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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The Irish government would have us believe that the most destructive riot in Dublin in living memory was not a symptom of failed governance, but the result of an ideological fringe group going on a looting spree. That is a suspiciously convenient narrative for the powers that be, for it absolves them of all responsibility for losing control of the city. By fingering a Far Right fringe, public officials can wash their hands of any role they themselves may have played in bringing the city to the brink of anarchy.
But blaming these riots on the “far right” only serves as an excuse for not engaging in serious reflection about the deeper causes of this incendiary atmosphere, and the ensuing events. These events did not come out of nowhere and cannot be simplistically reduced to the work of a fringe “far right” mob. “Far right” talk is an excuse for not thinking hard about what led up to this and how public authorities lost control of Dublin’s city centre.
– David Thunder
The sad thing is that the character of the Doctor used to represent a distinctively British kind of amateur anti-authoritarianism. He took on the might of the Daleks with the equivalent of a screwdriver and a well-worn scarf. Now he surrenders to the pronoun police without so much as a quibble.
– Malcolm Clark
The Soviet Union collapsed when the lies of the ruling class were so obvious they became laughable. The liberal world order – with the ‘religion of peace’, ‘woman with a penis’ ‘effective vaccines’ and ‘17 months to save the planet’ is at the joke stage.
– ‘Polish Housewife‘
The story goes that Frank Lloyd Wright was once summoned to testify in a lawsuit. When he took the witness stand, a lawyer asked what his occupation was. He answered, “I am the world’s greatest architect.” Afterwards, his embarrassed wife told him he should be more modest. “You forget,” he replied. “I was under oath.”
– Timothy Sandefur, from his article: Frank Lloyd Wright: Rebel Architect.
The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.
― Thucydides
What is happening in London cannot be laid solely at the feet of the anti-Israel protest movement. The poison of identitarianism must assume the bulk of the blame for the cultural dismemberment of society. We have a mayor who constantly preaches difference over unity. We have a Metropolitan Police so paralysed by fear of being called racist that they make endless excuses for anti-Semitic demonstrators. And we have a national broadcaster that refuses to call Hamas terrorists, while happily instructing non-white children that they are under the yoke of ‘white privilege’.
We are confronted with a choice right now. We can continue pushing children into silos of racial and religious hatred. Or we can start forging a society free of identity politics which aims to bring people of all backgrounds together. I know which path the London of my childhood would choose.
– Ike Ijeh
But we can and should go further than that. We all know there’s a vast amount of investment happening in this going green stuff. Maybe that’s a good idea, maybe not, that’s for another day. But the point of what is being done is to address an externality – those environmental damages, costs of emissions, which do not show up in prices and therefore are, again, not in GDP. So, we solve those externalities – and maybe we should! – and we create green jobs while doing so.
Cool. So, now we have the same output – say a GW of ‘leccie, even a GWhr – with the same value as before but we’ve used more human labour to produce it – those green jobs that the energy transition creates. By definition productivity has declined. Again, by definition productivity has declined.
– Tim Worstall
We are so far down the slippery slope of “having not been allowed to speak the truth about science because it must be subsumed to ideology” that re-entry into any sort of objective assessment is going to be incredibly jarring.
The foundations of modern technocracy are invalid and if your stock in trade has, for decades, perhaps centuries, lain in deriving authority and influence from peddling uncriticizable frameworks to induce others (and perhaps yourself) to inhabit hallucinations. this return to reality poses grave threat to currently ascendant political & ideological power bases.
This, of course, dovetails right into the heart of the omnipresent octopus of the government industrial censorship complex, the other group deeply insistent on getting to be the one who decides what’s true and what may be spoken. it too fears unmoderated content perhaps above all else as unfettered facts are technocratic kryptonite.
– El Gato Malo
The COVID enquiry has been policy based evidence making
– Gawain Towler
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is a bit like having a department tasked with increasing alcohol consumption and sobriety.
– Commenter Bell Curve, over a beer or three.
Tony Blair is a political virtuoso, whatever one thinks of his policies or ideas, and he stated the position very clearly. The 21st century is not a battle between capitalism and socialism. It is one between progress – that is, liberal progress – and conservatism. It follows that anybody who describes themselves as a ‘liberal conservative’ is sleeping with the enemy – or very badly confused.
[…]
Liberalism, fascism, and communism are all in essence justifications for a mode of rule which is fundamentally ‘princely’: all are predicated on the idea that the population is in some way benighted or corrupted and incapable of simply being left to its own devices, and therefore that government’s task is to reform it from the ground up (and indeed, that this is the basic narrative of History).
Against this stands conservatism, which alone among political philosophies holds that it is not that the people are benighted or corrupted when left to their own devices, but in fact that it is they who are the true repository of virtue. Goodness inheres not in the State, but in the familial, social, communal and religious institutions which people naturally create, and naturally congregate towards, and it is through embedding oneself within these institutions that one is made truly free – in the sense not of being free from ties, but in the sense of being free to realise one’s true potential. This does not exactly mean that there is no need for the State to exist at all, because man is fallen and there is a requirement for laws to be enforced and the people to be protected. But it means that the justification for the existence of the State derives from its reflecting, and preserving, the social norms of society, and its capacity to preserve that society’s way of life in a stable and secure way across time.
– David McGrogan, in a virtuoso article There is no such thing as liberal conservatism
What happened over the weekend is that every single media outlet in the country went into overdrive to say that Braverman’s comments are fuelling the “far right”. If you’re not entirely clued up on British political designations, in this country the far right generally refers to people who:
– are racist and intolerant towards other ethnic and religious groups
– harbour prejudice against sexual minorities
– consider women inferior to men and treat them as second-class citizens
– use violence to achieve their political objectives and incite violence in public
In other words, the “far right” have been on British streets for weeks chanting genocidal slogans, calling for Jihad and saying things like “death to all the Jews” and “Hitler knew how to deal with these people”.
But that is, of course, not who the media mean when they talk about the “far right”. What they mean is a small number of football fans who like to get pissed and get into scuffles with the police. When these people did turn up, this was immediately taken as evidence that Braverman had incited a riot. Because if there’s one thing we know about football hooligans it’s that they all have a subscription to the Times and take inspiration from powerful brown women.
– Konstantin Kisin (£)
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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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