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 2012 scientists found the Higgs Boson. In 2015, after fifty years of trying, they finally found gravitational waves.
In 2021…
Leave camp turned Brexit into a religion to capture votes, study finds
Vote Leave turned Brexit into its own religion to capture supporters, a recent study by the universities of Birmingham and Warwick has found.
Researchers said slogans such as “take back control” used the NHS as the country’s Holy Grail that could be rescued from European forces threatened by Britain’s unique historical place in the world.
They also said Brexiteers focused on secular theological concepts such as sovereignty and nation to engage voters.
A study found it. It is Science.
Perhaps the most stark form of differend lies in what philosophical logicians call ‘The Fallacy of Many Questions’. When, in the court dock for instance, a wily prosecutor asks a witness for the defence, “And do you still have a drink problem, sir?”, the witness had better be on his toes to avoid confirming the prosecutor’s implied allegation. If he answers “yes” – well, the game is over. If he answers “no”, then he implies, at least, that he has had a drink problem. One hopes that a good judge would overrule this question, on grounds of its leading the witness – that is to say, leading him without his knowing it to confirm some version of the drink-problem narrative, the framework of the question having excluded the option that there neither is nor ever was a problem with alcohol consumption.
Owen Jones’s ‘Denier’ allegation commits a similar fallacy: either Sikora, Gupta et al. do not deny ‘Covid’; or they do deny ‘Covid,’ in which case they are cast in the role of refusing to accept that Britons have this year died in their thousands. The option of accepting that there have been deaths but rejecting that they have been extraordinarily due to a ‘Covid pandemic’ is taken out of play.
– Sinéad Murphy discussing An Incredible Berk of Staggering Ignorance.
The “differend” is not just a difference of opinion, it is a disconnect between fundamentally different world views. This is a discussion about what in these parts we refer to as “meta-context”, the unspoken & largely unexamined axioms that underpin how people understand everything.
When I read this zinger:
“It is absolutely clear that climate change is a threat to our collective security and the security of our nations,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who presided over the meeting.
I thought it was perhaps the most succinct summation of why (1) the ‘Conservative’ Party should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act (2) I will never vote for them again.
It is bizarre to think we can thank Russia (an enemy state run by gangsters) and India for providing the voice of sanity.
“Though you can’t move for pundits and politicians demanding more public spending, the big lesson of the postwar recoveries is that with robust consumer and investor confidence there is negligible need for government stimulus. History, not abstract theory, shows that the best way to boost growth after a ‘wartime’ period such as the pandemic is for the state to take a step back. This is particularly true with unemployment, which is undoubtedly a top priority, given the millions who have been furloughed or laid off in the last year. There will be countless calls for schemes and subsidies to support various groups. But we should take our cue here from post-war America, where household spending and private investment were the key ingredients for getting people back into work. Ministers should also be hard-headed about withdrawing support from companies which are no longer viable, especially once restrictions are removed. Overall, the lesson of the postwar recoveries is a simple one: with robust consumer and investor confidence, there is negligible need for government stimulus. The best way to repair the damage is not through schemes, subsidies and special treatment, but by getting out of the way and giving markets the flexibility they need.”
– Jethro Elsden
We are going to get a lot of folk claiming that recovering from COVID-19 justifies a bigger state. We see this sort of commentary from the likes of former UK policy advisor Nick Timothy, who constantly talks about how Tory MPs must shed their suspicion of “industrial strategy” (translation: getting politicians and bureaucrats to support sectors they favour and predict what will be hot and what will not). Given the UK’s sorry history in this regard, it is hard to have to summon breath to point to the foolishness of this.
Two days ago the BBC reported that the Supreme Court had ruled that Uber drivers are workers rather than being self-employed.
With what glad hosannas did the drivers greet the news of their liberation!
Er, no. As Sam Dumitriu writes in CapX,
Putting questions of legality to one side, it’s clear Uber’s business model works for drivers. If you don’t believe me, just ask them. Countless surveys have found that the majority of Uber drivers are happy with the status quo and would not sacrifice flexibility for greater security.
A survey carried out by Oxford University academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Thor Berger, in partnership with Uber, found that drivers reported higher levels of life satisfaction compared to other London workers, despite on average earning less. And, counter to the conventional wisdom, drivers typically worked full-time in other jobs before choosing to shift to Uber. Furthermore, more than four-fifths of drivers agreed with the statement: ‘Being able to choose my own hours is more important than having holiday pay and a guaranteed minimum wage’. They found that drivers would accept a move to fixed hours – but only if it came with a 25% pay rise.
