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 vitriol hurled at the ‘unvaxed’ has been nothing short of evil over this pandemic; it makes you want to refuse it purely out of solidarity. Frankly, I would be loath to do anything requested of me by the type of low life that would refuse treatment to the unvaccinated or show such glee at their suffering.
I will repeat what I have said many times but only seems to get more prescient – this is the most inhumane and irrational response to disease since before the enlightenment.
Whoever kids themselves that this nonsense is enlightened simply because it comes with modern mRNA vaccines, track and trace technology and zoom calls should think again about what ‘enlightened’ really looks like.
This is tech enabled medievalism
– David Slade
I never knew this:
“At the turn of the 20th century, incubators for premature babies were widely available at fairs and amusement parks across America, rather than hospitals.
Infant shows were the main source of healthcare for premature babies for over 40 years.”
That was a tweet from HumanProgress.org which linked to a fascinating article at “99% Invisible”. Apparently it’s a podcast about “all the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about”. I am usually too impatient to listen to podcasts, but if the accompanying articles are as revelatory as this one, I will bookmark the site. The article title is “The Infantorium”. It opens by describing a long-gone amusement park in Minneapolis called “Wonderland”:
The park’s biggest attraction wasn’t the roller coaster, or the dance hall, or the log flume. It was a sideshow called “the Infantorium.” Visitors would pay ten cents to enter a spacious room full of glass boxes that were incubators with tiny premature babies on display. But despite how weird this whole concept might seem today, this wasn’t the only place this was happening.
According to Lauren Rabinovitz, an amusement park historian, at the turn of the century, incubators for premature babies were widely available at fairs and amusement parks across America, rather than hospitals.
At that, many readers will wonder what sort of parents can they have been, to allow their own children to be shown at a fair when they were in peril of death? The answer is desperate parents who had no alternative:
Many parents of premature, at-risk babies pretty much had to bring their infants to an amusement park. And these infant shows were the main source of healthcare for premature babies for over forty years.
Very well then, but what sort of man makes a profit from this deplorable business? That, too, has a surprising answer. The leading exhibitor of premature babies was a man calling himself Dr Martin Couney. He got his start in London:
Unlike the other showmen, Couney’s show had more of a refined air. He hired nurses to hold the babies and feed them breastmilk. The show was a hit so Dr. Couney decided to give it a try in the United States at the Omaha World’s Fair.
[…]
Thousands of people paid ten cents each to see Dr. Couney’s incubator show. And parents from across the city brought their premature babies to Couney, hoping for a miracle. A local medical journal reported that 48 of the 52 babies delivered to Couney that summer had survived.
In the state of medical science as it then was, for such a high proportion of premature babies to live was little short of a miracle. So I see nothing wrong in Couney making a profit, as he did at first. Some may say, OK, maybe that was acceptable in the early days of incubator technology, but surely these baby-shows died off as soon as proper hospitals and doctors acquired incubators?
Nope. For decades most of the proper hospitals and doctors turned down the incubators which Couney repeatedly tried to donate to them for free.
Follow the link to see why. And this Christmas remember the name of Martin Couney, the charlatan and fake doctor who bankrupted himself saving thousands of childrens’ lives:
The babies in his care were more than four times as likely to survive into childhood. He took in babies of all races and classes, and he never once charged the families. Everything was funded by admissions. Money couldn’t buy better care — because there really wasn’t better care available.
The bully doesn’t want the victim to do X, Y, and Z for their own sake. He wants to establish the principle that the victim will do X, Y, Z, or A, B, or C, on demand. That’s why arbitrary, unreasonable, ever-shifting demands are characteristic of an abusive relationship. The more irrational the demand, the better. The controllers find it satisfying to see everyone dutifully wearing their masks. As with O’Brien, it is power, not actual public safety, that inspires them. That is why they roundly ignore science casting doubt on masks, lockdowns, and social distancing. Effectiveness was never the root motivation for those policies to begin with.
