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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That many men were undone by not going deep enough in roguery; as in gaming any man may be a loser who doth not play the whole game. (Henry Fielding)
The temptation to go just deep enough but not too deep is very understandable. If Hillary had won in 2016, there is much we might never have suspected, let alone known, about how she was helped. It was a great surprise to the deep state to learn they had not gone deep enough.
This time round, they went deep enough. But history teaches us that that too has its problems. When you have to go deep indeed to go deep enough, even the most determined propaganda denial may have to ‘evolve’ over time.
For example, in December 1934, Stalin arranged for Kirov, head of the communist party in Leningrad, to be assassinated, and over the next few years convicted millions for being part of the ever-expanding conspiracy accused of the murder – but the story of how it happened kept changing.
Finally, in 1938, the Soviet view took the form it was to keep until 1956: … the assassination … had been facilitated by Yagoda, head of the Soviet secret police. … This change of line, which contained elements of the truth, was designed to mask or neutralise the real version, which began to circulate in the secret police within weeks of the crime … (Robert Conquest, The Great Terror)
It’s an old propaganda technique – but a risky one – to confirm a half-truth to mask the truth.
‘Time’ magazine is taking the lead in ‘evolving’ the MSM’s election narrative. As late as a week ago, it was “baseless” to claim that 2020’s huge increase increase in vote-by-mail (“the largest source of potential voter fraud“) had other suspicious characteristics. But now, the “safest election ever” was in fact “fortified” by an elite cabal.
This was not news to me, of course, but the spin may be a bit of a whiplash for some. I agree with Neo’s take: it was going to come out in time, so better for the cabal that it come out in ‘Time’; someone had to neutralise the truth. It’s the past tense of the woke Law of Merited Impossibility – not “That will never happen (and you’ll so deserve it when it does)” but “That never happened (and what a good thing it did)”. As the deep state went abruptly from not existing to being the heroes a year ago, so ‘Time’ has replaced ‘baseless” with praise of this solid base.
However if I were Joe Biden, I would rather have seen this article after more than a year in the White House than after less than a month.
Arguing with race-obsessives is like walking into a room full of Hitler Youth or Red Guard and expecting to have a rational discussion. Stop wasting your time with such people.
– Perry de Havilland
Tim Worstall was recently quotulated, and from that quotulation I extracted this much smaller quote:
The entire point of any form of automation is to destroy jobs so as to free up that labour to do something else. The new technology doesn’t create jobs, it allows other jobs to be done.
Well it’s a snappy quote, but I disagree. The entire point? Surely, part of the point of automation is, often, to make certain sorts of product possible that otherwise wouldn’t be possible, many of which products make other sorts of work both necessary and possible. The point of automation, to use a well-worn metaphor, is not merely to break eggs, in the form of existing jobs that it destroys; it is also to create new kinds of omelette in the form of new products previously unmakeable and new jobs previously undoable, by creating inputs and materials for these new jobs that used not to exist. Oftentimes, new technology does create new jobs, and often this happens on purpose. An often, that’s at the very least part of the point of the exercise. The new technology does not merely allow other jobs, jobs in general, to be done by those it throws out of their existing jobs. It creates particular new jobs that people must then be hired to do.
I think I get where Worstall is coming from. The grand aim of economic life is to create a world that requires us all to do less work rather than merely to remain on progressively more elaborate treadmills and still slaving away at the same old pace for the same old number of hours, for the same old money. But, he overstates that case. The “purpose” of any particular enterprise can be whatever may reasonably be expected to result from it. That can indeed be more freed up labour, but it can also be particular new kinds of labour, which are more fun, more significant, and better remunerated.
Also, the first impact of new technology is often to destroy existing jobs. But that is often only the beginning of the story, as those unleashing the new technology are typically well aware.
What Worstall says reminds me of that claim that you regularly hear that “the entire purpose of any business is to make profits”. Again, snappy, but again, in most cases, wrong. Any enterprise must stay solvent. One way or another, it must pay its bills. But the idea that all that matters to the people who run some particular enterprise is its profitability is, more often than not, just plain wrong. Often, what unites them is not the love of profit but the love of making whatever they make, doing whatever they do. They know that they must be profitable, and can’t be too wasteful, but that’s because that way they get to keep on serving up this stuff, stuff that they love to create for its own sake.
Simon Gibbs has a suggestion for a way forward
We have been under house arrest now for 10 months. I think now is the time to demand a little bit of libertarianism.
Some of you might disagree with me over details of the science which I wrote about on Samizdata, but I am sure most of you agree that you want to be let out of your house and that you are willing to do something about it.
I have been watching the debate over Coronavirus response and it seems too binary. One side says let us out, the other says they can’t – we’ll die, or our mums will. The Government is following the science, says one, the Government isn’t doing enough, says another. This is immature.
What is missing is serious discussion of what the people could do to make themselves safe. Handwashing and masks feel like small-minded details, and plainly that message is not making any more free, or much safer.
Many of us are advocates for privately run social infrastructure. I am advocating, in plain sight of my employer, a bit of privately managed Public Health infrastructure. A system, or an agreement really, that if a business that is otherwise unsafe (by mainstream opinion) to be open in a pandemic might choose to run Public Health screening – a testing program – at it’s own front door. That it might, without compulsion, use a bit of cheap technology to reduce the risks for its customers of coming into its premises.
The petition wording is not entirely of my creation, it was edited by the petitions team after a long delay. I didn’t want to specify what kind of test would be used. I’m sure I don’t know enough about tests, or enough about the businesses that might benefit. Gyms, theatres, beauty salons, conference venues, and hotels are examples of businesses I think might benefit but it is not for me to decide. Nor is it for the Government to decide.
All I am asking is that if a business wants to have a serious go at keeping customers safe (or even safer, if you prefer), then it should be up to the people involved to set that up and make that happen.
If we demand this freedom, we might get it. If we don’t then it is likely all of us will need to wait until everyone over 50 is vaccinated. That is too long already. Please support this demand by signing the petition.
The chief publicist of the post-Cold War order was Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1992 book The End of History argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall Western liberal democracy represented the final form of government. What Fukuyama got wrong after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t his assessment of the strength of political forms; rather it was the depth of his philosophical model. He believed that with the end of the nearly half-century-long superpower standoff, the historical dialectic pitting conflicting political models against each other had been resolved. In fact, the dialectic just took another turn.
Just after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western democratic principles transforming the CCP, the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years.
– Lee Smith, The Thirty Tyrants
Brian Micklethwait has long observed that a company building a large new vanity HQ is highly corelated with the long march into decline 😀
That said, they have the world’s governments slaughtering their competition, so maybe wait a few years to go short.
Stop press: Continental Telegraph seems to be making the same observation.
A totalitarian state cannot tolerate privacy, even and especially within the family, the last redoubt of dissent. Hate-speech laws do not yet cover what you say in the privacy of your own home – you can’t be prosecuted for stirring up hatred at your dining table or in the bedroom.
The [law] commission, however, finds this idea of privacy intolerable. So, if it gets its way, any words you use in your own home that are ‘likely’, even by accident, to ‘stir up hatred’ against a vast array of ‘protected’ groups – including ‘punks’, if you can believe it – could get you sent to prison for seven years. These proposals will make parents fear their own children – and children fear their siblings.
– Radomir Tylecote
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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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