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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Party politics in Britain now is conferring retrospective significance upon a generation of – and this is putting it very mildly – bad mannered behaviour by lefties.
Here is an example:
This picture was used by London Mayor Boris Johnson to illustrate an article about what is now happening to the Labour Party. It is a cleaned-up snap of what some lefty moral projectionist did to a war memorial in May of this year, during an anti-austerity demo.
The Boris Johnson article was posted last weekend at the Daily Telegraph website, to which links from here are not encouraged. Its title is: “Labour directs its impotent fury at all but those responsible – itself”. It is about how, because they dare not now discuss their own self-inflicted failures and perplexities accurately and clearly, Labourites instead now prefer to blame others for these things.
At the time it happened, the above-illustrated piece of moral decrepitude was not hugely significant. Some people now behave like this. Why? Insert preferred causal theory. Mine might have involved the expansion of the universities and of the welfare system, and perhaps also a reflection on what spraycans have done to our world. Religious people might have murmured something about the decline of religion as a moral force in our society. Those who think that history is now taught badly in Britain’s schools might have talked about that. Most feminists, torn between denouncing what is on several levels a horrible anti-woman insult or, on the other hand, denouncing a fellow lefty moral projectionist for perpetrating it, presumably remained mute.
But that picture now interests me more than it did in May, or would have had I seen it then, just as it recently interested Boris Johnson. Maybe I did see it back in May, but now, I am doing something else. I am noticing it. I even did some googling and found an uncensored version of what had been done. You pretty much knew already what the Boris version of this piece of rudeness was concealing, but I want now to spell it out:
I found this here. This did not take me long.
→ Continue reading: Expletive undeleted
If reports are true, the Finnish tax police want the public to report anyone selling a take-away pizza for less than €6.
“Unless a pizza is on temporary sale there is no way a legitimate establishment can offer pizza for less than six euros,” Det Insp Minna Immonen of the Uusimaa police department is quoted as saying.
So they have calculated that it is not possible to remain in business selling pizza for less than that price, and still pay the 12% VAT.
12% VAT? What a pleasantly low rate, here in the UK it is 20% for almost everything. I will not be diverted onto a discussion as to what is standard or zero-rated, except to note that on learning that horse semen is subject to normal VAT but bull semen is zero-rated (effectively exempt) as in most of Europe horses are not ‘food’, I decided that whoever made that ruling in Brussels bloody well deserved that to be their legacy.
However, the intrusion is greater, you should get a receipt for your pizza, so Finland has joined Italy as a place where every transaction (even a 1€ cup of coffee or Sachertorte in Venice) leads to a receipt being printed at the till, for fear of the Tax Police.
Police are trying to crack down on the “grey economy”, which costs the country millions of euros in lost tax revenue each year. They also want people to make sure they get a receipt for their pizzas, regardless of value.
We all surely know that the ‘country’ is in fact ‘the State’, and those millions of Euros of lost revenue go on to lead happy, productive lives in the private sector in the hands of their owners. It is a sorry state of affairs when price signals are used by tax authorities to go looking for suspects, rather than customers for bargains, perhaps the tipping point from a tolerably free society to an unpleasant one. I do recall the Sage of Kettering remarking years ago that someone had calculated that no business could carry on in New York City if it followed all the regulations that apply to it.
Still, this has generated some scorn, so that is a positive sign.
Dear NHS worshippers, sorry to be a killjoy, but look, the NHS is not ‘yours’, and never has been. You have no control over it. You feel like you are in control when you spin your little toy wheel, but try steering the car in any direction other than the one where it is already heading, and see what happens. The ones who really drive the car are the political class and the medical establishment. ‘Democratic accountability’ is a mirage. All it really means is that healthcare managers answer to bureaucrats, who answer to other bureaucrats, who also answer to other bureaucrats, who, after some more detours, answer to some politician. That’s democratic accountability. Feel powerful now? Accountability through the political system is about the weakest form of accountability one could imagine, and in healthcare it is even weaker than in other areas.
