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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“Stone Age Herbalist” is a pseudonym adopted out of necessity by someone who wants to practise an activity condemned by respectable society: scientific archaeology. Their piece for Unherd is called “The Rise of Archaeologists Anonymous”.
Why do these academics seek to do in secret what they used to do openly in the universities? Because academic archaeology has changed:
Historian Wolf Liebeschuetz and archaeologist Sebastian Brather, to pick on just two, have both firmly insisted that archaeology must not, and cannot, be used to trace migrations or identify different ethnic groups in prehistory. To quote from Liebeschuetz’s 2015 book, East and West in Late Antiquity: “Archaeology can trace cultural diffusion, but it cannot be used to distinguish between peoples, and should not be used to trace migration. Arguments from language and etymology are irrelevant.”
At a stroke, this line of reasoning would essentially abolish several centuries of work unravelling the thread of movements and evolution of the Indo-European peoples and languages, not to mention the post-Roman Germanic Migration Period, Anglo-Saxon invasions, Polynesian and Bantu Expansions and almost all major changes in the human record.
and
This became clearer than ever following the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which saw archaeology departments and professional bodies across the world fall over themselves to pledge curriculum “decolonisation” and an explicit commitment to politicising the discipline. To quote from the “’The Future of Archaeology Is Antiracist’: Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter”, published in American Antiquity:
“Consequently, Black archaeology has been and must remain purposeful in practice. It rejects research and practices defined in sterile, binary terms of objective-subjective positionality. Archaeology at historic Black sites must be conducted with an explicit politics… To the field of archaeology, it serves as a moral guide with the potential to elucidate historical wrongs and explore forms of contemporary redress.”
This tweet by “the Rabbit Hole” is possibly the most damning, and the funniest, single image of media double standards I have ever seen:
In case someone else buys Twitter and it goes away, the image shows matched pairs of headlines from Vox, the Washington Post, Forbes, ABC News, the Insider, CNN, CNBC, the New York Times, the Verge and the AP. Every one of these outlets decided to run essentially the same pair of stories a few months apart. Taking but two examples,
The Insider said “Don’t blame Black Lives Matter protests for the spike in coronavirus cases across the US” and “The Capitol insurrection seems to have caused a superspreader event among lawmakers. Some Republicans refused to mask up.”
The Verge said, “Blaming protesters for COVID-19 spread ignores the bigger threats to health” and “COVID-19 cases in the Capitol are only the tip of the iceberg.”
And so on for the rest of them.
I can remember a time when if separate reports written by many different journalists in a whole bunch of famous newspapers and TV channels all said the same thing, it made me more likely to believe them.
Today is the 31st anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR, one of the most delightful events in history. Hopefully within the next 30 years Russia will be back to its 1263 borders 😀
It’s that time of year. Everything slows down and between the overeating, disappointing presents and family rows we have the opportunity to take stock and reflect on the year that has (almost) been.
And that means an opportunity to give a thought to those who have done the most in the fight against evil and communism. To this end I am introducing – on no one’s authority other than my own – the Samizdata Awards.
I propose the following categories. But please feel free to propose your own. We are libertarians after all. We believe that growing the awards pie is more important than how that pie is distributed. So:
- Second-best Man of the Year
- Post of the Year
- Meme of the Year
- Comment of the Year
- Fascist of the Year
I was going to have a “Man of the Year” but I think that one’s has been taken. “I need ammunition not a ride” may not have the poetry of “We’ll fight them on the beaches” but its galvanising effect was – and is – identical. But I am expecting some keen competition to be runner-up. My nomination is Toby Young. He does Daily Sceptic. He does the Free Speech Union. He does a podcast with James Delingpole. Indeed, he is still on speaking terms with Delingpole which shows unusual fortitude or possibly unusual greed.
Come to think of it I think “Fascist of the Year” is also spoken for. But who is the Reichsmarshall to Putin’s Führer? Nominations include Nadine Dorries, the FBI, anyone fired by Elon Musk and the University of Cambridge. But I am sure you can think of some of your own.
In the Post of the Year – and I apologize for the lack of levity – I propose this. It changed my mind on something and at my age that is a rare pleasure.
I think it only fair to point out that there will be no glitzy awards ceremony. There will be no tacky, gold-plated statuettes. There will be no expensive clothes, hairdos or coke habits. There will be very little vapidity or hypocrisy – deaths due to nuclear power little. At best we’ll have some recognition for those who’ve done some good; at worst an ever more fractious comment thread involving Paul Marks on some completely unrelated subject – probably Bitcoin.
If anything, our modern puritans are worse. At least the stiff folk of the 17th century believed reducing bodily pleasure would help expand the spirit, get one closer to God. The new puritans offer no such spiritual transcendence in return for our curbing of our blowouts – only the bovine payback of a slightly smaller waistline.
We eat around 6,000 calories on Christmas Day, disgusted experts say. We can do better than that. Start with a Buck’s Fizz breakfast; don’t scrimp on the Christmas-tree chocs; make brunch a sozzled, carb-heavy mix of your first beer and some Christmas panettone; everything for dinner should be cooked in turkey fat; follow that with a 1,174-cal slice of Christmas pudding; end with more booze and a selection box you don’t pick at but consume entirely. We can beat 6,000 calories. We owe it to old England and the original spirit of Christmas.
– Brendan O’Neill (£)
I’m up for embracing your admonition, Brendan, going to give it a serious try. Have a Merry Christmas all.
This video of a woman called Isabel Vaughan-Spruce being arrested for praying silently in Birmingham has gone viral. The version to which I link is from the Daily Caller. I have written my own transcription of the dialogue below. It differs from the subtitles provided by the Daily Caller in minor ways, mostly related to British police and legal terminology.
