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]
|
Samizdata quote of the day – Turds all the way down edition The choice is between a quivering mound of turds who destroyed this country with their lockdown policies and a heap of wobbling turds who think the lockdown wasn’t destructive enough. I’d sooner lick the floor of my local A&E than vote for either of you.
– Burnside
|
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.
|
The perfect purgative to a Paul Marks comment: succinct & to the point 😀
Sums up my position too. I consider politicians to be my enemies. People who are deliberately doing me real harm.
I consider most people to be my enemies. Their ignorance and cowardice is a Damocles sword hanging over all of us. That is what 2020-2021 did to me.
Bulldog Drummond – you often remind us that you are wealthy, but you are not a Gentleman. You are both rude and ignorant Sir.
I hope that is “succinct and to the point”.
As for Burnside’s argument – sadly I can think of no strong arguments against his position, he has a point.
I’ve voted for the lesser of two evils my entire life. I’m done voting.
We’ve been training up generations of delusionals that we then set in charge of everything because they’ve attained all the right credentials.
The results shouldn’t be at all surprising.
Where the whole thing went wrong is that there’s no performative accountability built in; you leave school with the proper credentials, take a job, do things, get put in charge… And, then you screw something up. What happens? Nothing, in most respects.
Should you want an excellent example of what I’m talking about, look at the EPA here in the US. They supervised a breach of containment at Gold King Mine which resulted in the contamination of much of the Animas and San Juan rivers in three states. The breach was basically due to massive incompetence on the part of EPA employees. None of them were ever fired; they were given performance bonuses instead.
Look around you. This kind of thing is all over; local sheriff’s deputy walked up on a guy parked alone in his truck in a city parking lot in the middle of town. Things happened; there was a shootout followed by a high-speed chase. Deputy fired something like 28 rounds from his pistol; never hit the guy he was shooting at. Following day, you went downtown and there are little yellow flags everywhere, all over the adjacent buildings. It’s a damn miracle that nobody was hurt; the guy he was shooting at had a black-powder revolver. Final denouement? Dude was acquitted, and is now suing the county. Deputy is still on the job, no disciplinary action, no remedial training. The old sheriff lauded him as one of his best men; I suspect that may have played into him losing the recent election.
There’s no feedback loop in our institutions. Nothing goes back into the education or training pipeline to say “Heyaaaaaaah… You know that guy you gave that diploma to, and who we hired? Everything he does goes wrong; he’s actually a bit of an idiot…”
Likewise, nobody pays the least amount of attention to the actual performance of these expensively educated dolts, who’ve been told all their lives how smart they are. Most of them… Aren’t. Look at Sam Bankman-Fried, for an absolutely marvelous example. His parents are in on the dysfunctional fraud, because they’re notable professors in the academy. How do they still have jobs? How did he get as far as he did?
Elizabeth Holmes? Theranos? Ring any bells? How many bright lights bought into her BS? Yet, if you were to ask anyone doing grunt-level blood testing out in any lab, most of the techs could have told you that there’s almost no way in hell Theranos could have been getting accurate results off of those tiny samples they were claiming to use. I remember talking to a lab tech years ago, in a conversation where I made a comment about them having to give up taking such huge samples. He set me right about all of that, and in pretty clear terms, laying out all the near-impossibilities that were there for what Theranos was claiming they were doing.
Yet, the idiots who bought into all that crap are still out there, lauded as geniuses. The former Defense Secretary, the much-lauded Marine General Mattis? He was one of them. He’s got all the right credentials, yet… He was supposedly taken in by the obvious fraud.
We’re doing things wrong, with all of this. It starts with the schooling, and it is going to end in the destruction of our civilization. There’s no accountability, no correctives feeding back into the system. So, they keep screwing up, time and time again.
You do what you can. Sometimes you get to vote for the best. Other times you are voting against the worst. At least you get to bend things minutely your way.
bobby b – I have made the sort of argument you make here for more than 40 years, but although I hate to agree with Bulldog Drummond – it is getting harder and harder to make such arguments.