I learned about this too in school. In the senseless, degrading busy work and the arbitrary rules, I detected a hidden curriculum: a curriculum of submission.3 The principal issued a series of trivial rules under the pretext of “maintaining a positive learning environment.” Neither the students nor the administration actually believed that wearing hats or chewing gum impeded learning, but that didn’t matter. Punishments were not actually for the infraction itself; the real infraction was disobedience. That is the chief crime in a dominance/submission relationship. Thus, when German police patrol the square with meter sticks to enforce social distancing, no one need believe that the enforcement will actually stop anyone from getting sick. The offense they are patrolling against is disobedience. Disobedience is indeed offensive to the abusive party, and to anyone who fully accepts a submissive role in relation to it. When “Karens” report on their neighbors for having more than the permitted number of guests, is it a civic-minded desire to slow the spread that motivates them? Or are they offended that someone is breaking the rules?
– Charles Eisenstein
A brand new medRxiv pre-print study entitled: “The BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses” has graced our world. This paper is so important and it provides evidence to support what many prominent immunologists and vaccinologists have been saying for a long time, including myself. These COVID-19 mRNA injectable products are causing, yes, causing, immune system dysregulation – and not just in the context of the adaptive system, but in the context of the innate system. Not only that, but these findings provide very good reasons as to why we are seeing resurgences of latent viral infections and other adverse events reported in VAERS (and other adverse event reporting systems) and perhaps more importantly, why we should under no circumstances inject this crap into our children.
– Jessica Rose
On December 17th the Times reported,
Hoaxes sometimes have their uses in reducing certain states of mind to an absurdity. By playing on some common credulity they show how blind it is. One has just happened in America.
The report goes on to say that “the audience were not aware that the lecture was a parody. Indeed, it was such a success that the hoaxers were frightened and would have kept the joke to themselves, if it had not been revealed” and that now “[the hoaxers] are not popular in Ithaca, especially as a large part of the faculty and undergraduates of Cornell University were hoaxed.”
A lecture given to “a packed and brilliant audience” at an elite American educational institution turned out to be a fake? Surely you jest?
Well, I do, but not in the sense that this hoax lecture did not happen, but in the sense that the December 17th of the report was December 17th 1921. The lecture was on the topic of dreams in Freudian psychology and was given by a person who claimed to be a friend and pupil of of Freud. One can see why lines such as “A dreamer does know what he dreams, but he does not know what he knows and therefore believes what he does not know” went down well with the audience.
Alan Sokal and the trio of Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose are heirs of a well established tradition, but it is a sad sign of the times that the absurd statements they produced to mimic the prevalent academic style of their time were merely ugly, whereas the equivalent in 1921 had something of the beauty of the later paintings of Claude Monet.
When President Joe Biden said, in one of his many foolish sayings, that “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show any more”, the hubris of that comment was truly on the Greek tragedy scale. Inflation is almost at 10 per cent on an annualised basis in producer price terms in the US. Consumer price inflation is also high. In the UK, inflation runs hot. Yes, disruptions and energy price spikes are big factors, but these are structural – and ultimately, what causes prices to rise overall is because money loses its purchasing power. (See this decade-old video featuring UK-based investment figure and author Detlev Schlichter.)
Across the developed world and beyond, that loss of purchasing power involves a huge shift in resources from savers to borrowers, with the latter being governments in many cases. Finance ministers won’t admit it, but they want inflation to resolve their fiscal incontinence without having to cut spending or raise taxes.
The late Prof. Friedman pointed this sort of process out many times. Yes, I get that not all aspects of the Quantity Theory of Money hold up, and the “Chicago” school has its disagreements with others, such as the “Vienna” one over money, banking, etc. But the broad point seems to hold that if you print government fiat currencies on a massive scale, eventually inflation will bite. President Biden is unfit for the office he holds for a variety of reasons, and his jeering at one of the great minds of the 20th Century is one of them.
Update: Bank of England slightly raised interest rates today.
“MPs back Covid passes in England amid large Tory rebellion”, the Guardian reports.
The requirement for people to show a Covid pass – proving their vaccination status or a recent negative test result – will come into force from Wednesday. It was passed by 369 votes to 126.
Labour said that 101 Conservatives voted against the government, by far the largest rebellion of Johnson’s premiership since the 2019 election.
Earlier, MPs endorsed the need for masks to be worn in shops and on public transport by 441 votes to 41.
