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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These fanatics are fond of pissing our money up the wall on their insane schemes. And I am not going to buy an electric car. These monstrosities are not remotely environmentally friendly. Smug, self-righteous arseholes in developed countries get to feel all self congratulatory about their lack of emissions while in developing countries child labour is used to destroy the local habitat, but who cares about brown people and wildlife if you can virtue-signal in your latest electric motor, eh?
Although I always thought Boris Johnson was something of a lightweight probably unfit for high office, even I have been surprised by just how bloody awful he has been since getting into Downing Street. We might just as well have elected Jeremy Corbyn.
– Longrider
Being generous, we could blame an incompetent Government blindsided by a ‘pandemic’ that hit just as it was popping the cork on finally ‘getting Brexit done’. But the actions it took went beyond naïvety and entered the realms of the Kafka-esque nonsensical. The last 18 months have been those of U-turns and false predictions followed by denials; hirings and firings of ‘experts’ paid to find or fabricate the evidence to fit the theory; promises to follow ‘the science’, to go by ‘data not dates’ – and then do the opposite. The mainstream media has refused to ask tough questions, social platforms have censored anything that doesn’t fit the fear narrative, scientists and medics and employees across the spectrum have lost their jobs and reputations for daring to speak out or refuse injection. The nurses on the ‘front line’ who worked around the clock last year without a vaccine will now be fired if they choose not to have one. This is their reward. The elites have flourished while the proles festered.
Much blame should be laid at the Government’s door for frightening its citizens and turning them into nodding, clapping, cheering automatons. But the people are not themselves entirely blameless, and tyranny does not operate in a vacuum. We are responsible for collectively swallowing the lies, the deceit, the buried evidence, the false predictions, the censored questions, the fairy tales told from Rose Gardens dreamed up in Barnard Castles in the air. Gullible en masse, we have refused to believe the evidence of our eyes, dropping last week’s headlines down the memory hole in favour of the latest scare, forgetting that the Government promised no further lockdowns, no vaccine passports, no jabbing of the under-18s, abandoning that most precious of resources: common sense. Why?
– Charlotte Niemiec
Journalists, like good novelists, should be curious about everything and empathetic about everyone. They should seek to tell a different story, not the story everybody else is telling. They should instinctively want to report on what it felt like to be Amy Cooper that morning in Central Park, as well as Christian Cooper. The corollary of this attitude is a deep suspicion of stories with angels and demons which perfectly fit our own story about how the world is. Moral clarity means nothing to report.
– Ian Leslie
“YouTube suspends Rand Paul for a week over a video disputing the effectiveness of masks”, reports the New York Times.
I have no strong opinion on the question, but Senator Rand Paul is also Doctor Rand Paul, so his medical opinion holds some weight. This post on Rumble takes you to the video that got him banned: “It Is Time For Unfiltered News”
As Glenn Greenwald points out,
JUST LAST WEEK: Biden’s former COVID adviser, the epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, told @camanpour [the CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour] exactly the same thing.
YouTube and Facebook* play a merry game. On April 16 2020, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity”, posted “An Update on Our Work to Keep People Informed and Limit Misinformation About COVID-19”. That post is as good as a soap opera; the writers are always adding new and dramatic plot twists.
On February 8, 2021 at 10:00AM PT, they announced that claims that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured” would be removed.
On May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT, they said, “In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”
In like spirit, Dr Paul is doing no more than returning to the medical orthodoxy before last. From the Independent, Thursday 12 March 2020:
Coronavirus: Face masks could increase risk of infection, medical chief warns
Members of the public could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting coronavirus by wearing face masks, one of England’s most senior doctors has warned.
Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer, said the masks could “actually trap the virus” and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in.
*I initially mistyped that as Facesbook, and my spellchecker, set, of course, to British spellings, suggested an amusing alternative.