What will I do? Continue to vote Conservative, and campaign, especially as the local Member of Parliament is a friend. It is much the same with other Conservatives locally – I can remember some of them when they were children, I can not betray them now.
But it would be good to have hope, to really believe that government spending will be reduced, that taxes will be reduced, that there will be large scale deregulation, that sound money will be established – and international “governance” rejected.
Yes the other parties are worse – but the situation is not good, not good at all.
Kirk – black powder weapons are even legal here in the United Kingdom (partly due to a friend of mine at the Home Office – who suggested that they be excluded from the various gun acts here). Otherwise historical reenactors would be persecuted here – which would be extreme even by our British standards.
As for the Deputy – I do not know what to be disgusted by more, that he was trying to kill an innocent man, or that that he fired 28 rounds from a modern pistol (he must have reloaded) and never hit him.
I note that the Sheriff who praised the murderous and incompetent deputy, “lost the next election”.
This is an important difference between the United States and the United Kingdom – locally elected sheriffs, who are (at least to some extent) outside the bureaucratic structure.
Joseph Biden has hated of locally elected sheriffs that goes back to the 1970s (i.e. long before Mr Biden went senile) – Mr Biden hates locally elected sheriffs because he wants law enforcement to be totally under the control of State and Federal bureaucracies.
The establishment choose well, from their point of view, when they gave Mr Biden the Democrat nomination in 2020 – and then handed him the rigged election “victory”.
Even if, by some miracle, the mind of Mr Biden returned to him – he would agree with the totalitarian policies that are being pushed in his name.
For a rare wonder, the officials and “experts” who say they are following policies that Mr Biden would want them to follow are telling the truth – he would want them to follow these totalitarian policies.
“But he was always corrupt” – yes he was, but that does not mean that Mr Biden did not also have opinions. He did have opinions – deeply Collectivist opinions.
“The old sheriff lauded him as one of his best men;”
I used to work with a guy who served in the RAF. He recalled that, during the war, some of their bases were located in places were the locals weren’t particularly happy about having them there. As a result they often had to field complaints from the public. The officer who got the job of dealing with the complaints was often heard saying into his phone “Well I don’t understand this, he’s one of our best men.” As a result of hearing this story, the phrase he’s one of our best men became the company catch phrase whenever anyone screwed up. Eventually we even had a one of our best men trophy that was awarded annually to the biggest idiot of the year. It was plastic and had a sticker from the label printer on it naming the recipient.
The fundamental fallacy of saying that voting is futile is the corollary, in that not voting achieves nothing. It is not impossible that a party could be voted in that is committed to liberty. Given a ‘White Leninist’ will, it would be possible to reform and reduce the size and power of the State. So to throw up ones’ hands and bemoan the futility of voting is to ignore the possibility of success.
The main problem is that the ‘will to power’ of the bunch of weirdos and perverts who sit in Parliament, who are happy to sit there and watch the bureaucracy devour the country that they persuade themselves they are (nominally) in charge of is so strong that no normal person has the will or resources to tackle it.
When contemplating all this sort of thing, the biggest question I have is this: How the hell did we get started on this course in the first place? What the hell happened to all the Calvinistic judgmentalism we used to have embedded in our culture?
Where was the inflection point? What was it?
I’ve read a great deal of material from “ye olde dayes”, when we used to have standards. You look around you, and compare the moral world of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter to today’s “everything is relative”, and you have to wonder when the hell we lost the capacity to recognize incompetence, sloth, and outright evil for what they were.
Not that going the other way was all that great, either, but… Dear God, the stupid all around me just hurts.
We have become unable or unwilling to call people who are clearly in the wrong on their BS. Incompetency is rewarded; mendacity has become the acceptable norm.
I’d agree that things weren’t perfect in this regard in the deeper past, but things have certainly changed from what they were. Norms are no longer upheld; people are not being held accountable for their actions, and are outraged if someone does demand something like consequence for their misconducts and incompetencies. What made all this change?
Is it better to have bad standards than no standards? At least when the bad standards are knocked down, you have a shot at creating new, good standards. Bad standards occupy the field.