– Kristian Niemietz, who stonks the NHS in an article from 2014 called The Maggie Simpson delusion: the NHS is not ‘ours’
Finally, contemporary feminists do not believe that women are independent, free-thinking individuals. Feminists promote a cliquey, sisterhood mentality, but not through a collective and positive sharing of ideas. They’re the kind of group you’d encounter at school who would shun you if you weren’t wearing the right kind of hairband. Today’s feminism is opposed to criticism and nuance, refusing to allow women to form their own opinions or challenge preconceived ideas. And feminists call for the state to intervene when they want an opposing view silenced, and launch Twitter wars against dissenting views.
– Ella Whelan
For the benefit of my foreign readers, I should make clear that despite the protestations of the current dork masquerading as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church of England is not the national religion, it is the NHS! The people of Britain (dread words!) kneel and pray to it in adoration despite it being the biggest Ponzi scheme ever invented – well, it was but those ‘damn Yankees’ have out-done us again with their ludicrous ‘Obamacare’ nonsense. But perhaps the financial tectonic plates just shifted and finally reality will bring the temple crashing down.
– David Duff
The point of free markets is to allow free action in the economic sphere so that people (individually and working together) can achieve their objectives. For some this might be more family life and less work; for others an interest in eating organic produce; some people might want to work for a co-operative (even if their productivity and wages were lower); and so on. All sorts of people – not just women – make choices that reduce their measured productivity, hours worked and wages and so do not maximise measured economic growth.I work for a charity and not a hedge fund; my wife teaches French and decided not to be a lawyer. My wife works shorter hours than me. We both work shorter hours than the Chief Executive of Goldman Sachs. Would Nicky Morgan have a problem with this?
In a free society, labour market outcomes are a product of preferences. Women may well prefer to work more flexible hours, shorter hours, closer to home, in jobs that fit in better with child care, and so on. Some women may wish to give up work altogether for a period of time (perhaps for life). Others might not. But, if women choose to combine family-friendly work with family life, this does not damage the economy or reduce productivity. It is the outcome of people’s own preferences: and, acting in accordance with their preferences, people maximise their welfare. These decisions are often taken despite the fact that the state heavily weights the dice against women choosing to work at home, both by the shape of the tax and benefits system and the existence of state-subsidised childcare.
– Phil Booth, knocking it for six at the IEA
If Russia’s defense ministry really does believe that all the missiles found their intended targets, those sheep must have been up to something
– Dave Majumdar & John Allen Gay
I have been re-reading Mark Steyn’s amusingly-written prediction of America’s coming Apocalypse, noting those parts where his predictions seem to be on course (debt, rising bureaucracy) and those which suggest there’s more vigour in that country than the doomsters suggest (fracking, the continued innovations of its businessmen and women, etc). I am not on the same page with Steyn about everything – he is more of a social conservative and culture pessimist than I am, but most of his points hit home or at least are a spur to change course. There is a laugh-out-loud paragraph on every page and this one in particular, on page 75, caught my eye. Steyn writes about the “stimulus” programme of the Obama administration:
“What sort of jobs were “created or saved”? Well, the United States Bureau of the Public Debt is headquartered in Parkersberg, West Virginia – and it’s hiring! According to the Careers page of their website: `The Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD) is one of the best places to work in the federal government. When you work for the BPD, you’re a part of one of the federal government’s most dynamic agencies.'”
“Most dynamic agencies”.
Have a good weekend.
Vox Day is a game designer, science fiction and fantasy writer, blogger, and a prominent figure in the #GamerGate and Sad Puppies movements. His book SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police describes social justice warriors and is a strategy guide for dealing with them and for winning the larger culture war.
SJWs are the people whose hobby it is to get offended.
They have also invented the useful concept of the “microaggression”. This is an inadvertent offense committed by an offender who violates the Narrative without even realizing he has done so. It is the most insidious violation because it means that the hate is buried so deeply inside the offender that he doesn’t even realize it is there. Needless to say, SJWs have a highly developed ability to observe these microaggressions being unwittingly committed.
They would be nothing more than a minor annoyance if they did not currently seem to have the ability to cause the sort of controversy that can lose people like Brendan Eich or Tim Hunt their jobs for having the wrong kind of opinion or making the wrong kind of joke.
