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]
We laugh at them for not knowing what ‘woman’ means. They laugh at us for not knowing what ‘power’ means.
“Only power arrests power.” (Montesquieu)
“In a conflict between mere law and power, it is seldom law will emerge as the victor.” (Hannah Arendt)
The state of Tennessee has laws. A law taxes its citizens and gives a hefty chunk of the proceeds to maintain a large education bureaucracy. A law compels Tennessee children to attend the schools this bureaucracy administers. A law forbids this education establishment to push critical race theory on the kids – but the education establishment is not as eager to obey this law as they are to enforce the others.
The same casual contempt of the idea that laws apply to teachers, not just to parents and children, can be seen in Oklahoma. In Florida, laws force parents to pay education taxes and children to go to school from a young age, and they get enforced. But the law against teachers sexualising kindergarteners is another matter. Amber junior doesn’t feel like going to school? Amber senior doesn’t feel like paying so much tax? “Tough!”, says Amber the teacher. “You can’t break the law but I can.”
The educational establishment’s belief in its right to ignore the parents and those they vote for – its right to confine their role strictly to providing the kids and the money – is not new. They will behave this way while they have the power to do so. While the tax laws and the attendance laws provide the base for the educational establishment’s power, it will be hard to impose an external power to restrain their power. The parents may want it, but the parents have been deprived of direct power – they must pay taxes to a bureaucracy that can (and prefers to) ignore their wishes. The kids may want it, but the kids are compelled to attend school, and to treat the teachers’ narrative as fact and their doubts as ignorance. As long as all that operates, it will be hard to find the additional taxes and the additional government employees and lawyers to make a contemptuous bureaucracy obey an external power. Until the power dynamic can be changed, expect the education bureaucracy to spend much time laughing at the impotent rage of governors and the despair of parents while grooming their kids, or punishing them for teacher-defined *isms and *phobias. It will be hard work for even an unusually able and energetic governor to focus external power effectively upon them. As for parents, the bureaucrats think they have no right even to know, and ‘interpret’ the rules to impose costs on any who try.
Parents are pretty-well the only available independent resource with which to counter this power-dynamic. The idea of giving back to parents the power the bureaucrats took from them has been around for a long time. Past ‘school choice’ schemes have often offered parents only a little choice – ‘Education vouchers’ that let them choose an education-establishment-run school that is less full than others of inept teachers the teacher’s union will not let be weeded. Any legislature that wants the education laws they pass treated as facts, not jokes, needs to transfer a lot more power. Make the definition of school minimal. Give administering that definition to a small finance authority focussed on avoiding fraud, not on enforcing a narrative. Tie the tax money to the child and transfer it directly to the school they attend – and to the new school attended if the parents pull the kid from the old one. Cut the education bureaucracy out of every decision. In legal theory, the state will lose some power, but in actual reality they will lose the illusion of it; the education bureaucracy will lose the reality of it.
The education bureaucracy has a long track record of cheating to destroy voucher schemes. Everything I said about why they will nullify state law applies tenfold to a state law designed to give parents more power and them less. That’s why the handling of the money must be pulled back from the education department to an adjunct of the revenue. Revenue is everything. Taking the receipt of education revenue away from the education bureaucracy is everything. Taking the disbursement of it to schools and teachers away from the education bureaucracy is everything. Until that happens, a child’s parents may have the law on their side but the educational establishment will have the power.
If you’re calling for FBI resignations or firings you still don’t get it. Same with the CDC, IRS, CIA, and all the others.
They “resign” and go work for MSNBC for $500k a year. That’s not punishment. Until there are trials and prison time for government people, nothing changes.
With the Digital Markets Act, the EU wants to make competition between tech giants more fair. What could possibly go wrong?
In his weekly podcast, Linus Sebastian gushes about all the wonderful things it will bring: ensuring interoperability of instant messaging services (so you can more easily abandon Apple devices even if all your friends have them and use iMessage); the ability to use alternative app stores (which is what Epic games was hoping for so it could sell Fortnite VBucks to iPhone users without paying Apple); the right to uninstall pre-loaded apps (aka bloatware); no self-preferencing (e.g. putting your own products at the top of search results); more rules about combining personal data without consent; no more requiring developers to use certain services to get their apps onto app stores, making it easier to, for example, use alternative payment processors; allow app developers fair access to supplementary functionalities of smartphones (for example access to NFC for third party apps on iPhones).
“This is just such an obvious list of things that no consumer should oppose,” says Linus. And he is right. All these things would be very convenient.
But Linus does not consider the means by which these things are being attempted. One wonders what minor inconveniences he would not resort to legislation to solve. The non-aggression principle does not occur to him. Never mind the motivations of the people behind it or the time-proven tendency for all state regulation to have unintended consequences.
At 18:48 he responds to a commenter. “BFire just outed themselves as someone who doesn’t get it. ‘More government control. You’d think Canadians would have learned.’ No! This is a government body stepping in to reduce corporate control. Everything here is about loosening an iron fist. How is it not clear? This is one of those things: I just don’t get it. How can you oppose being allowed to remove crap you don’t want from your devices?”
Linus has fallen into a semantic muddle. No-one is being allowed to do anything. People are being forbidden from doing things. The answer is easy: if you want to be allowed to remove crap you do not want from your devices, simply buy devices that do not take that control away from you. The beauty of this is that it does not require any violence!
Linus must know on some level that violence is involved. His next sentence: “Companies being forced to make their products inter-operable. How can you oppose pro-consumer legislation?”
Perhaps one might oppose it because it is legislation which means that force is used. You might also oppose it because it may not lead to the utopian world its proponents imagine. Alec Muffet tweets that enforced interoperability will weaken end-to-end encryption of messages (and he goes into much more detail in a recent essay). There is a consequence that might not actually be unintended by the state actors behind this legislation and that might well harm the very consumers they claim to help.