Perhaps they had looked across the Atlantic and seen the results of California’s attempt to save gig economy workers from working in the gig economy:
In Uber’s home state of California, 70% of drivers backed Proposition 22, a ballot measure that created a carve-out for ridesharing services from the state’s tough laws on freelance work. The measure passed with 59% of the vote in November.
AB 5, the freelancer law which Prop 22 was responding to highlights how interventions designed to solve a problem in one market can have unintended consequences in others.
When it passed, Vox published an article: “Gig workers’ win in California is a victory for workers everywhere”. A month later they published another article: “Freelance journalists are mad about a new California law. Here’s what’s missing from the debate. The alternative to AB5 would be worse”. Two months later, Vox Media itself cut hundreds of freelance writing jobs in California.
Significantly, the rapidly growing UK white-nationalist group Patriotic Alternative is actively targeting younger recruits and recently started Call of Duty Warcraft gaming tournaments for its supporters.
This warning comes from an article by Mark Townsend in the Guardian‘s Sunday sister, the Observer, with the title “How far right uses video games and tech to lure and radicalise teenage recruits”.
“MSPs back criminalising hate speech at the dinner table”, reports the (Glasgow) Herald
HATE speech in the home is set to be criminalised after a Tory attempt to stop it failed at Holyrood.
Critics fear it could lead to over-heated dinner table conversations being investigated by the police under the Scottish Government’s new Hate Crimes Bill.
However MSPs on the justice committee agreed with Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf that there should be no exemption for hateful speech and conduct just because it was in a private dwelling.
He said the law often dealt with events in the home, and an exemption could mean, for example, that someone who urged people in their house to attack a synagogue, but then did not take part, could not be punished for inciting the crime.
Humza Yousaf’s choice of example is disingenuous. There has never been a “dwelling exemption” when it came to inciting a crime, and no one has suggested there should be one. The amendment allowing a dwelling exemption that was unsuccessfully tabled by the Tory MSP Liam Kerr related only to the “stirring up of hatred”.
It is disturbing enough that such an amorphous charge should ever be made a matter of law at all, but whatever he might think of the Hate Crime Bill as a whole, Kerr’s proposed amendment in this instance was limited to suggesting that the rule whereby it becomes a crime to stir up hatred would be suspended if “words or behaviour are used by a person inside a private dwelling and are not heard or seen except by other persons in that or another dwelling”. In other words Kerr did not think it should be a crime to stir up a particular emotion in another person if done in private. By seven votes to two, the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament disagreed. Assuming the Bill passes, it will thus be a crime in Scotland to say words deemed to be hateful, even if done in your own home.
This new crime having been created, will failure to report this crime itself be a crime? According to the website “Ask the Police”, “Whilst there is no legal requirement to report a crime, there is a moral duty on everyone of us to report to the police any crime or anything we suspect may be a crime.” Since asking the same question in “Ask the Scottish Police” redirected me to the same answer, I assume this answer also applies to the separate Scottish legal system. That is only slightly reassuring. Once reported, a potential crime must be investigated. The suspect must be questioned. Witnesses must be called. By the nature of this new crime the suspects and witnesses are likely to be the family members of the accuser. To many that will be a feature not a bug.
I call it a “new” crime, but that is a misnomer. The Scottish Government – soon to be the Scottish State if the ruling party of the current Scottish Government has its way – is set to return to methods of maintaining order that are very old.
“Piers Corbyn has been arrested over leaflets comparing the UK’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout to Auschwitz”, the BBC reports.
The 73-year-old brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said he voluntarily attended a police station on Wednesday.
He was then arrested on suspicion of malicious communications and public nuisance.
The leaflets were offensive. A recent headline in the Evening Standard described vaccination against Covid-19 as a “safe path to freedom”. The leaflets implied that this was a lie by photoshopping a picture of the entrance to the Nazi concentration camp so that its gates appeared to bear the phrase about vaccines rather than “Arbeit Macht Frei”.
Tacky. But if we took to arresting every fool who compares their political opponents to Nazis there would soon be more people in the nick than out of it. Calling people Nazis is not illegal. Being wrong is also not illegal.
If we want to convince people that vaccines are safe, try convincing them that vaccines are safe. As in try to change their opinions by argument. The only thing the arrest and silencing of anti-vaxxers does is make people wonder what the government is trying to hide.
Simon Gibbs has a suggestion for a way forward
We have been under house arrest now for 10 months. I think now is the time to demand a little bit of libertarianism.
