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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This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force – officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.
– Roland G. Fryer, Jr
The National Bureau of Economic Research.
H/T, Commentary.
The desperate need of left-wing journalists to see Obama as “pure” and “most successful” — to see him as they’ve reported him instead of how he is — is in part a result of the racial pathology of the left, its tendency to reduce people to their victim group. The notion that “the first black president” has been a failure would be, according to this way of thinking, a nasty slight against a race rather than, what it is, an indictment of bad ideas and their consequences.
– Andrew Klavan
Identity politics is, in my view, one of the great, if not the greatest, scourges of the age. It isn’t an exclusively left-wing phenomenon, either.
A commentator on Breitbart, ‘Rob’, says of the decision by the FBI not to recommend charges relating to alleged violation of the law relating to the use and security of the Secretary’s private email server:
“Until this election, the corruption, coercion, and sleazy backroom deals were just that… backroom. The Clintons… AND Obama… have revealed who they are: criminals. IF in light of this clear abortion of justice this country elects Hillary, the United States DESERVES to collapse and disintegrate just like Rome. Shame on Comey. Shame on Lynch. Shame on Obama. And shame on that sleazy criminal hag Hillary. Disgusting… all of them, and I would love to watch Attorney General Chris Christie put them all in prison next summer.”
As president [Hillary Clinton] wouldn’t merely run off with the White House silver (again) and line her pockets to an extent which would make Ferdinand Marcos blush. She would do real, permanent, damage to the republic, to an extent which neither Trump nor Sanders could match. She’s greedy, evil and dangerous; Trump is merely greedy and Sanders is merely evil.
– Laird, serial commenter in this parish and oft-times wordsmith.
The overall effect of Donald Trump: Bombastic; but you can obviously deal with bombastic people. Occasionally contradicts himself; you can obviously deal with people like that. Has some views that, let’s say, perhaps, most people don’t hold; you can obviously deal with people like that. He can’t be that bad. The American system is designed to limit the power of the president. Nothing that bad is going to happen. He’s going to build a wall. He’s going to fix trade. […] Everything else seems to be up for grabs. Which is fine. Who wants an activist president? Who said we had to have all these presidents who wanted to do things? The best president in history was Calvin fucking Coolidge who did nothing.
I think Trump is going to quickly find he is not able to do much after he builds his wall and fixes trade and that’s fine. He’s going to be a slightly more bombastic Coolidge and I think most people are fairly relaxed about that. But the cultural effect of Donald Trump is going to be marvellous. Donald Trump represents the single greatest threat to the left’s thirty year history of shaming, name-calling, silencing, bullying, nannying, bossing around, the schoolmarmishness of the left: he just blows through it like a juggernaut. He represents an existential threat to the regressives we hate so much because he shows them up for the nonsense that they are. Every time he’s accused of being sexist he either doubles down or shows with evidence why it’s not true. Every time he’s accused of being racist he laughs it off and moves on. Any time he’s accused of any of these things it doesn’t work; it doesn’t affect him. And the media, which is so in hock to these ridiculous liberal social-justice lunacies and platitudes has lost its power to affect how people vote. The power of the American media to shape elections is fucking gone. It’s over.
[…]
Trump has come along at exactly the right moment when people are prepared to vote culturally. And people are prepared to vote for a wacky, outside candidate because they realise that nothing is going to change otherwise. […] The people who are the most angry about Trump are the people who realise that the gravy train just skidded to a halt. There is no more money for you. And why? Very simple: you’re losers. You lost every possible argument with the possible exception of guns and maybe abortion. Everything else you lost. Conservatives are losers. The public is tired of looking at conservative media and conservative politicians and seeing losers.
– Milo Yiannopoulos at UCLA explaining why he thinks a Donald Trump presidency would be a good thing.
The fundamental reason FDA placed the public at greater risk of the health problems that come with smoking traditional cigarette was that it cannot pass up on a chance to expand its power. As the tortured language of the regulation shows, the FDA recognizes that e-cigarettes are safer than cigarettes, but refuses to admit their potential positive consequences. Instead, the agency twists congressional intent in its deadly power grab.