“Politicians have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing renewable energy with no effect on climate. Nuclear power, which would sharply reduce CO2, is taboo among the greens. Innovation in developing low-cost natural gas, which substitutes for coal, may have done more than any government policy to reduce U.S. emissions. Yet President Biden wants to crush the gas industry with regulation. The IPCC report doesn’t justify putting the U.S. economy into the hands of government. A sensible climate policy will continue to monitor trends, while allowing a free economy to find solutions and build the wealth that will allow for adaptation and amelioration if the worst happens. This lacks the drama of the Apocalypse, but it will better serve the world.”
– Wall Street Journal, responding to the latest IPCC report on global warming (aka climate change).
Richard Tice, of Reform UK, has refuted Metro Bank’s claims that the party’s bank account was suspended as it was “no longer commercially viable”. Speaking at a press conference in Westminster, Mr Tice, 56, told journalists the suspension of the party’s bank account was a politically motivated act.
You would have to be remarkably naïve to think Metro Bank was not leaned on to undermine the primary electoral threat to Tory marginal seats. If they manage to eliminate Reform UK in this manner, the only way to express displeasure with the Tory Party is to vote for the even more monstrous Labour Party.
I am not currently planning on doing a tactical vote to try and destroy the Tory Party, so if Reform UK still exist come next election I will probably vote for them even though they will not win. But if they do not exist… who knows? As many have observed as of late, after the last year and a half, the differences between the Stupid Party and the Evil Party have narrowed very considerably, so perhaps the unthinkable is becoming thinkable.
The vulnerability of people expressing their views via other people’s platforms was pointed out by Glenn Reynolds back in the fairly early days of blogging when almost every blogger was hosted on a blogger.com site, with a .blogspot.com at the end (can’t find Glenn’s remark to that effect online but first half of the 2000’s I think). And .blogspot.com sites steadily became slow and buggy as hell. This technical risk largely ended when people moved away from the increasingly unreliable and clunky hosting and set up MoveableType or later WordPress sites hosted all over the place.
But by 2010, blogs were no longer at the centre of what was now being called ‘social media’, with Facebook and Twitter being where the mass eyeballs were, blogs becoming more of a niche thing. This brings us back to the risks Glenn warned of, but dialled up to 11 this time, with less technical and more political concerns.
I am seeing an interesting development in response to Big Tech shutting down voices dissenting from The Narrative, with people taking their discussions away from curated platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (who still get to act legally as if they are not curated platforms)… and onto Telegram groups, like for example the delightfully named Slightly Offensive (with posts like this) or global anti-lockdown stickerists White Rose.
These groups are somewhat clunky and it is harder to spread interesting post via links (they are more phone/desktop app oriented rather than web-friendly), but this does show the social media landscape is still changing.
Dear fellow friends of Brian,
Many of you will have received Tim Evans’ email below with a message from Brian Micklethwait telling us that he has lung cancer. Brian asks that we boost his morale by telling him if and how we have been inspired or influenced by what he has written, said, or done.
Since several of us at the IEA have been inspired by Brian, we would like to invite you to celebrate ‘the life of Brian’ Micklethwait on the evening of Friday September 3rd, at the Institute of Economic Affairs, 2 Lord North Street, London SW1P 3LB. The event will be from 6pm to 8pm, but you are welcome to stay on until Brian decides to go home. Consider it a special edition of Brian’s Fridays, with Brian being the topic rather than the host.
If you are able to attend, please can you reply to VIPEvents@iea.org.uk so we know numbers in advance. If we have more than the maximum capacity of the IEA, we may have to seek another venue.
Please save the date in your diary and forward this email to fellow friends of Brian who are not in Tim’s distribution list below.
Can I also ask for a volunteer who would be willing to be the recipient of photos and short videos of Brian as well as video messages from those unable to join us, so that these can be shown on the evening.
We will send further details over the next few weeks. In the meantime, please do keep emailing and/or phoning Brian and writing about him. I know Brian is looking forward to us all joining him on September 3rd.