Some of you might disagree with me over details of the science which I wrote about on Samizdata, but I am sure most of you agree that you want to be let out of your house and that you are willing to do something about it.
I have been watching the debate over Coronavirus response and it seems too binary. One side says let us out, the other says they can’t – we’ll die, or our mums will. The Government is following the science, says one, the Government isn’t doing enough, says another. This is immature.
What is missing is serious discussion of what the people could do to make themselves safe. Handwashing and masks feel like small-minded details, and plainly that message is not making any more free, or much safer.
Many of us are advocates for privately run social infrastructure. I am advocating, in plain sight of my employer, a bit of privately managed Public Health infrastructure. A system, or an agreement really, that if a business that is otherwise unsafe (by mainstream opinion) to be open in a pandemic might choose to run Public Health screening – a testing program – at it’s own front door. That it might, without compulsion, use a bit of cheap technology to reduce the risks for its customers of coming into its premises.
The petition wording is not entirely of my creation, it was edited by the petitions team after a long delay. I didn’t want to specify what kind of test would be used. I’m sure I don’t know enough about tests, or enough about the businesses that might benefit. Gyms, theatres, beauty salons, conference venues, and hotels are examples of businesses I think might benefit but it is not for me to decide. Nor is it for the Government to decide.
All I am asking is that if a business wants to have a serious go at keeping customers safe (or even safer, if you prefer), then it should be up to the people involved to set that up and make that happen.
If we demand this freedom, we might get it. If we don’t then it is likely all of us will need to wait until everyone over 50 is vaccinated. That is too long already. Please support this demand by signing the petition.
A totalitarian state cannot tolerate privacy, even and especially within the family, the last redoubt of dissent. Hate-speech laws do not yet cover what you say in the privacy of your own home – you can’t be prosecuted for stirring up hatred at your dining table or in the bedroom.
The [law] commission, however, finds this idea of privacy intolerable. So, if it gets its way, any words you use in your own home that are ‘likely’, even by accident, to ‘stir up hatred’ against a vast array of ‘protected’ groups – including ‘punks’, if you can believe it – could get you sent to prison for seven years. These proposals will make parents fear their own children – and children fear their siblings.
– Radomir Tylecote
I’m also currently helping out a journalist who has been arrested four times and had his equipment taken by the police – without warrants. He is accused of trolling people who he has never communicated with. But he has never been charged. It is all possible because of the hate laws. Being a politician and a Brexiteer, I could have the police fully employed arresting people who say very offensive things to me online. I would not do that. But some people do. We need a major overhaul of all this, because it has set in motion a load of events that are extremely unhealthy for democracy.
– Andrew Bridgen MP in “Why we must repeal our hate-speech laws“
The Telegraph reports:
EU threatens war-time occupation of vaccine makers as AstraZeneca crisis spirals (£)
“The EU sledgehammer is coming down. The European Council is preparing to invoke emergency powers of Article 122 against AstraZeneca and Big Pharma within days.
This nuclear option paves the way for the seizure of intellectual property and data, and arguably direct control over the production process – tantamount to war-time occupation of private companies. This is Europe First pushed to another level. It takes the EU into the territory of 1930s methods and an authoritarian command economy.
Charles Michel, President of the European Council, is being badgered by member states to take action before the escalating vaccine crisis mutates into a political crisis as well and starts to topple governments. He is offering them the most extreme option available in the Lisbon Treaty.
Article 122 allows the EU to take emergency steps “if severe difficulties arise in the supply of certain products”, or “if a Member State is in difficulties or is seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control”.
Begun the vaccine war has.
Newsflash: Empire now says Order 66 “was a silly mistake”:
“EU backtracks on decision to block supply of vaccines to Northern Ireland”, the Irish Independent reports.
The EU has backtracked on a decision to block vaccines being transported into Northern Ireland.
The move followed hours of diplomatic chaos after it emerged the EU triggered an article of the Northern Protocol which introduce check on good entering Northern Ireland. This would have allowed EU authorities stop the importation of vaccines manufactured on the continent entering Northern Ireland.
[…]
There were frantic phones calls between Taoiseach Micheál Martin and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen when it emerged vaccines could be stop from moving between the EU and Northern Ireland.
There was also significant backlash against the EU from both sides of the border when the decision emerged.
A Government source said the Taoiseach had not being given any advance warning of the EU decision to invoke the article in the protocol. The source said the article may have been inadvertently triggered by “someone who did not understand the political implications” of the decision.
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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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