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]
|
Oxford’s UNWomen society gave its name a new meaning by no-platforming Amber Rudd last Thursday. Student Nadia Awad
“highlighted Ms Rudd’s reference to Labour’s Diane Abbott as a “coloured” woman during a radio interview”
in her explanation of why the remoaner-sympathising ex-Home Secretary had to be silenced.
Inspector: “Would Mr Kodogo by any chance be a coloured gentleman?”
Police Constable Savage: “WelI, I can’t say as I’ve ever noticed, sir.”
All those times I watched the Not-the-Nine-O’clock News sketch yet failed to realise that PC (in both senses) Savage was merely shocked at his superior’s using such a term.
I knew that the terminology merry-go-round is a major PC concern, but I had not realised that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had advanced so far as to make part of its own name unsayable – at least by those who who wished to be allowed to say anything else afterwards.
(What with her being set up by her civil servants over the Windrush scandal and now this, I may yet feel compelled to a slight sneaking sympathy for Amber – which, as demonstrations of how political correctness distorts reality go, really takes the cake! 🙂 )
Call a woman “shrill” and you might just end up in cage. Meanwhile, as I point out, this sort of “protection” disempowers women.
– Amy Alkon, suitably reacting to this maggoty peach by Sadiq Khan.
At my personal blog, on Friday February 28th (Friday being my day for animal kingdom related stuff, most of it very silly), I posted a link (among other links of a similar level of profundity) to a video, of a snake that had swallowed a towel having the towel extracted back through its mouth by helpful vets. Ho, ho.
The link I posted, to a tweet someone had done, no longer works, but here is the drama I’m referring to.
But now, today, AndrewZ added a comment to that posting of mine which seems to me to deserve rather wider attention than it would get if I merely left it where he first put it. He wrote this:
A snake is a simple creature driven by its instincts. It follows a set of hardwired rules which it can’t question and which can lead to dangerous errors when it encounters something outside of its normal experience, like a towel. In other words, a snake’s mind is a very limited algorithm. But the world today is saturated with algorithms, from Facebook to FinTech to facial recognition systems used by the police and ten thousand other things. The $64,000 question – perhaps, the $64 billion dollar question or the 64,000 lives question – is how many of them are still operating at the “dumb snake swallows a towel” level of sophistication.
This is not, to put it mildly, my area of expertise. But, on the other hand, this is just the kind of thing that the Samizdata commentariat enjoys chewing on, metaphorically speaking. So, ladies and gents, chew away.
First female POTUS will be a Republican. There have been two female Prime Ministers in UK now, both Conservative Party. And whilst I adored Thatcher & loathed May, neither made being female a political issue. There is a lesson there, one the Identitarian Left will not learn.
– Perry de Havilland
The Guardian, wrong about everything, always. Doubly so on anything economic.
– Tim Worstall
The English Football Premier League is one of the world’s great sporting tournaments, and as the current season now nears its end, Liverpool have a huge lead of over twenty points over their nearest rival club. This is, despite a recent stumble in Liverpool’s form, an amazing achievement. (Our own Patrick Crozier, a Watford supporter, might enjoy commenting on that stumble.) This all comes after Liverpool, last season, won the European Championship. All football fans, whether paid or unpaid, are now inclined to regard everything that Liverpool’s hugely engaging and obviously very smart manager Jurgen Klopp says or does as evidence of his all-round human wonderfulness.
Personally, I greatly prefer following football on television and on the internet to actually going to games, which are too noisy, expensive and time-consuming for my tastes and for my fading eyesight. I prefer classical concerts at the Wigmore Hall. (I recently attended this concert there. Stu – I’m now deploying a verbal device that Americans often like to use when they really want to ram their point home, often by swearing at this point – pendous.) Nevertheless, from a virtual distance, I too am a football fan, and so I share the general admiration for Jurgen Klopp.
The above explains why Klopp is getting so much admiring attention for what he recently said about the coronavirus. Klopp was, MarketWatch reports:
… responding to a reporter who asked if the famed Liverpool coach is concerned about the spread of the coronavirus.
Here is how Klopp responded to this question:
“What I don’t like in life is that a very serious thing, a football manager’s opinion is important,” Klopp explained. “We have to speak about things in the right manner, not people with no knowledge, like me, talking about something. People with knowledge will talk about it and tell people to do this, do that, and everything will be fine, or not. Not football managers, I don’t understand that.”
Cue an orgy of admiration for what a stellar human being Klopp is, for saying something so very, very wise. What a guy!