Sometimes yes. But far more often, you just get to slightly slow the rate at which everything is bending away from you. I have concluded that we have well and truly reached the point where voting third party (who cannot win) actually makes more sense that voting for the slightly-less-ghastly-than-the-other-chaps party
At least that’s a positive influence, however small. I’d be more amenable to what you’re saying if I could see a practical and successful application of it.
I remember when a lot of Republicans felt as you do, and voted for Perot as their 3rd-party protest. We got Clinton, probably as a direct result of that protest.
I remember when a lot of Dems felt as you do, and voted for Nader. They got Bush, probably as a direct result of that protest.
Remember the Bernie Bros? They bailed on the election when Bernie tanked, in numbers that could have carried Hillary. Bet they’d have preferred Hillary to Trump.
Our parties have limited available votes on the outsides of the bell curve – voters who think the cons aren’t con enough – and unlimited voters who cluster around the middle looking for the best hair. They’ll drop you in a second if they can slide just a bit over to the center and harvest some of those centrists – which they can do once they stop worrying about their more-to-the-right angry voters.
I think your theory might work if you were trying to pull your party to the center, but not when you’re pulling the other way. A protest vote for a third-party centrist threatens your party’s fat-part-of-the-bell-curve of voters, and so they’ll pay more attention to you. It’s cheaper to drop you as a voter when your like-minded cohort is sparse.
P.S. Should have added above – I expect that the US R’s are about to lose the next presidential election because of many people who are going to follow your theory if their preferred candidate isn’t nominated. Vote your conscience in your primary, but vote your nominee in the general.
The idea that Trump is going to save us from what is coming is ludicrous. The idea that Biden or whatever other figurehead they put up in his place will save us is equally ludicrous.
The raw fact is that most of the people who are the biggest part of the problem are entirely untouchable, being as they were never elected in the first place. The real power in Washington, DC isn’t in the elected officials, who haven’t been doing their jobs since at least the 1960s, but in all the unelected bureaucrats and “support staff”.
Fetterman’s Chief of Staff is a guy who used to work for Harry Reid. He’s been on several “influential” consulting groups. He’s writing legislation for Fetterman, and “helping” him along.
None of these people are at all reachable by any of the voters. They’re above the law, doing what they will. It’s all the so-called “think tanks” and other outfits that really run the country; none of us have a say in it at all.
Sooner we recognize that fact, the better. We’re not getting our country back until we do.
I cast my first vote ever for Ron Paul back in 1988, and have been an independent libertarian voter ever since. Back in the day I would be willing to vote for the occasional Republicrat or Demican, but for many years now neither side of what can reasonably be called the ‘Uniparty’ gets my vote. Sure, I’m just spitting into a hurricane, but I do experience some spiritual solace in knowing that I have been battling this $#!+-storm for a long time. And please, spare me your cynical game-theory, I know how that stuff works.
I do miss the days when the League of Women Voters would publish material on -all- of the candidates for any particular office, so that they could be compared side-by-side, and would run debates that featured -all- of the candidates. It just felt more like a…democracy.
What will I do? Continue to vote Conservative………….. But it would be good to have hope, to really believe that government spending will be reduced, that taxes will be reduced, that there will be large scale deregulation, that sound money will be established – and international “governance” rejected.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
*BREATHE*
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Anybody still believing the current Conservative Party has the tiniest scintilla of Conservative policy to offer a prospective voter needs sectioning.
Sometimes, yes, but often no. If the Tories (or Republicans) see your vote as acquiescence to their policy of throwing you off the cliff tomorrow rather than the utterly wicked Labour (or Democrat) policy of throwing you off the cliff today, maybe the way to send a better message is to make the Tories (or Republicans) *not* take your vote for granted… and I suspect the only way to send that message is firstly to not vote for them, but to actually vote third party to indicate anger rather than indifference.
Does that actually work? Dunno, but Farage sure as hell changed Tory government policy that way without a single Brexit Party MP in Parliament (but a great many in the Euro Parliament, which was fucking hilarious).