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.
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“Alex Salmond given part of the Stone of Scone by son of student who stole it”, reports the Telegraph:
Alex Salmond was given part of the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, by the son of one of the students who stole it from Westminster Abbey, newly released Scottish Cabinet papers have disclosed.
Prof Sir Neil MacCormick presented the then First Minister with part of the stone, on which kings and queens of Scotland were traditionally crowned, in 2008.
Sir Neil’s father, John MacCormick, advised and bankrolled the Glasgow University students who took the 150kg stone from the Abbey on Christmas Day 1950.
So Professor Sir (note the Sir!) Neil MacCormick felt free to give away this historic artefact because he inherited it from his father, who stole it while it was on display to the public. And Mr Alex Salmond, presumably on the strength of then being First Minister of Scotland, felt free to take an object of significance in Scottish history into his personal possession as if it were a mere curio. Nice to see the right of conquest and the hereditary principle being reaffirmed in this day and age.
“I stayed up last night… Not so much to welcome the new year, but to make sure the old one leaves…”
– Ben David, in the comments to the previous post.
Still, hope springs eternal in the human breast. 2024, here we come.
…real pain for my sham friends. Bring consternation to your enemies by having a splendid and productive New Year.
This post is reposted from a source I do not trust (Double Down News) by a person I do not trust (Dr Susan Michie, adviser to the SAGE committee and literal communist) on a topic (the Israel-Hamas war) where AI-generated fakery is rampant. Remember the six-fingered Palestinian child?
Closer examination give yet more causes for doubt – the bizarrely elongated finger on the left hand of the soldier second from the left, the way that, perhaps in compensation, the right hand of the rightmost man seems to have no fingers at all. There is something wrong about the bipod of his rifle, too. The angle of the windows on the left of the picture looks off. The flame coming out of the window is too neatly defined.
But what interests me is that I thought “AI-generated” before I looked closely enough to see any of that. Possibly the thing that tipped me off, if I am right at all, was that all the elements of the alleged photograph looked exposed to the same degree, when one would think that the glow of the flames would dominate. Even that form of words, which I got from my husband, is more explanatory than whatever it was that screamed “fake” to me.
That said, this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer.
To say our elites have a blindspot where anti-Semitism is concerned is a grotesque understatement. Having spent years obsessing over fantasy forms of racism and fascism, having spent years soberly telling us that Boris Johnson was Eton’s answer to Hitler, the great and good look upon Jew-hating marches, attacks and even terror plots… and it barely registers.
Whether these people are ignoring anti-Semitism, making excuses for it, or participating in it, the story remains the same. Our supposedly ‘anti-racist’ betters, people who during the Black Lives Matter uprising just two years ago were taking knees and ‘doing the work’ and tweeting #SilenceIsViolence from their £4million townhouses, are so marinated in a divisive identity politics and a demented ‘anti-imperialism’ that they see Jews as ‘white’ oppressors, even when they’re being beaten up, and Israel as the aggressor, even when it is under attack.
The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ over the barbaric rise of anti-Semitism reminds us that these people were never anti-racists at all.
– Tom Slater
We also visited the sense-dulling intersection of sports, wokeness, and science journalism, via the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, in which we were told, “The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences, but of biases in how they are treated in sport.” That such male-female differences and their implications for athletes have been widely studied and quantified seemed somehow to have escaped detection. That Allyson Felix, an 11-time Olympic track and field medallist, would place six hundred and eighty-ninth on a ranking of high-school boys was one of many details carefully avoided. And which again suggests that wokeness is actively stupefying, a kind of rapid-onset morony.
– David Thompson, presenting us with a roundup of 2023’s lunatic antics. Read the whole thing and prepare to be stupefied by the cavalcade of idiocy.
“Anglis adhuc mundum regit, sed id necessario OK non est. Tempus est vim suam cohibere?”, writes Michele Gazzola in the Guardian.
Pro disertis, clara sunt beneficia — aliis, sunt ingentia gratuita. Hic viae sunt nonnullae ad boost iustitiam linguisticam
I’ll start.
Javier Milei.
Lots of space launches.
And?
Taking a Christmas break from my customary snarkiness, I mean this without irony. I would like to make one of those motivational posters with an inspirational quotation or slogan on it. The slogan would express an idea that I already believe strongly, only I have not yet found the best way to express it.
The starting point is a slogan that has many variants, but the version I saw first and like best is:
“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was always yours. If it does not, it never was.”
Knowing my audience, I shall link to the demotivational version as well. It’s a quote from B.J. Novak, who was probably a ray of sunshine until he played the temp in the American version of The Office.
So, the slogan for which I reach is similar to that one (the motivational version, not Novak’s), but is about acceptance rather than love. Something like:
“If you seek acceptance, don’t demand it, ask for it. If the other person says yes, you know you are truly and freely accepted. If they say no,
Then what? I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure if it’s even a good idea to mention the consequences of the other person saying “no”. I suppose I could say “better to be aware they do not accept you than to be deceived by them feigning acceptance out of fear, which will probably lead to them stabbing you in the back whenever they get the chance”, but that one’s a bit of a downer to put on a poster. The point I really want to make is that true acceptance cannot be had if the person being asked to do the accepting does not have the option to say “no”.
The reason I seek a more pithy way to express this sentiment than anything I have come up so far is that, as I said a few years back in a post called “To knock on the door is better than booting it in”, “Like some warrior cultures of old, the grievance culture holds getting what you want by asking or peaceably trading to be fit only for slaves. The superior person does not ask for what they want; they demand it.” This attitude is culturally dominant in both senses.
I can see why this disastrous misapprehension arose. There are circumstances where the only moral course is to demand one’s just rights as rights, with not the slightest hint of pleading. But there can be no right to be accepted, just as there can be no right to be loved.
Javier Milei gave a speech:
He says a lot of good things of the sort that have been said on this blog: socialism causes economic failure and costs lives; the individual is more important than the state; it is better if everything not forbidden is permitted than if everything not permitted is forbidden; politicians are not God; fiscal deficit is bad.
I hope that he means it, and that he can do it, and that he is not undermined by the civil service, or by whatever Argentina has in the way of a “deep state”. It would be good to see Argentina getting wealthy again. It would be bad if there are further disasters and they can be conveniently blamed, by those with bad ideas, on these good ideas that Milei is talking about.
First Minister
@ScotGovFM
On the 35th anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster, First Minister @HumzaYousaf has expressed sympathies to those who lost loved ones on board Pan Am Flight 103 and on the ground.
The word “disaster” has its origins in astrology. It means “ill-starred”. But the people killed on 21st December 1988 were not killed by bad weather, human error, or an unfortunate conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. They were murdered.
Pan Am Flight 103 (PA103/PAA103) was a regularly scheduled Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via a stopover in London and another in New York City. The transatlantic leg of the route was operated by Clipper Maid of the Seas, a Boeing 747 registered N739PA. Shortly after 19:00 on 21 December 1988, while the aircraft was in flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, it was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew in what became known as the Lockerbie bombing.[1] Large sections of the aircraft crashed in a residential street in Lockerbie, killing 11 residents. With a total of 270 fatalities, it is the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom.
[…]
In 2003, Gaddafi accepted Libya’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid compensation to the families of the victims, although he maintained that he had never given the order for the attack.
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