But, perhaps because I only admire people like Klopp from a virtual distance, I am able to dissent. I think that this was an excellent answer by Klopp, to a question that he wasn’t actually asked. He wasn’t asked what he thinks will be the future progress of the coronavirus. He was merely being asked whether he was worried about it. Any conscientious football club manager must now be anxious about how the coronavirus might affect his club in the weeks and months to come, and to be listening out carefully to learn what derangements look like being imposed upon the world and the country in general, and upon professional football in particular. Klopp doesn’t have to be an expert on infectious diseases to be worried about the spread of one of these devilish things while it is still spreading and still killing people, and more to the point while it is causing sporting authorities to ponder doing things like cancelling all heavily-attended sports events for the duration of the coronavirus problem. He just has to be a semi-intelligent person who is keeping half an eye on the news.
To the actual question that Klopp was asked, a simple Yes would have sufficed. Yes, he is worried, as are most other people, and worried precisely because he, Jurgen Klopp, does indeed not know what the coronavirus will do next. He might then have added a few words to the effect that he was already thinking about how future games might be affected, and about what he would be telling his players if cancellations and general disruption of sport in the UK, along the lines of what is already happening in Italy, do shortly ensue.
The comments Klopp made on the habit of regarding people who are celebrated in one field as experts in other fields are very sensible, or would have been had that been what he had been asked about. But I also dissent somewhat from that. Not in the sense that I regard successful football managers as experts on all other things. It’s more that I reckon you can also overdo the reverence for the pronouncements of “experts“. Experts can often be very right, but they are often wrong. The rest of us ought at least to be willing to question the supposed experts, and then ask ourselves if their answers make as much sense as they are claiming.
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall points out that electric cars ain’t cheap. So when all cars must be electric, no cars can be cheap.
This is where “trickle down economics” is actually true. New tech is expensive, toys for the rich. It takes a number of manufacturing iterations for it to become cheap enough for the masses. The iPhone started at $700, you can buy better landfill Android now for $30. ABS was only for top end cars, a couple of decades later everyone has it. That’s just how it works.
But we’ve now got government insisting that only electric cars by 2035. Which is rather before those cheap ones are going to be available – an iteration of technology in a car is measured in years, up to a decade. So, the poor get screwed.
And this gets worse. Batteries don’t last forever. And a significant portion of car transport for the poor is provided by the £500 beater. An older car, mechanically reasonable enough, that another few tens of thousands of miles can be got out of. Battery powered cars won’t do that. Because at some point you’re going to have to replace the battery pack, something that will be a substantial portion of the cost of a new car.
The technology basically kills the £500 beater market.
A good point, though I would replace the word “technology” with “regulation”.
At which point, well, aren’t they noticing? Or is this the point? That the proles have to walk while the Comrades can use the whole road as a Zil lane?
Allegheny County, home to the city of Pittsburgh, has been hit with a lawsuit over irregularities on its voter rolls, including dead voters, duplicate registrants, and one registered voter marked as being born in June 1800. (reported on freebeacon, h/t instapundit)
I was aware that every election day in the US the dead rise, shamble towards the polling booths and vote, shall we say ‘disproportionately’ ( 🙂 ) Democrat. (It seems they have been some Democrats’ most reliable voting block for a long time.) However this is the first time I’ve wondered whether the undead join them. For the dead voters, is there some healing ritual we could perform that would free these trapped souls to ‘move on’. For the undead voter(s), is a stake through the heart the only way?
In the UK’s past, the rising of the very-recently deceased from the morgue, of the ill from their sickbeds and of the politically inactive from their slumber was only a very localised problem, but as parts of the US are not the only foreign culture from which dead voters could immigrate with the living, I hope our new government will keep more of an eye on things than past ones have done – especially when our politically-correct media avert theirs.
Has this ever been an SQotD before? If not, here it is, and if it has, good and here it is again:
Twitter presented this to me today.
Here is what Wikipedia says about George MacDonald.
Twenty four more George MacDonald quotes, and the one above, here.
Some wonder if Philip Rutnam’s resignation has damaged Boris Johnson’s government. But a great swath of opinion outside the bubble takes this as a sign of something good happening & this chap’s squealing is music to their ears. They may be wrong to assume the swamp is being drained, but that is how this is playing to the normies.
– Perry de Havilland
“I will not be slienced.” (Greta Thunberg in Bristol)
How would she know? Indeed, how would we know? It savours less of English understatement that of pointed irony to say that noone has tried to silence her. So it seems to me that we and she lack data on this point.
Greta has Asbergers Syndrome. Fans of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ know how many of the jokes depend on the impossibility of silencing the asbergian Sheldon by the gentle methods of social cues and hints, and the ease of doing so when to speak or to act requires that he move outside his idiosyncratic comfort zone. If Greta ever goes to China (obviously required by her proclaimed cause but AFAIK not even hinted at by her handlers or herself) then we may learn how far her ability not to be silenced extends beyond her condition. Meanwhile, we are entitled to reply to her, “How do you know?”
The question could also be put to her about other matters.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments