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]
Let me say this upfront: I was not Charlie Kirk’s biggest fan, nor was I a bitter detractor. I saw him in cynical terms and still do, as an ally of convenience on some issues, an opponent on others. As I am very much in favour of free speech, I am perfectly happy to see his image raised as a political icon, a literal free speech martyr.
Being a family man with much to live for, I venture with confidence Charlie Kirk would have rather not been assassinated. But nevertheless having been murdered by some trans-fixated politically motivated lunatic, Kirk is perhaps looking down from the heaven he believed in feeling vindicated, pleased that at least his death mightily serves a cause he strongly believed in.
I do find it interesting to see this AI generated meme appearing, showing political activist Charlie Kirk and Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska…
Both were murdered whilst on video. Iryna Zarutska was stabbed by a racially motivated serial-offender a couple weeks before Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Kirk spoke out about her murder, horrified by the vile senseless crime captured in slow motion for all to see. And of course he cared, Iryna was murdered by a US national in the United States of America.
But Kirk was not keen on supporting Ukraine against mass-murderous Russia, which was what had driven Iryna to become a refugee in the USA. Had she died in Ukraine in a Russian missile strike on an apartment block, her passing would not warrant a mention, just another nameless victim of the Russian imperialism Kirk would rather not see a single US cent spent opposing.
Charlie Kirk was deeply religious, claiming this was his strongest motivation, which was probably true. He was also a nationalist, and in that particular Gott mit uns strain of American Christianity, maybe Charlie Kirk did not see the tension between his indifference to the victims of the war in Ukraine and his Christianity, possibly seeing the narrow interests of the USA and God as being one and the same. But perhaps my own aggressively secular sensibilities are showing.
So, I am happy to see him exploited as a free speech martyr, even though I did not particularly like the man, and I am confident Charlie Kirk would have been perfectly ok with that too.
It has been interesting to see the predictably alarmed reactions to the huge march in London organised by Tommy Robinson et al.
One remark I heard on a video was “The most alarming aspect of the event was just how normal the vast majority of the marchers were… the sort of people you’d meet in a country pub, or at a half-time queue for the loo or a concert.”
At first, my reaction to hearing that was “surely the normality of the crowd should have made the march less alarming”… but then I realised the marchers not being stereotypical bovver boys makes plausibly labelling the demonstration as “far-right” vastly harder.
Yes, I can see how that might alarm some people as the magic words racist, fascist, and far-right lose their power from years of overuse and the fact there were reggae bands and alarmingly black faces in the crowd.
Imagine facing your nation’s Supreme Court for the “crime” of sharing a Bible verse. On October 30, that’s the reality for Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish grandmother, medical doctor, and parliamentarian. Her soon-to-be seven-year ordeal began in 2019, when she questioned her church’s support for Helsinki Pride and posted a Bible verse on X. That single tweet triggered 13 hours of police interrogation, two full trials, and now a third prosecution under Finland’s “hate speech” law.
Räsänen’s case might sound like an exclusively European story — but it also serves as a warning about the growing threat of censorship coming from the EU. While someone living outside of Europe might assume they are exempt from the troubling wave of censorship spreading across the continent, that assumption is dangerously mistaken.
I find it personally deeply upsetting. Kirk was a very religious-y person and I’m an implacable atheist, so there there lots of things I disagreed with him on. But what he encapsulated to me is “free speech”. He debated with everyone, openly, without hostility, honestly, directly. He was without guile, laid it out on the table, kind to a fault, and, most dangerously of all to the left, extremely convincing. To me that makes him one of the greatest men of the 21st century. Free speech is, to me, probably the greatest virtue and basic foundation of all of society, and yesterday the men who couldn’t win the argument took out its greatest, happiest warrior.
David Eltis, described by Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University as “the world’s leading scholar of the slave trade”, reckons that nineteenth-century expenditure on slavery-suppression outstripped the eighteenth-century benefits. And the political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, have concluded that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade alone in 1807–67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”.
The African Union’s demand for colonial reparations is an act of cynical opportunism. But unless our elites learn to care less about signalling their virtue and more about doing justice to their own country’s historical record, it will cost us all.
“Unfortunately, the current Labour government, like every unpopular administration before it, has reached for the oldest trick in the book, persecuting the law-abiding. Sunak did it with smoking bans and talk of national service, Starmer is doing it with the motorist. The plan includes mandatory eye tests for older drivers, stripping pensioners of their independence and dumping the cost onto the already-buckling adult social care system when Dad now needs a taxi just to get to the shops. It lowers the drink-drive limit from 35 to 22 micrograms, despite Britain already having the second-lowest drink-driving deaths in Europe. There is even talk of slashing the national speed limit in the countryside to 50 mph — a direct attack on rural life, where the car is not a luxury but a necessity.”
One of the problems with certain types of new regulation is getting them enforced. If the cops are too busy going around pinching people for saying mean things on social media, how are they going to enforce some of this nonsense?
Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer, who is not exactly loved in the rural parts of the UK, is still in thrall, as far as I can tell, to a form of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to risk and safety. And he may think that he might as well stick it to rural people who need to use a car as they will be very unlikely to vote for him. There may be a sort of “damn you bastards” reflex here. I recall that he was a fan of lockdowns, and while he remains in power, there is a risk that he’d impose them if international organisations demand it. The authoritarian itch is powerful in “Capt. Hindsight”.
Less negatively, there may be a warped kind of mistaken desire to improve humanity going on here (shades of the old “nudge” issue I wrote about a few days ago, although we are now in open coercion territory.) According to this way of thinking, it is better to pile on costs and inconvenience to everyone if it saves a single life, whether that means cutting rural speed limits, making granddad check his eyes regularly (I have some sympathy for this, after all, pilots are regularly checked out) and reducing alcohol. There is a sort of cost-benefit analysis that can be done to figure out what the unintended consequences of certain measures are. Unfortunately, fatal/near-fatal car accidents make for horrible headlines (and they are horrible, period), while the increasing drudgery and cost of living in a heavily regulated country does not translate so well into news stories. That is a factor that explains the rise of Big Government more generally: the whole issue of “what is seen and what is unseen”, as Bastiat described it.
All this heavy-handedness is is a reason, I think, why we need more of the pro-safety elements at work to come from insurance. If an elderly person does not get their eyes tested and they are involved in a crash, or they don’t have tyres with a minimum grip, or they haven’t had an MOT test, then that means an insurance policy does not pay out, etc. Let those who make a living out of correct risk assessment drive such things (pardon the pun) and not a political class that seems to crave this sort of micro-management of our waking hours.
But then as long as we have “our NHS” socialist model of healthcare, it will always be argued, by those of a communitarian bent, that those who fail to minimise risks to others impose unwanted costs on innocent third parties, and to “save” the NHS, such regulations, however far-reaching, must be enforced. But this, in my view, is an argument against socialised medicine, not for increasing regulation.
This is where the worship of “expert” peer review science gets us — a science crime syndicate.
Once science stopped being about winning arguments and became just the-number-of-papers-someone-published, it became an empty shell. And once billions of dollars, depended on sacred ‘experts’, it was doomed.
Long gone are the days when papers were hardly ever retracted and pal review was “the big problem? Now, fake papers and fake editors are so rife they are their own specialist industry. Networks of brokers connect paper-mills up with authors and publishers and place batches of papers in journals with ‘friendly editors’. When Richardson et al analyzed PLOS ONE, they found 33 editors who seemed to have an extraordinarily high rate of retractions. One in particular had approved 79 papers of which, 49 had already been retracted.
Labour bigwigs have spent so long portraying themselves as morally superior that they have come to believe their own hype. They really do seem to think they are, as a group, almost beyond reproach. That they are the good guys, the virtuous ones. What they lack in any substantial political vision for Britain, they make up for in skyscraping self-righteousness. Which blinds them to their own hypocrisy.
Today, tutoring is seen mostly as a corrective to failures within the bureaucratic structures of education, like an intervention to help out a course, grade, or test. In general, those doing well in school don’t get tutoring—it’s like we’re applying the secret genius sauce solely to the kids who aren’t going to be geniuses.
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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