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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Political and economic theories are never implemented in pure form, and their adherents are rarely impressed by politicians who claim to be inspired by them. That’s just par for the course. Marxists, however, are pretty much the only thinkers who accept no responsibility whatsoever for real-world approximations of their ideas. Third-Way advocates may have despaired over Blair, Hayekians can – and do – rant all day about Thatcher’s shortcomings, and ordoliberals have written scathing condemnations of Konrad Adenauer. But ask them whether they think those respective governments did more good than harm on balance; ask them whether they think those governments were preferable to the next likely alternatives – and you will get an unambiguous and unqualified “Yes!” as an answer.
In contrast, hardly any contemporary Marxist would accept that whatever ‘real’ socialism is – surely, East Germany was at least closer to it than West Germany, North Korea is at least closer to it than South Korea, Venezuela is at least closer to it than Peru, Maoist China was at least closer to it than Taiwan, etc.
And why would they? It works for them. Every other idea is judged by its necessarily crude, incomplete and imperfect real-world approximations, warts and all. Only Marxism has the luxury of being judged purely as a set of ideas, which something as mundane as real-world experience could never blemish.
– Kristian Niemietz
If we’ve got to apply the full nelson to get the governmental apparatus to do something obviously both morally and pragmatically correct then why in buggery would we give them more power over our lives? This is something that could and should have been settled before even the decision to go in. That it wasn’t is evidence that government ain’t very good at doing things, isn’t it?
– Tim Worstall
This universe has finite resources, finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist. It needs correcting.
Avengers: Infinity War spoilers below.
→ Continue reading: Samizdata movie spoiler quote of the day
Writing in CapX, Chris Deerin argues that opposition to ID cards is out of date. He seems to agree that they may solve problems including terrorism and mis-treatment of immigrants. He suggests that government would be better if we did not need to leave the house to talk to it; that democracy would be better if we could vote online. He suggests that because some people are horrified by Facebook’s sharing of data while others happily tell Facebook everything, that we should all be happy to tell the government everything.
He suggests that because people under the age of 25 enjoy the convenience and fun of online services from private companies, that they should also enjoy being forced to sign up to a single unified government database too.
Not many in that generation would choose to return to an era of privacy if it meant giving up the treasures of their online existence. It seems faintly ridiculous that in such a climate we are reluctant to allow the state to jump on board.
He suggests that because people voluntarily hand over information of their choosing to companies even though those companies sometimes make mistakes and leak information, that they are silly to be nervous of being forced to hand over whatever information the government wants to be stored on a centralised government database. As if it is just the same thing.
The entire article is nonsense that ignores the fundamental difference between the state and private individuals: that we do not interact with the state voluntarily.
Whatever your views on free market principles, it is clearly dishonest to imply that those who support tax cuts, lower government spending and greater economic freedom do so in the belief that some wealth will belatedly “trickle down” to the poorest in society or because they view entrenching wealth amongst the privileged as an end in itself. Free marketeers would instead argue that allowing people to pursue all the opportunities they can through free exchange, with the minimal amount of government interference, will lead to generalised wealth creation. The virtue of cutting taxes is not that it benefits the rich, but that it benefits everyone.
– Madeline Grant
The author is commenting on what appears to be a shoddy misrepresentation of the ideas of persons such as the late FA Hayek. Interestingly, one of the writers of the book in question, Angela Eagle, had attempted to run against current hard left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. But it appears Eagle’s understanding of the classical position is terrible and her opposition to such freedoms as we enjoy seems clear. So the question I ask is that if Eagle and her allies are the “moderates”, then in what ways can they possibly be any better than Corbyn, apart from perhaps being less indulgent to anti-semites and certain other thugs?
I like this, about Jordan Peterson, in Esquire, by Wesley (good name, considering his subject) Yang:
Many of Peterson’s seemingly grandiose pronouncements are, in fact, quite modest. He is often derided for repackaging banal common sense in a vague and pretentious idiom, and there is something to this. Peterson is an apologist for a set of beliefs that we once took for granted but now require an articulate defense, such as: Free speech is an essential value; perfect equality inevitably conflicts with individual freedom; one should be cautious before attempting to reengineer social institutions that appear to be working; men and women are, in certain quantifiable respects, different. His life advice concerns the necessity to defer gratification, face up to the trials of life with equanimity, take responsibility for one’s own choices, and struggle against the temptation to grow resentful. How such traditional values came to be portrayed as a danger adjacent to Nazism is one of the puzzles of our time.
The next paragraph solves this puzzle:
Viewed another way, Peterson’s intellectual project is exceedingly immodest, and can be stated in a sentence: He aims at nothing short of a refounding of Western civilization, to provide a rational justification for why the materialists of the digital age should root themselves in the soil of Christian ethics despite having long ago lost the capacity for faith.
The more rabid leftists call anything they don’t like Nazi. And the thing they dislike most is The West, which they want trashed. The West’s power, and everything good that The West stands for. Anything – anything – which is anti-West, they support.
Jordan Peterson is preaching virtues, public and personal, virtues which are the total opposite of Nazism and which might, unlike Nazism, greatly strengthen The West, by persuading a generation of Western and Westernised wastrels to sort themselves out, and to have good lives with good consequences. Therefore Peterson must be denounced as a Nazi, regardless of what he says he is, and regardless of what he actually says about the Nazis.
Obviously he did on his last day, as the wolves killed him. But earlier, when he enjoyed making the villagers run at his command, did the boy who cried wolf believe in wolves? Did he tell himself that every flash of a squirrel’s tail could be a wolf? Did he think all real wolves had been frightened off long ago? Was he just living in the moment, in the intoxication of his power, not thinking of the morrow at all? Or was he too sure that people would always come running when he cried “Wolf” – so they’d still come if there ever really were wolves.
My left-wing friends – those who discuss politics with me – are (obviously 🙂 ) willing to discuss politics with someone like me. They belong to that (dwindling?) band on the left who don’t think the right answer to every question is to call it ‘hate speech’. So they cannot answer easily this question:
do the people who believe in ‘hate speech’ believe in the hatred they say fills that speech? Do the boys and girls who cry ‘hate speech” really believe that anyone’s hatred but their own will ever cause more than willfully-indulged hurt feelings?
How would we know?
– We know what the ‘hate speech’ enforcers say in public (no right-winger can live in a bubble today – which is great for our cognitive diversity), but that just tells me that the boy who cries wolf is crying “Wolf”.
– We can talk to any left-wing friends who haven’t (yet) been cast out for knowing us. But all I know from mine is typified by the one who told me that, since the election of Trump, her west-coast liberal friends were ‘hysterical’ – true, I do not doubt, but more a description than an explanation.
Does anyone know more?
[ADDED LATER: a Quillette article on The Boy Who Inflated the Concept of ‘Wolf’ provides a related take.]
Have a great or at least an interesting Beltane, or if you prefer, have a suitably reflective Gulag Remembrance Day
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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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