Best wishes,
Professor Syed Kamall, Institute of Economic Affairs
Lockdowns are claimed to be “effective” against a modelled counter-factual of mass deaths if they aren’t done. If the counter-factual is wrong then lockdowns by definition cannot be “effective”. And we know the counter-factuals are very wrong because model predictions keep being falsified, over and over, most recently with UK freedom day. Note that all the models for COVID at the start were predicting a single giant wave. They couldn’t predict anything else because they assumed only lockdowns can stop epidemics and that otherwise a virus will simply keep spreading exponentially until 100% of the population has been infected. With no understanding of natural immunity, nor for how long SARS-CoV-2 had really been spreading in the population before mass testing started, they had to make this assumption in order to make predictions, but it renders their model useless. They ended up confidently asserting nonsensical scenarios on the back of very incomplete scientific understanding, something which our broken and brainwashed society was totally unable to push back against.
So: lockdowns probably don’t work because the alternative scenario they supposedly protect against isn’t real, because they’re based on bad understandings of probability and biology, and because the germ theory on which lockdown theory rests appears to be incomplete. And underneath it all, because the “experts” who push this theory know no more about viruses or disease than you or I do.
– Norman Powers, in a comment under an article with a somewhat different article rather different topic Will Trump bring down DeSantis?
How confused does the NHS have to be to reprimand a patient who can’t breathe for coming to the hospital to save their own lives?
This recently happened to a friend of mine who caught Covid-19. With no previous health issues, she is healthy and full of zest. Then, out of nowhere she developed difficulty breathing and found she couldn’t swallow properly. So she did what any sensible person would have done: She called 111, and following their advice, mind you, made the trip to A&E. You would expect that a 19-year-old rushed into a Bristol A&E with breathing difficulties would be treated with compassion and seen immediately. But you’d be wrong. Not only was my friend subjected to a six hour wait for an ECG scan, but she was also reprimanded for coming in at all, despite the fact she was told to do so and had a positive Covid-19 test. In short, a pantomime of chaos whereby hospital staff were shocked that an ill person had entered their midst.
[…]
More strikingly, she was told ‘it’s only Covid, you’ll be fine, you can go home.’ Only Covid? Only the virus which has led to the imprisonment of all youth in the continuous drudgery of lockdowns; so it’s all for just a pat on the head from a school nurse and told to go back to lessons? It’s nonsensical and entirely hypocritical. If a severe bout of Covid means nothing to the Bristol NHS trust anymore, then why do Dr Whitty and all his merry men keep going on about it?
– Alys Watson Brown, writing Covid rules are trumping decency and common sense in the NHS – I’ve experienced it.
The NHS is the envy of the world and don’t forget to clap, citizen.
Some interesting analysis by commenter Wintergreen.
When I ponder the societal response to COVID, the theme that leaps out at me is the fundamental hubris of modern humanity. Of course I’m speaking in sweeping generalities that don’t apply uniformly to all individuals, but modern man has convinced ourselves that we are the masters of the universe. We scoff at the benighted fools who went before us, we tear down their statues if they do not rigidly adhere to every tenet of certain strands of modern philosophy. We laugh at their belief in the old gods, or in old now-falsified scientific theories, but always lacking the self-awareness to see that our recent forebears who are now the target were doing the same and that we will soon be the butt of the joke.
We have torn down the old gods, and I’m not here to tell you that they were true (or to agree that they were false), but it is audacious hubris to be certain that there was nothing at all to be taken from the millennia of distilled thinking on the human condition that they represented. They sometimes led to horrors – crusades, inquisitions, jihads, witch hunts, and those horrors confirm our rectitude. But in their place, men have been forced to find other animating reasons for being. Nationalism, Marxism, socialism, totalitarianism, environmentalism, and now scientism and Wokism have all attempted to fill this void, and they have produced their very own horrors, but no matter. Yesterday’s intellectual craze that lit the world on fire is discarded and replaced by a new one, and this time it will surely be utopia.
