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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Samizdata quote of the day – the narcissism of the Fact-Checkers There are many cases of fact-checkers spreading disinformation that then results in censorship. Facebook censored stories claiming Covid-19 might have come from a lab. Last week, Public documented the role played by Anthony Fauci in creating junk science to create a fake debunking of the lab leak, which the White House and others used to justify censorship.
Fact-checkers have thus been forced to make an embarrassing series of retractions. PolitiFact, the dean of all fact-checking organizations, was forced in 2021 to retract its false debunking of a doctor who said COVID-19 was a “man-made virus created in the lab.” And just last week, the BBC was forced to retract its false claim that UK politician Nigel Farage was not de-banked for political reasons because, as it turned out, he was.
– Phoebe Smith and Michael Shellenberger
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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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The problem with these retractions is that they are bloodless. An organization who claim to be a “fact” checker, if they get stuff wrong even very occasionally is utterly useless for their stated purposes. So, what? Doesn’t that mean that instead of a “withdrawal” they should go out of business?
It reminds me a lot of the financial crisis of 2008. What was the real cause of that crisis? It was that the rating agencies ridiculously overrated many of the mortgage packages that were being traded. They utterly failed in this crucial obligation and it is that massive overrating that caused the whole systemic collapse. Is S&P ratings business still up and running? Of course, because there is no accountability.
This is a great segment from the movie The Big Short talking about this issue.
It’s an example of what I term a “consensus lie”, wherein the participants all willfully ignore evidence to the contrary of their “politically correct” belief system. Until they can’t.
All of the “right people” were telling me that the United States Army would never, ever have to deal with a situation even remotely akin to that which the Rhodesians and South Africans had during the bush wars in southern Africa. They lied about the fact that we ourselves had faced much the same threat in Vietnam, and before that, in the Korean War. You could point them at the evidence, and they still denied reality. This continued throughout the entire post-Vietnam era, with everything that was on display in the southern African theaters there to be observed in plain sight, out in the open.
That denial persisted, right up until 2003-04 when the handwriting on the wall apparated itself, according to them, through magic. Never mind all the dissenting voices and warnings that were issued by people who actually bothered to study the subject… It was an entirely bolt-from-the-blue sort of affair, huge surprise, that nobody could have possibly foreseen.
Those are the consensus lies. The first blew up with the first trucks to hit IEDs. The second set of consensus lies, about the systemic failures that didn’t anticipate and prepare for that sort of war, never really blew up at all. Why? Because not one person in Congress demanded answers as to why we weren’t prepared. If there had been Congressional investigations, a la the Ichord Committee on the M16 rifle and it’s woes in Vietnam, the consensus lie would have exploded over everyone’s faces. Didn’t happen, mostly because they managed to paper over it all.
You can only maintain a consensus lie so long as your lies aren’t made manifestly noticeable. Hundreds of dead bodies noticeable; bankruptcy of nations noticeable. The rumblings in the background can sometimes be damped out, but the underlying cause must also be damped out, as well.
It’s also only possible to pull these things off so long as the consensus liars remain credible with the rubes. They catch on? LOL… It won’t be pretty. At. All.
Ah, but Kirk, by the time the rubes catch on, they will have been disarmed (a US perspective here, obviously!) and every utterance, every thought they have will be monitored by an AI to flag for a “personal follow up”.
Oh, and while they are disarming us, they will be arming up, including ramping up the heavy armaments of state and local enforcers of Federal mandates (I was about to write cops but we are hardly talking about constables on patrol any longer, right?)
If they were at all competent, I’d be worried.
As it is, the correlation of forces is obvious: They can’t even maintain control of their blue-zone cities. What, do you suppose, they’re going to be able to do out in the hinterlands, once enough people are activated against them?
There aren’t enough cops in the entire US to lock down and control even one state the size of Ohio, for example. What do you suppose happens when they try? You cannot govern or police without the consent of the governed/policed. You lose that? LOL… Yeah, good ‘effin luck with that one, baby. You saw CHAZ/CHOP in Seattle? Extrapolate that out to say, most of Eastern Washington. What then, little man? Inslee has the state patrol to enforce his will, and most of them hate his guts. How’s he going to make his will happen, when the time comes?
These idiots are delusional morons, who have no idea how to actually go about doing these things they want to do. The Nazis were smart enough to have an organization; these guys? LOL… What’re they going to do when the rank-and-file FBI refuse to do their bidding? They control the suites; they don’t control the minds of the minions.
One small quibble: I suspect that they are maintaining control of their blue cities in the exact quantity and quality they desire. Lawlessness and fear are helpful if you wish to dismantle, and then remake, a society.
So they think.
The theory has yet to be proven out, in practice. I suspect that what they’re doing is actually draining the good will and compassion out of the “silent middle”, and it won’t be too long before that part of the population is nodding along with the extremists from the other end of the spectrum, the law-and-order types.
Don’t be real surprised to see an inflection point wherein that which was formerly publicly acceptable becomes totally unacceptable. Time was, vagrants and transients would be shown the edge of town by the local cops, and if they dared stay, then they’d get their asses whipped with everyone in the community nodding along and saying that they got their just deserts.
This sort of thing can shift on a dime; you just don’t know when the inflection point will be reached. Ceaucescu was oblivious until that one day in Timisoara. Before that, his brand of personalized Communism was invincible; nobody in Romania would gainsay his or his wife’s words. Their will was done, no matter what. In the short space of a few moments in that square, harangued by the tyrant, that all changed.
The idiots running these campaigns of subornation and corruption of the institutions here in the US and elsewhere have no idea at all that once they’ve captured the heights and corrupted them, they become useless in short order. They confuse the form with the substance; that which was respected was respected because it was respectable. Now that the morons have taken those institutions and rendered them disreputable, welllllll… Guess what? They’ve captured nothing, because they destroyed the inherent legitimacy just by taking over and turning it over.
Leftism is a lot like the Cordyceps fungus. It takes over the brain, and makes the organization/organism do stupid, life-threatening things. Which result in said parasitized organization destroying itself as the other insects avoid its obvious brain damaged actions.
Sure, but the Nazi organisation was built from the ground up. There is almost zero equivalent in either the US or the UK and anything which starts to move in that direction is infiltrated by 3 letter agencies and then they try to pull the old false flag shit with the extremists and the mentally ill of the organisation.
Just because it’s a trope doesn’t make it any less true.
The lying “Independent Fact Checkers” are still at it – I had a Facebook post, a film from John Campbell PhD on the harm the toxic Covid “vaccines” do, marked as “False Information” only yesterday.
The establishment know very well about the injuries and deaths caused by the injections (Members of Parliament have told me that to my face) – but they are not going to accept responsibility.
No – it is whistle blowers such as John Campbell who are going to be punished.
It is much the same with the Credit Bubble monetary and financial (banking) system – the establishment know it is a massive fraud (they do not need a film from my cousin Clive to tell them what they already know), but they are not going to admit that the system is a fraud – because their own Corporate State power depends on the fraud.
The international Corporate State could not exist without the fraud based Credit Bubble monetary and financial (banking) system.