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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ITV News reports,
Social gatherings of more than six people to be banned in England to limit spread of coronavirus
Social gatherings of more than six people will be illegal in England from Monday as the Government seeks to curb the rise in coronavirus cases.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson will use a press conference on Wednesday to announce the change in the law after the number of daily positive Covid-19 cases in the UK rose to almost 3,000.
The legal limit on social gatherings will be reduced from 30 people to six.
It will apply to gatherings indoors and outdoors – including private homes, as well as parks, pubs and restaurants.
That was a line from a Guardian op-ed written entirely by a robot. The machine was instructed to focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI. I do not find this reassuring.
The biggest UK news overnight was this:
Birmingham stabbings: Manhunt as one killed and seven hurt.
That BBC report dates from last night when the man who had already randomly murdered Jacob Billington was still at large. It reads:
A knifeman who killed one man and wounded seven other people in a two-hour stabbing rampage across Birmingham city centre is being hunted by police.
The first stabbing was in Constitution Hill at 00:30 BST then the killer moved south, apparently attacking at random, officers said.
The stabbings did not appear terrorism related, gang related or connected to disorder, West Midlands Police said.
Murder inquiry detectives said they were hunting a single suspect.
The force urged anyone with CCTV or mobile footage to contact them.
One man died, another man and a woman suffered critical injuries and five other people were left with non-life-threatening injuries.
Ch Supt Steve Graham said the attacker went on to stab people in Livery Street, Irving Street and finally in Hurst Street, where the city’s Gay Village meets the Chinese Quarter, at about 02:20 BST.
Police said there was no evidence the stabbings were a hate crime.
I expect they were the non-hateful sort of stabbings. The BBC article continues,
Ch Supt Graham said officers – some armed – remained across the city centre to reassure people.
He added they had received a number of descriptions of the suspect but would not be releasing any details for the time being.
So while a man who had already killed one person and murderously attacked several other men and women was still on the streets looking for more victims, the police felt the need to issue a statement about his motives, about which they could not possibly know. They did not feel the need to tell the public what he looked like, which they did know, being in possession of multiple statements from the surviving victims and other witnesses, plus CCTV footage.
To be fair, anyone familiar with modern policing could deduce what the absence of a police description actually meant.
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A related post from six years ago: Politically correct evasiveness fails on its own terms.
Not interacting with people outside of our immediate circle is disastrous for the social fabric of society. As the demands of Black Lives Matter protesters or transgender activists show, it increasingly seems as if some people are speaking a different language to everyone else. Words like oppression, privilege, racism, experience and identity may still be familiar, but they now mean entirely different things to different people. Phrases like ‘cis-gendered’, ‘cultural appropriation’, ‘genderfluid’ and ‘intersectional’ trip off the tongues of some, but are utterly meaningless to others. ‘Silence is violence’ is either common sense or ridiculous. Stating that there are two genders is either blindingly obvious or offensively transphobic. The existence of this language-within-a-language exposes fundamentally different ways of making sense of the world. The less we talk to each other, the more these differences crystalise.
– Joanna Williams
Lest anyone look at the previous post and think that it is only the Yank media that thrills to the sound of breaking glass, here is our very own Evening Standard giving over its pages to Gail Bradbrook, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion: “Roof spikes and the noble art of window smashing— protesting for Extinction Rebellion”.
She writes,
Just having left an impromptu roadblock on Millbank, I found myself yesterday suddenly among a swarm of cyclists pedalling friendly mischief around the city. There’s something about the spirit of this rebellion. When people join together in courage and love for life on earth, willing to take the punishment that will come, the system doesn’t know how to handle it. The Government itself declared a climate and ecological emergency last year, but little more than lip service has followed. On Tuesday, together with environmental organisations, academics, lawyers, and now more than 30 MPs from seven parties, we handed to Parliament on a plate a Bill fit to address the crisis. All they need to do is pass it — and all we need to do is tell them we want it.
Away with all that pettifoggery about persuading the public. That XR want it done should be enough to make it law.
Edit: Further demonstrating that persuasion is not their thing, Extinction Rebellion protesters block newspaper printing presses.
Darren Grimes said it well:
Extinction Rebellion hasn’t been ‘infiltrated’.
Black Lives matter hasn’t been ‘infiltrated’.
These movements were never about the environment or racial justice.
These movements were always about control.
They cannot win at the ballot box, so they have to use other means.
“It’s actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small-business owner must be respected, that the small-business owner creates jobs and is part of the community.”
That was said by Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting. Ms Osterweil was given such a fawning interview by Natalie Escobar of the American state radio station npr (note the cool lowercase initials) that it became an embarrassment, and the record of it is now prefaced by the words:
This story was updated on Sept. 1, 2020. The original version of this story, which is an interview with an author who holds strong political views and ideas, did not provide readers enough context for them to fully assess some of the controversial opinions discussed.
No need to bother, Co-op. As of today you are henceforth banned from advertising in The Spectator, in perpetuity. We will not have companies like yours use their financial might to try to influence our editorial content, which is entirely a matter for the editor.
– Andrew Neil, in response to Co-op indicating they would refuse to advertise in The Spectator due to the publication’s “transphobia”
The Soweto riots were the beginning of the end for Apartheid in South Africa. This is how they began:
Black South African high school students in Soweto protested against the Afrikaans Medium Decree of 1974, which forced all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50–50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from 1 January 1975, Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade), according to the Afrikaans Medium Decree; English would be the medium of instruction for general science and practical subjects (homecraft, needlework, woodwork, metalwork, art, agricultural science). Indigenous languages would only be used for religious instruction, music, and physical culture.
