When someone says at a party, `I’m a great listener,’ you just know they are going to yak on about themselves for hours.”
– Tim Stanley, Daily Telegraph. (£)
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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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