The whole thing is also obviously unnecessary. In the video there is some discussion of Google search results becoming a bit rubbish lately since many more of the top results are just adverts. Luke Lafreniere (the chap on the right who works with Linus) talks about using Duck Duck Go to get better results, not just for privacy. So there is a free market solution to these problems that is already working.
At 29:39 Luke straight up announces that he would consider not buying Pixel phones if other phones allowed him to remove all the crapware. He seems completely unaware that the problem of crapware is already solved: simply buy devices that do not have crapware.
But for all the practical considerations, there is an easy way to counter all of this from first principles. Violence is bad, and the ends do not justify the means. You just need to have the semantic discipline to see through such constructs as “pro-consumer legislation”.
In my school, some children are now struggling to articulate what they need or want, answer simple questions or follow short instructions. This has a knock-on effect on their social skills. Those who haven’t had much practice taking turns in conversation or sharing with others find playing and using school resources difficult. Many children have missed out on physical development opportunities; it has been eye-opening to witness four- and five-year-olds choosing to crawl down the corridor into the toilets rather than walk.
I take a fairly forgiving view of the actions that our government and others took when the pandemic hit. As an immediate strategy lockdown may well have been the right thing to do, and even if it wasn’t, it is easy to be wise in hindsight and when it is not you who has to make the decision. Boris & Co. were faced with a type of crisis they had never faced before and a cacophony of conflicting advice, all of which claimed to be expert.
But it was clear quite early on that the slight risk that Covid-19 presented to young children was far outweighed by the harm done to their development by masks and lockdown. That is difficult to forgive.
Due to the uptick in Russian Troll Factory turds inbound, things are a bit more likely to get caught by the moderation system, so try not to take it personally if your legit comments take a while to appear.
To reiterate. The mRNA shots don’t stop infection or transmission, we don’t know whether they interfere with the development of durable immunity post-infection, and whether the next variant is deadlier than Omicron is “mostly a matter of luck.”
Politically, none of this matters at the moment. The people who pushed the shots – in other words every Western government and the entire public health establishment and media – have zero incentive to admit that the roulette wheel is still spinning.
The events of the past two years have been a wake-up call to those of us who naïvely believed our liberties were more or less secure under Western democracy. We discovered that a viral epidemic with an estimated Infection Fatality Rate somewhere in the range of 0.15-0.3% was sufficient for governments to claim the power to lock citizens up in their homes, prohibit citizens from taking walks in the park, tell citizens how many visitors they could have in their homes, shut down religious worship indefinitely, and order mass closures of businesses, all “for our own good.”
If all of this can happen once, it can surely happen again, especially if we are hit by another global crisis, be it global warming, terrorism, a global recession, an energy crisis, or a food shortage.
And if the crisis is not quite severe enough to convince citizens to renounce their liberties, governments can apparently count on the support of an uncritical media to stoke up people’s anxieties and fears, priming them for more “emergency” interventions and ever more illiberal restrictions on their property, life, and mobility.
Governments have restricted a wide range of civil liberties during the pandemic on the basis of unsubstantiated doomsday predictions, highly unorthodox methods of disease control, and hardly any serious consideration of the likely harms such restrictions would inflict on citizens and on our way of life. Future governments could exploit this dangerous precedent in a future crisis, whether real or manufactured, especially if the media jump on board to drum up some public hysteria.
We have sometimes cited Mao Tse-tung on this blog, so why would we not cite Dan Crenshaw? If someone says something true, it is worth noting, regardless of who they are and whether or not they are wrong about other things. Hell, yesterday I found myself in furious agreement with the ghastly Guy Verhofstadt when he was having one of his twice-a-day-stopped-clock moments, so we live strange times.
I’m not saying that I think the present science establishment is good. It has been utterly poisoned by the interference of government, and the biggest mistake we make is thinking that something like the FDA or the CDC are science establishments, when they are in fact government institutions. It might be populated by people with science degrees, but they are still civil servants before being scientists. (especially the higher up the greasy pole they climb.) And unfortunately the universities have also been largely sucked into the poisonous stream of government funding.
Most people prefer experts, of course, especially when it comes to health care. As a surgeon myself, I can hardly object to that tendency. But a problem arises when some of those experts exert outsized influence over the opinions of other experts and thereby establish an orthodoxy enforced by a priesthood. If anyone, expert or otherwise, questions the orthodoxy, they commit heresy. The result is groupthink, which undermines the scientific process.
From Against Scientific Gatekeeping, an excellent, measured essay for Reason magazine by Jeffrey A. Singer. He draws on his own experience of changes in medical best practice during his career as a surgeon and also on the lessons of history:
The “germ theory” anticipated by Semmelweis did not take hold until the late 1880s. That helps explain why, in 1854, the public health establishment rebuffed the physician John Snow after he traced a London cholera epidemic to a water pump on Broad Street. Snow correctly suspected that water from the pump carried a pathogen that caused cholera.
Public health officials clung instead to the theory that the disease was carried by a miasma, or “bad air.” The British medical journal The Lancet published a brutal critique of Snow’s theory, and the General Board of Health determined that his idea was “scientifically unsound.” But after another outbreak of cholera in 1866, the public health establishment acknowledged the truth of Snow’s explanation. The incident validated the 19th century classical liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer’s warning that the public health establishment had come to represent entrenched political interests, distorting science and prolonging the cholera problem. “There is an evident inclination on the part of the medical profession to get itself organized after the fashion of the clericy,” he wrote in 1851’s Social Statics. “Surgeons and physicians are vigorously striving to erect a medical establishment akin to our religious one. Little do the public at large know how actively professional publications are agitating for state-appointed overseers of the public health.”
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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