*
“Um, before I ask you any questions about what’s going on today, I have to caution you, which is just your rights, which is you do not have to say anything. It may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something that you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. What are you here for today?”
“Physically, I’m just standing here.”
“OK. Why here of all places? I know you don’t live nearby.”
“But this is an abortion centre.”
“OK. That’s why you’re stood here – because you standing here is part of a protest?”
“No. I’m not protesting.”
“Are you praying?”
“I might be praying in my head, not out loud.”
“So, I’ll ask once more, will you voluntarily come with us now to the police station for me to ask you some questions about today and other days where there are allegations that you’ve broken Public Spaces Protection Orders?”
“If I’ve got a choice, then no.”
“OK, well, then you’re under arrest upon suspicion of failing to comply with the Public Spaces Protection Order, which is under the Anti-Social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014. Now, I caution you again, you do not have to say anything. You may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something that you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand the caution?”
“I do, yes.”
“Your arrest is necessary in order for a prompt and effective investigation
into the offence. What that means is that I can ask you some questions [inaudible phrase]. I also have to protect vulnerable people, mainly service users, in the building. OK, so will you come please now to the police station. You’ll get booked in front of the custody sergeant, and then if you want a solicitor, you can have a solicitor [inaudible phrase]. OK? I don’t intend to handcuff you, but obviously my colleague will search you because we’re going to get into a police car and I need to make sure that you don’t have anything you could use to harm us or you could use to [inaudible phrase]”
*
She was then searched by a policewoman. I doubt the policeman was really that worried that Ms Vaughan-Spruce might harm him or his female colleague. To be fair to him, he was reasonably polite and even sounded a bit embarrassed. However he made it quite clear that the question he had to ask in order to decide whether to arrest her was whether she was silently praying, i.e. what was going on in her mind. He would not have had to ask if she had been praying out loud.
→ Continue reading: Arrested for her thoughts
Like so many things on the left, they went from asking us to tolerate something to demanding we celebrate it.
– Roger Williams
“The West is stagnating because it has grown neglectful of freedom.”
– Sherelle Jacobs
Dear all,
As we wind down for Christmas, it is important to ensure that we keep ourselves safe, and I have found this wonderful but short instructional video, purportedly from Finland c. 1979, helpfully showing how to open a door correctly. I would recommend turning on the English subtitles for most of us, but other subtitles are available for those of us unable to understand the wonderful Finnish language.
I have a nagging feeling that this might have been a parody of ‘health and safety’ instructional videos, but if that was its aim, it has failed miserably to stem the tide.
I was depressed to see Ros Kaveney tweeting this:
“I’ve sometimes been accused of being a psychopath and a liar for accusing GCs and their fascist allies of promoting genocide of trans people. The Lemkin Institute agrees with me.”
I briefly met Roz Kaveney many years ago, at a speech she gave. She dealt very patiently and graciously with the curiosity of her mostly student audience about her having had a sex change, at a time when it was much more rare to meet openly transgender people than it is now. I do not think she is a psychopath or a liar. I just think she has succumbed to the terrible effects of being in a social media reverberation chamber. I had heard of the Lemkin Institute, too, named after the scholar of genocide Raphael Lemkin, most of whose family were murdered in the Holocaust. The world is not yet safe from such horrors, as shown by the Institute’s pages on historical, ongoing and threatened genocides in places such as Armenia, Somaliland and Ukraine. It should get back to the day job, which urgently needs doing. The Lemkin Institute’s “Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice” is absurd.
I am not being sarcastic when I say that I admire the way that Nick Young, writing for Greenpeace Aotearoa (the country formerly known as New Zealand), at least has the guts to admit that Sri Lanka’s ban on chemical fertiliser was a disaster. In a piece called “Sri Lanka’s fertiliser ban and why New Zealand can phase out synthetic nitrogen fertiliser”, he gives his reasons for supposing that despite Sri Lanka’s experience, it will work next time. He is enthusiastic, for instance, about the prospects for the Indian state of Sikkim which has also prohibited chemical fertilisers. He writes,
The key thing to note is that it wasn’t something that happened overnight. And it didn’t happen because Sikkim’s shoppers suddenly decided to buy organic food or because its farmers woke up one day and decided to switch to organic with no support. It happened because the Sikkim Government used policies, public investment and a transition plan to make it happen.
It is strange to me to see someone delight in the fact that the choices of shoppers or farmers, the ordinary people whose lives would be affected most, played no part in this change.
This Guardian article is five years old now, but I would bet that the problems it describes have not gone away: “Sikkim’s organic revolution at risk as local consumers fail to buy into project.” More recently, Pawan Chamling, who as the then Chief Minister of Sikkim did much to put the policy in place, said that the current Sikkim government “has put Sikkim’s organic mission on the back burner”. He writes,
The organic mission has been totally wiped out of the government’s vocabulary and State budget. Not a single penny has been allocated towards organic farming. Even more alarming is that chemical fertilisers are being brought into the state and are freely sold in the market.
Freely sold and freely bought. Farmers making their own decisions. How awful.
Despite everything, I have nothing against organic farming. But the way that Sikkim being “100% organic”, a source of pride and a key part of Sikkim’s identity according to Mr Chamling, withered as soon the government subsidies dried up suggests that the change was never, if you will forgive the metaphor, organic in the first place. It was imposed from the top down. It had no roots.
In this sense, the problem of EU corruption, rather than being a bug in the system, should be seen as an inherent consequence of the supranationalisation of politics. Making the EU “more democratic” won’t change the fact that the lack of a European demos represents an insurmountable obstacle to the creation of a European democracy, even if Brussels was interested in going in that direction (which it isn’t). The number of corrupt officials involved in the amateurish Qatargate scandal is of little importance; for the EU, it is already too late.
– Thomas Fazi
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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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