However the Times gives a different number,
Boris Johnson has suffered the biggest rebellion of his premiership as 98 of his own MPs voted against plans for Covid passes.
The prime minister mounted a last-ditch charm offensive as he told Tory MPs that he had “absolutely no choice” but to introduce the measures.
He told the 1922 committee of backbenchers that only a small proportion of those infected with the Omicron variant would need to go to hospital before it becomes a “real problem”.
As ever, politics makes strange bedfellows:
Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader who now sits as an independent, said he was opposed to the “totally wrong attempt to force vaccinations and passports on people”.
Whatever the exact number, Steve Baker’s tireless work made it by far the biggest rebellion of Boris’s premiership. But not, of course, big enough.
“No one has fought themselves free of the intellectual stranglehold which anti-classical liberal political sentiment currently enjoys among intellectuals and opinion-formers can have any illusions about just how difficult the task will be to convince public opinion that the best solution to the manifold problems that afflict the world today is that recommended by classical liberalism. Equally, however, no one who has come to embrace classical liberalism will fail to appreciate that nothing less than its eventual triumph will enable human beings to enjoy the best lives of which they are capable. To this extent, classical liberals need have no embarrassment about being considered utopian in political aspiration. Unlike other forms of utopianism, the classical liberal variety springs less from naivety about what is humanly possible than from a suitably modest and realistic assessment about what would make human lives as good as they can be.”
– David Conway, Classical Liberalism: The Unvanquished Ideal. (Page 138). St Martin’s Press, 1995. Conway also wrote “A Farewell to Marx”, which in my view is one of the most lucid demolitions of Marxism ever written.
I believe every MP will remember forever how they voted on this issue. Let us hope they do what they know in their minds, hearts and souls to be right. We will, rightly, be judged on our actions, and inactions.
We can’t go on like this. This can’t be how a country like ours is governed.
We shouldn’t obsess with the press or gossip or grudges. We should reform expert advice and bring to bear a firm grasp of values and virtues, like temperance and courage.
The present chaos seems to me the worst of all worlds: a powerful Prime Minister circumscribed by Cabinet members being bounced, with poison being dropped by the disgruntled and dismissed. And the failed policies of the past are driven on.
I would dearly love to see Boris grip this mess and turn things around. The time to do it is not much longer.
– Steve Baker
“People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this spectre by invoking it.”
– Christopher Hitchens, “The Perils of identity Politics,” Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2008. This quote came from a new book by Victor Davis Hanson.
Nobody has asked you to storm any beaches. Just to go into a shop without wearing a mask.
– the delightfully named Kung Fu Movie Guy
Sadly, my most prominent fan, Stephen King, who for over a decade had provided ecstatic blurbs for all my novels … in the process becoming one of my closest friends, simply turned his back, explaining that he, America’s most popular writer, the writer to whom Siege was dedicated, did not wish to risk standing up to the raging mob.
So wrote Hesh Kestin, whose 2019 novel, ‘The Siege of Tel Aviv’, blurbed by Stephen King, was canceled after a “raging mob” (a.k.a a handful of anonymous complaints from 13 twitter accounts of people who could not have seen the advance reader copies) made the publisher pulp its own book, despite several glowing reviews from the few who got to see it “including one from a Palestinian-American novelist and one from a prominent British Muslim media personality”. (One of several cases covered in ‘Washington Examiner’ article Publishers against the People of the Book, h/t instapundit.)
To me, reading about literati Jews discovering that their liberal friends, uh, aren’t had a rather 1930’s feel to it. My second-ever Samizdata post was about this – except that it was an analogy (an experience of a German Jewish couple in 1930 compared to an experience of the un-politically-correct – and un-Jewish – Sarah Hoyt in 2017). I can’t say I’m surprised that now it’s an echo not an analogy. People who call you racist for saying “all lives matter” were never going to have a problem with calling you Nazi for not purging Jewish writers.
To the accusations against him, Kestin objects
There are at least four heroic Arab/Muslim characters in Siege, while the Israeli establishment is painted as naively complicit in its own destruction.
but the part I put in bold showed me only too clearly why that did not save the book from modern US liberal wrath!
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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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