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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In response to the lockdown Sir Desmond Swayne said his initial reaction was “despair”, adding: “These are difficult decisions but that doesn’t alter the fact that it’s the wrong decision. More people will die in the long run.”
An MP since 1997, and former PPS to David Cameron, Swayne says he’s definitely voting against the lockdown and points to the fact that when he asked Matt Hancock two weeks ago what evidence he had of excess deaths above the long term average in recent weeks, the Health Secretary said there wasn’t any. Swayne says: “Every year thousands of people are carried off as a result of the flu but we don’t run around like headless chickens.”
Another MP who says he’s voting against the new lockdown is the MP for Bolton West Chris Green. Green resigned as a Ministerial Aide in early October over the Coronavirus restrictions, saying at the time that the “attempted cure is worse than the disease”. Since then he hasn’t changed his mind and says a lockdown now “only pushes the problem into the New Year when another similar lockdown will be imposed.”
– David Scullion
“The Soviet Union (also Mao’s China, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela) have proved that central planning is impossible. Even something as simple as corn. To grow corn, you just plant seeds in fertile soil, and wait. Yet every country that attempted to centrally plan it, has starved.”
– Keith Weiner, who runs a precious metals investments business, based in Scottsdale, Arizona. He’s become a friend, and a fount of good sense on issues such as money and central banking. Check out his blog.
When Samuel Paty was decapitated in the street in broad daylight for trying to teach his students a civics lesson, the New York Times ran with the woefully misleading headline “French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street”. The attack — in which the assassin who had just cut someone’s head off was shot by gendarmes — was awkwardly framed through the lens of liberal America’s anxieties over police violence, and it didn’t get much better from there.
– Liam Duffy
When I ventured to criticise them in a BBC interview for acting beyond their powers I received a letter from the Derbyshire police commissioner objecting to my remarks on the ground that in a crisis such things were necessary. The implication was that in a crisis the police were entitled to do whatever they thought fit, without being unduly concerned about their legal powers. That is my definition of a police state.
– Lord Sumption
“If anti-state fanatics have been calling the shots for decades, why is the federal government bigger today than it was 40 years ago?”
– Oliver Wiseman, writing a review of a book that alleges that most of our problems today were caused by free market think tanks and intellectuals. Wiseman is, rightly, dismissive of the book’s central claim.
The idea that someone’s skin colour should determine their politics stems from a reactionary, patronising attitude towards non-white people. It ends up producing the grim spectacle of white people telling black people what they are allowed to think. Indentitarian activists are all for empowering black people – right up until they disagree with them.
– Spiked
We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.
– Joe Biden, October 24th 2020
People react to discrediting evidence not by acknowledging reality but by entrenching their beliefs even further. This counter-productive thinking is further exacerbated by ‘cognitive dissonance’, another Festinger theory. When confronted with evidence disproving their beliefs, people will opt for the least painful choice, holding on to their beliefs, no matter how catastrophic these are, rather than admitting they have been wrong. Our political class – the Government – is currently providing a textbook example of this behaviour.
– Karen Harradine
Yes, yes, of course the World Economic Forum are dingbats. But the point is that if we’re forced to pay for the BBC at gunpoint – yes, try escaping from jail after you’ve not paid the licence fee and it does come down to that in the end – so that they can educate and elucidate for us could we, just possibly, see a bit more of that educating an elucidating? Like, reminding us that the WEF are dingbats?
– Tim Worstall
The point of “public service obligations” were because costs were high and bandwidth was limited. Broadcasters, especially those chasing ad money might not make programmes for disabled people, or obscure arts shows.
When you solve costs and increase bandwidth, anyone can make a show and people do. You want stuff about Keynesian economics, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. There are lots of blind people making videos on YouTube, people of nearly all varieties of politics from communists to libertarians, the history of corsetry, how to repoint a wall. There are few colour, sex or whatever bars because this stuff is cheap to make.
– Some geezer on Tim Worstall’s site discussing the anachronistic dinosaur known as the BBC
No place has got rich – that is, the population enjoying a multiplicity of those three squares and a roof – without being roughly capitalist, roughly free market and trading across the borders of that place or society. Non-capitalism, non-marketism and autarky just don’t produce the result. We can and should go further too. Any place that is rich has been that roughly capitalist, marketist and tradist for some time now. Those places that have only in recent decades adopted the trio are getting rich. Those that still haven’t done so are still poor.
Sure, there’s a spectrum of possible policies, from Sweden’s tax heavy social democracy to Hong Kong’s near laissez faire. But that is a spectrum that always includes our trio.
– Tim Worstall
openDemocracy wants to tell us all that coronavirus has entirely upended the assumptions of neoclassical economics. This is because openDemocracy doesn’t have the first clue about the assumptions of neoclassical economics. This is not, therefore, a good starting point for a reordering of the economic assumptions we use when trying to deal with reality.
– Tim Worstall
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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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