So confident are we in our status as masters of the universe that when the utopia fails to materialize, it takes at least a generation to consider that perhaps the new ideology was not the answer. In the mean time, it must be that other humans have foiled the triumph, because humans have conquered all (confusingly, the high priests sometimes acknowledge that we are small, not particularly physically-gifted creatures trying to use our brains to carve out an existence for ourselves on a small rock circling a small star in a small galaxy in some far-flung corner of a largely empty and cold universe, but do so to buttress their own authority rather than admit their own fallibility). So some group must be otherized and the blame laid on them. Depending on the ideology that’s been foiled, it might be a religious or ethnic group, it might be the opponents of the ideology in question, or it might be polluters, capitalists, or the unvaccinated. In any event it must have a purely human source because to consider other possibilities would be to shake the foundations of the fundamental hubris. If people are hungry, it must be because some other human is hoarding resources. If people are not reaching their potential, it must be because some other human is oppressing them. If people are sick, it must be because some other human is failing to subjugate themselves enough to “stop the spread”.
Even an ideology that rejects objective truth and grand narratives like post-modernism is used not as it might be to reject human hubris but rather simply as a cudgel with which to kill the old gods and the old ideologies. All ideologies have the potential to fall into hubris and otherizing, but the risk can be greatly reduced when an ideology embraces the notions of inalienable individual rights, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression — notions that if they were ever truly embraced have now been disregarded as the the cynical refuge of the scoundrels who are blocking utopia.
The opiate of the masses being deployed in this moment is not promises of an afterlife but promises of a life after – a life after two weeks then months then years of being deprived of some of the most simple pleasures of human existence. Just as the priests of old could not actually deliver on their promises in a verifiable manner, neither can the priests of today. As many of their parishioners await their future reward, they may die of non-COVID diseases, suicide and drug abuse, their intellectual and social skills may atrophy, but surely they will emerge on the other side sicker and older and weaker because no amount of intellectual posturing can overcome the physical constraints of the human condition itself.
Scientism is proving to be one of the most dangerous of the new ideologies because it mutates with the speed of a virus, and each mutation wipes out the memory of the previous iteration so as to not puncture the hubris of its adherents. It can credibly claim to do so by expropriating the mantle of science, which is a way of thinking that requires old beliefs to be jettisoned when evidence demands. Scientism, though, plays fast and loose with the evidentiary requirements, treating hypotheses as theories and requiring that the currently fashionable hypotheses be venerated as in a faith.
So now a vast campaign of othering has commenced against those who refuse an experimental vaccine for a disease they are very unlikely to suffer serious harm from. That it is completely infeasible, even with an utter disregard for individual rights, to vaccinate 8.8 billion people in time to prevent new variants from emerging is no matter. The first major campaign demonized those who refused to accept indefinite house arrest, the wonton suspension of economic and civil liberties, and the complete disregard for all aspects of life other than virus avoidance. The second demonized those who questioned the efficacy of cloth talismans. Woven throughout was the dismissal of those who questioned how this disease emerged and whether it may in fact itself be a manifestation of human hubris, and of any possible remedies that didn’t line the pockets of DME manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. But this new campaign is the most vicious, because while the others were at least theoretically temporary in nature, there is no way to walk back an injection, and the campaign now seeks to physically rather than simply rhetorically otherize its opponents.
The admirers of the experts (e.g. Fauci) will defend their flip-flops by saying “the science changed”. Well, actually, the science didn’t change. Perhaps our understanding changed, but the workings of the natural world that we are grasping to understand did not (of course, viruses evolve and conditions change etc., but that’s not how it’s being invoked). Maybe you should show a little humility as a result, and submit yourself to honest cross-examination while allowing people to dissent.
Tony Fauci recently won a million dollar Israeli prize for “speaking truth to power” – doubly ironic as Tony Fauci was the person with the power, and he is not in the habit of speaking the truth.
– Paul Marks
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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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