– Jared Meyer
It is worth watching the panel session with Milo Yiannopolous, Stephen Crowder and Christina Hoff Summers at the University of Massechusets.
Of course the event, organised by the Republican Club, is disrupted by heckling lefties who think that the format of a panel session infringes their free speech. And Milo is typically provocative.
But watch out too for very good arguments from Milo and Christina. Milo in particular demonstrates his ability to concisely make powerful, well-reasoned arguments.
That the talk is punctuated by heckling with Milo’s provocative one-liners and Stephen Crowder’s rants just makes it all the more entertaining.
Finally, here’s a quote from Milo that could forecast the end of the PC movement:
This is the year the public starts to see these videos. My college tour is penetrating way outside the media that is usually interested in this stuff. Your parents are going to start pulling you from college if you keep this shit up.
… to keep out the floods of undesirable US celebrities fleeing the USA following a Trump victory.
Just sayin’.
Long before Chavez gained power in Caracas, Sanders expressed support for the suppression of dissent and censorship of the press implemented in his long-favored models of socialist Shangri-La: Cuba and Nicaragua. The Sandinista regime’s restrictions on the independent newspaper La Prensa “makes sense to me” he commented at the time, even as he sparred with Vermont’s Burlington Free Press over his Castro fanboy-ism.
– J.C.Tuccille
I must stay I found this quite interesting!
In short, Harriet Tubman was a black, Republican, gun-toting, veterans’ activist, with ninja-like spy skills and strong Christian beliefs. She probably wouldn’t have an ounce of patience for the obtuse posturing of some of the tenured radicals hanging around Ivy League faculty lounges. But does she deserve a place on our money? Hell yeah.
Fascinating.
Hillary Clinton objectifies women by reducing them to mere body parts:
Mrs Clinton, meanwhile, said that she would win the nomination and unify the party. She gained perhaps her biggest applause of the night for taking on the moderators of this and past Democratic debates.
There had been “not one question about a woman’s right to contraceptive health care”, she said. In spite of attempts in some states to impose limits and “a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, saying women should be punished (for abortions)” it had not been discussed. “It goes to the heart of who we are as women,” she said.
So Secretary Clinton believes that the core of a woman’s identity is decided by her stance regarding contraception or abortion (as if all women had the same stance), or, more limiting yet, decided for her by the stance of her local jurisdiction regarding contraception and abortion. Time was when feminism was about refusing to define women by so-called women’s issues.
While I am on the subject of the decline of feminism, Guardian Clickbait-profiteer Jessica Valenti says in an article for which comments are closed,
I’m tired of having to explain, over and over again, why the tone of the comments under my pieces is indeed sexist
I strongly agree that the Guardian moderators have the right and are right to delete insults and ban those uttering them. When it comes to threats they should contact the police in any case where it appears that the threat might be credible.
But I’ve read many, many Guardian feminist articles and their accompanying comments and observed a few things.
The typical insult thrown at a woman writing online by a male troll is vile by convention. He will either denigrate some aspect of her physical appearance or sexuality, or will call her by the name of a body part. Conventions matter. These insults still hurt because all sides know they are meant to hurt. But looked at objectively, they are meaningless. The things referred to are not actually bad things. I am a woman who writes online and I have had a few such insults. I mentally sent them back to their originators with knobs on, then turned to other matters.
The typical insult thrown at a man writing online by a female troll (the Guardian sub-species of which is usually found writing above the line) is to accuse him of something that, if true, would actually be vile. She will typically call him a “misogynist”, a hater of women. That really is a bad thing to be. Worse still, she might call him a rape-apologist, a rape-enabler, or a would-be rapist. To truly be any of these things is evil. Yet such terms are frequently thrown around very casually at targets who have done no more than act in what the feminst writer sees as a sexist way, behaviour which may even be acknowledged by the writer to be unconscious, or at those who have simply expressed disagreement with her version of feminism.
I’ve had a few of this type of insult too, in the days when I used to comment on the Guardian website using a screen name that did not clearly indicate my gender. They made me far more angry than the body-part type of insult. What did I do to get me called a rape-apologist? I argued that not every claim of rape is true.
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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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