It contains the sort of advice that should be passed onto one’s children:
The reason SJWs demand apologies is in order to establish that the act they have deemed an offense is publicly recognized as an offense by the offender. The demand for an apology has nothing whatsoever to do with the offender. It is focused on the SJW’s need to prove that the violation of the Narrative involved is publicly accepted as a real and legitimate offense for which punishment is merited. […] it is absolutely and utterly futile for the target of an SJW attack to apologize for whatever offense he is said to have caused
This is indeed what happened to Eich and Hunt. Once they apologised, the media attacks only increased.
There is also advice for the sort of people who feel the need to post articles like this as Samizdata Illuminatus:
It’s much easier to put pressure on someone who works for a university or a large corporation because the attacking SJW knows that he can count on the support of fellow SJWs in the faculty or the Human Resources department. […] The action itself only matters insofar as it indicates that the individual is a Bad Person, and since there is NO PLACE for such Bad Persons in the university, the corporation, the club, the group, or the organization, the only possible solution is for the target to be promptly expelled.
There is a chapter that describes the various stages of an SJW attack, from the moment you wake up to a Twitter storm demanding your scalp to the demands for an apology to your final ejection from polite society. Then there is a follow-up chapter explaining how to deal with each of these stages and maybe even put your attackers on the back foot by not playing along how they expect.
The first thing to do when attacked by SJWs is to recognize that you are under SJW attack, remain calm, and realize that no one else cares. […] A refusal to play along with their game quickly strips the mask of sanity from their faces and reveals the angry, shrieking madness underneath.
→ Continue reading: Vox Day on Social Justice Warriors
I believe current dogma is that men and women are absolutely and completely identical except men are bastards.
– Samizdata commenter “Ellen”
What would cutting Canada’s emissions in half really look like? Which schoolbuses and fire trucks would Mulcair say we shouldn’t use any more? Which farms will be shut down? Which factories? (Has Mulcair he told his union friends about that last part?)
Mulcair’s plan will cripple our country without changing the world’s temperature one degree. Because as the UN IPCC itself admits, even if every country in the world obeyed the Kyoto Protocol, including China, it would not change the temperature of the world by 1/100th of one degree, even after 100 years.
These cap and trade schemes are really about deindustrializing the West, and crippling capitalism and progress.
– Ezra Levant
I cannot now remember any more than the general sense of a comment that was deleted by the moderators to this Guardian article:
Rihanna calls Rachel Dolezal ‘a bit of a hero’
(Dolezal, you may recall, was a white woman who pretended to be a black woman. Rihanna is a popular musical performer.)
But the general sense of the deleted comment was similar to these comments, as yet unmolested:
“Changing race pales into insignificance compared to changing sex, but everyone who thinks ‘correctly’ pretends the later is possible and that the result is absolutely valid; it’s about time a famous cis-African spoke up on behalf of trans-African rights.”
“If you accept that Bruce/Caitlin Jenner is female I don’t see what’s wrong with accepting that Rachel Dolezal is black. Who are we to question her identity?”
“Totally agree. I don’t get it – if we can choose our sex based on what we ‘feel’ we identify with, despite physical biology, then why not for race?”
“If a man thinks he’s a woman and must henceforth be referred to as “she,” then why can’t a white woman be considered black if that’s what she thinks she is? Watching the Left grapple with this (cheering on one, while ridiculing the other) was an absolute treat.”
Being a libertarian is, well, very liberating. I do not have to contort myself to fit through the very oddly shaped hoop that demands acceptance of a man transitioning to a woman and demands condemnation of a white person transitioning to black. My exact attitude can remain in a state of Heisenbergian uncertainty. Everyone could be this happy if they could just drop the demand for public acquiescence. Yet it appears they cannot. The assertion that race is objective and gender subjective is so important to some people that an assertion to the contrary must be expunged by the Guardian‘s guardians of public decency. That gives me an idea. We can settle this once and for all in a manner acceptable to progressives and conservatives alike. Never mind having dissent expunged by the moderators, expunge it in blood. Let him, her or xem who will assert that he, she or xe will prove his, her or xir chosen gender and race upon the dead body of anyone denying it by the traditional means of trial by combat. That will get respect.
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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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