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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Volume 9 of of the collected works of Kim Il Sung is now out, and Mick Hartley is having a hard job containing his excitement:
Let’s hope the book maintains the powerful tradition in Korean revolutionary literature of keeping sentences long, with plenty of clauses which further elaborate on the idea first mentioned in the opening clause, thereby ensuring that the original idea becomes ever more entrenched within the consciousness of the reader as the theme is expanded upon and elaborated, very much in the way that a piece of music takes an original theme which is then embellished and repeated in different formats and combinations, which serves to increase the power of the music and can similarly be a powerful device to increase the power of a revolutionary thought or indeed instruction from a Great or Dear Leader, even if there is a risk, among those perhaps insufficiently devoted to the drive towards a successful and dynamic socialist country, that the original thought that started the sentence may have been forgotten by the time the reader comes in, panting but nevertheless certainly wiser and also older, to the end of the sentence.
Hartley has also been very good on the lockdown.
So you don’t read people you disagree with? Do you at least read the CliffsNotes version to know if you actually disagree with them?
To be fair, not uncommon, which is why my party trick of attributing Mussolini quotes to Marx to see what someone really thinks works so well.
– Perry de Havilland
A guest post from Sandy Wallace
No-one from a nation that has never endured occupation should ever presume to sit in judgement on how vigorously those who have been occupied should have resisted occupation. I now realise that I too would have at best acquiesced to the occupation. Had I been in power, with my salary and pension dependent on my decision, I might have collaborated.
When Rishi Sunak announced his first great rescue package including the guarantee of 80% salary to anyone furloughed due to CoViD19, I took to my bed for six hours. I had only just got up after 8 hours sleep. When I returned to my computer I faced a wall of approval, from writers and commentators I considered to be to my right politically. He had just privatised the British state, without recourse to Parliament and he was the hero of the hour. I looked to see who would argue against the trashing of the economy for a generation. Douglas Carswell seemed to be my De Gaulle, but in truth he did little more than murmur doubts. There were many more Petains. At my minor level, I examined my position. As a Councillor elected as a Conservative who had resigned from the party at the height of May’s Brexit betrayal, leaving a pro-Remain and pro-Big Government Scottish Conservative Party, whose ruling Council administration group preferred if at all possible to give all power to our minority LibDem partners, I had been close to presenting a rival council budget proposal, a shadow quasi Conservative budget full of cuts to front line services to permit investment in capital projects. I had dropped my plans as CoViD now made my grandstanding seem self-indulgent rather than politically provocative. I sighed with relief at my near miss. I had misjudged the mood. Nobody cared about the principles of living within your means, of planning for the future. All that mattered was getting through the day.
Then my own daily travails interrupted. My two day a week sojourn at B&Q would be paid at 80% while I sat at home and got on with my hobby degree. As a school run taxi driver, I had asked to take three months off to focus on that degree. Now I would be paid 80% of what I would have earned based on what I earned last year. My degree funding was not only secure, the nod and wink indicated that even if I submitted no work I would still get nodded through to second year. My pay as a Councillor is unaffected. My wife, a senior nurse, and younger daughter, a junior nurse, were looking at unlimited overtime and public adulation. My elder daughter, a student, was now assured passage into third year. It dawned on me that with no travel costs and no eating out the future looked rosy. I took up camp with my elder daughter in her flat in a lovely village with pleasant country walks and a well-stocked Co_op.
I looked again at the decisions of the Johnson government. Should they have followed my instincts? No lockdown. Shield the elderly and the vulnerable, like my elder daughters immuno-deficient boyfriend, but let all normal life continue. Let the virus rip. Let the football league play out its conclusion and more to the point let out beloved Dundee Stars Elite Ice Hockey Club break our hearts and miss the playoffs. Such a government would probably have fallen within days, battered by the broadcast media, backbench rebellion and a nation that preferred to be kept safe from the unknown that they feared. Had they survived the month, then the elderly who by choice refused to be shielded would have pitched up in their thousands at A&E, to be faced with experienced nurses like my wife who triaged them on the doorstep and sent many of them home to die, to preserve the ICU beds for those who could be saved. Instead of admitting them so that they could die with every bit as much certainty. Had he survived the first month, Johnson would have fallen regardless and nation would be traumatised by the memory of grandparents sent home to die
Had I been in his shoes, I too would have sued for peace. My nation demanded it of me. I would have convinced myself it was the right thing and when the chest pain and cough arrived, I would have felt relief that I had made the correct call. I would have looked at the Malice of Piers Morgan and convinced myself that I was still moderate. I would have dismissed the feeble objections of lunatic libertarians.
When it’s over we can shave the heads of a few easy victims and vilify a few who enjoyed it too much. But I collaborated too.
I can think of little to add to what Andrew Tettenborn of Spiked has written about The SNP’s war on free speech:
In 2017, the SNP government decided this had to change. It appointed Lord Bracadale, a far from libertarian Scottish appeal judge, to review the matter. His spectacularly hardline report was published a year later. Based on this report, Holyrood now proposes leaving racial-hatred law largely alone while introducing, in effect, three new offences.
First: a general crime of doing anything, or communicating any material, which is threatening or abusive and is intended or likely to engender hatred based on age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender or intersex identity. Second: a crime of merely possessing any such material, if you hold it with a view to communicating it – that is, in any way to anyone either in public or in private (such as showing a computer file to a friend over a dram). Third: criminal sanctions on anyone involved in the management of any organisation who fails to take steps to prevent any of the above. The penalty in all the above cases is up to seven years inside. And in addition to all this, the government proposes stiffer sentencing for hate crimes based on age.
There is so much wrong with these proposals. For one thing, the whole idea that hostility should aggravate an offence in relation to certain characteristics but not others needs reining in, not extending. To say that assaulting someone because he is old (and within the charmed circle of victim categories) deserves a heavier sentence than assaulting a teenager because he is the teacher’s pet (and therefore outside it) is discriminatory, grotesque and insulting. It is the hostility that matters, not whether the target falls within a group which has managed to persuade a government that it deserves victimhood status.
Read the whole thing.
“Not allowed to travel. Police breaking up public gatherings. Empty shelves in shops. Have to queue for everything. I wonder why my parents keep acting like they’ve seen it all before?”
“Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the disease. The scolders who are being seduced by such thinking have to wake up, before we end up adding another disaster on top of the terrible one we’re already facing.”
– Matt Taibbi
The whole essay will, I bet, resonate with all you freedom lovers in the comments.
[Judge-only trials] also misses the actual point of a jury. We might think they’re there to evaluate evidence, decide what is right or wrong, to decide upon guilt of the accused. But they’re not. They’re there to decide whether a crime has been committed. Which includes telling the law, the judge, the politicians and the entire system to bugger off as and when 12 good men and true decide that this isn’t a crime.
Sure, the British legal system absolutely hates any mention of jury nullification. But that is what they’re actually there for. Which is why we shouldn’t do away with them.
– Tim Worstall
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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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