Forty-six years later, in Inner Mongolia, sorry, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China (not to be confused with the neighbouring sovereign state of Mongolia), children of another subjugated land are protesting against a decree that forces their schools to use the oppressor’s language as the medium of instruction:
Inner Mongolia protests at China’s plans to bring in Mandarin-only lessons
Thousands of ethnic Mongolians have protested across northern China in opposition to Beijing plans to replace the Mongolian language with Chinese in some school subjects.
Tuesday marked the first day of a policy revealed in June, to gradually transition the language of instruction in Inner Mongolian schools from Mongolian to Mandarin Chinese. The change affects three subjects over the next three years in the autonomous region. The education bureau said Mongolian and Korean language classes would remain.
The official explanation for the change to a bilingual education system was to ensure the curriculum and textbooks were of a high standard, and that government documents cited by analysts also referred to president Xi Jinping’s push for shared language as part of a common identity.
However mass protests in Inner Mongolia – referred to as Southern Mongolia by ethnic rights and independence groups – have revealed the depth of fear that Mongolian would be relegated to a foreign language as part of government plans to assimilate ethnic minorities into Chinese Han culture.
I called this China’s Soweto. But don’t expect any equivalent to UN Security Council Resolution 392.
Other links concerning this story:
– Tightening the noose on Mongolian in Southern Mongolia
– Rare rallies in China over Mongolian language curb
“Western governments may have strong words for the Russian president, but we’ve been here before. Every time a Russian opposition figure is assassinated, from journalist Anna Politkovskaya to MI6 informer Alexander Litvinenko to politician Boris Nemtsov, there is a chorus of international outrage and demands for action to rein in Putin. Yet little is done, as world leaders don’t want to jeopardise their business dealings with Russia – or face more hostile acts by the Kremlin – and Putin emerges emboldened. A few months after the Salisbury attack, for instance, Russia hosted the World Cup, and opposition activist Petr Verzilov was poisoned after running onto the pitch during the final wearing a police uniform.”
– Sarah Hurst
I suppose you could say that Mr Putin has almost “normalised” the idea that when dealing with political opponents or any sort of perceived threat, the approach favoured is to kill them, lie about it, smirk a bit, and go back to undermining whatever particular nearby country or cause happens to be in play. And then hold a soccer tournament. Rinse, repeat.
Being nonwhite leaves one protected in this environment only to the extent that one toes the ideological line. An assistant professor of color who cannot quite get with the program writes, “At the moment, I’m more anxious about this problem than anything else in my career,” noting that “the truth is that over the last few years, this new norm of intolerance and cult of social justice has marginalized me more than all racism I have ever faced in my life.”
– John McWhorter
Simon Gibbs of Libertarian Home renown has some interesting information about Wuhan Coronavirus testing.
By the end of this article, I want you to be writing to someone and sharing this link. That person could be your MP, your employer, or if you are in a position of power, someone in your organisation who you will want to start making a plan. Preferably, all three.
There is a lot of drama in comment sections and on the street about false positives and tests for The Coronavirus producing positive results for other coronaviruses, like the common cold. Usually this is understood to mean you should ignore the Government. I have some sympathy for that, obviously, but what I have come to understand about tests, however, is that they are not binary. They are not limited to producing yes and no answers – if the person using them allows for it.
Usually the people doing tests don’t allow it, for reasons that are basically economical, but actually the missing subtlety is interesting. Tests can tell you how much virus is present – the “viral load”.
There are two other interesting properties of tests:
Specificity – a test with good specificity only detects SARS-COVID-2 i.e The Coronavirus, and not older or similar bugs
Sensitivity – a test with good sensitivity will tell you if your body has ever come into contact with SARS-COVID-2 even if the “viral load” is small.
There were, apparently, some issues with specificity at one point. The major issue at the moment is that most tests are far too sensitive.
If you just caught the virus yesterday then you are probably not spreading it yet, but you’ll test “positive” because there are already a few thousand bits of virus DNA in the sample. If you had it in January then you will have stopped spreading at the very latest by mid-February but would still be testing “positive” in March, because there are still thousands of bits of virus DNA in the sample. Either of these results makes it unclear what you, as an individual, should do about it.
What researchers have learned is that SARS-COVID-2, specifically, is mainly transmissible in a period between 1 to 6 days when your body is producing trillions of copies of the virus. If the test was able to tell you that you had trillions of copies in your body, then you would know what to do. You would know that tomorrow will be a bad day for you, and that going to a party today would make next Saturday a bad day for everyone at the party.
The brevity of this period is easy to overstate. It might be up to six days long, but by day two of that period you will probably want to be in bed anyway, and limited transmission will actually happen after that.
Testing as a means to stop transmission has only one day to do anything useful.
→ Continue reading: Test results are not binary. Good tests are not all the same
The initial claim of media bias is not that there’s a cabal that nays no darkie jokes no never, rather that the people doing the defining think that no darkie jokes should ever be made therefore that’s what they describe as being impartial. It’s a cultural censorship not a cabalistic one. As such it’s also quite possibly unthinking, not self-aware of what it is doing. Things that cannot be said in Islington drawing rooms may not be said on TV sorta thing. Which leaves rather a lot of people who don’t hold Islington drawing room opinions outta luck.
The very proof of this being that if a TV station starts up saying non-Isling.dr things and succeeds like wildfire then we know those views were being censored by that unconscious bias.
It’s all going to be rather fun, isn’t it?
– Tim Worstall
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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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