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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Hamsters and legislators There is something deeply wrong when a law passed with cross-party consensus and endorsed by Britain’s most trusted charities has made it impossible to run an internet forum for hamster owners.
— Sam Dunitriu, as screenshotted by atlanticesque to point out the wilful obtuseness of an opposing view.
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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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See here is the problem — the administrative class never actually does anything, never produces anything, never creates anything. Never has to make a deadline. Never has to do something that might actually fail. Never has to measure their work against the objective standard or reality. And so they really don’t understand how hard it is to start from nothing and make something useful, effective, widespread.
It is a problem I see everywhere. My mother had a saying “like two crows sitting on a wall”, meaning it is really easy to sit on the sidelines and sling insults and criticisms and “I wouldn’t do it that way” at the people who are actually grafting (to use the northern England meaning of the word), slogging their guts out to make things. Making mistakes, screwing it up, learning, going on when everybody tells you you are wasting your time. I have created products, companies, services, all sorts of things through my life, and it is extremely difficult. It is a slog through one problem after another. It requires a skin thick enough to ignore the two crows sitting on the wall. It is the gumption to pick yourself up when you fail, and those two crows are laughing out “I told you so”. And it is those people who advance society. Create the technologies, the services, the abundance of modern life. We are rich because they were brave, resilient, strong and didn’t care what the two crows were saying.
It is why I love Elon Musk so much. He slogs his guts out to make the impossible possible. He sleeps on the factory floor to make sure those cars get made. He throws his whole fortune behind a space company when so many have failed, where just the idea of a privately funded space venture is laughable. He reimagines the space business, and the car business, and the tunneling business and a zillion other things. He doesn’t just talk “free speech” he spends billions and uses his usual genius to return America to a place where you can speak freely without government censorship. And then he takes on that most impossible of targets, the US civil service. And they hate him for it. They threaten to kill him, to destroy all he has worked for, pillory him. But still he goes on. Even with a million crows on the wall.
These petty little men who think “oh you only have to fill in a form and have a meeting and bla bla bla”. I loathe them with every fiber of my being. The are the sand in the machinery of life, yet are filled to the brim with self righteousness and superiority. As they live off the wealth that others have created they do everything to suck every ounce of joy out of it.
These people? They are worse than politicians, and that is about the worst thing I can think to say about a person.
I see history as the contest between the politicians and the administrative class holding us back, bleeding us white, while the march of the merchants and inventors who create massive wealth move on, dragging their chains on their back. It is only because the latter are so much more effective than the former that we aren’t still banging rocks together.
The hell with them all, these small, petty little men.
I agree with much of what you say, Fraser. With Musk, there is, in my view, a worry I have about whether he is damaging himself by associating too much with MAGA; I don’t see his DOGE efforts leading to a sustainably smaller US government unless – and this is critical – Congress also acts to rein in branches of the admin state so that this is not all tied up in the courts and easily reversed a few years later by a very different White House. And the “move fast and break things” approach can become a major problem if it turns out you have fired people and then struggle to re-hire them.
On the SpaceX stuff, I think most of the negativity against Musk is outrageous. Sure, he came from a comfortable South African family, but he could, as many have, blown his chances and not taken risks. He did, so respect to him. I am a bit less of a Tesla fan, in part because I think electric vehicles aren’t as useful as they are purported to be and I dislike the Green flimflam. SpaceX has done well via US government (taxpayer-funded) contracts; in mitigation, it is very hard for purist free marketeers to operate in space-related sectors of any scale without confronting that issue.
In general, though, my advice to major entrepreneurs is stay away from government as much as possible, and if called to help run things, be very clear about the frame of reference, including when the work is to be delivered by, and don’t be used as a sort of buffer for politicians who don’t or cannot make the case for smaller government themselves.
Musk has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, which it is. https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-donald-trump-doge-b21b74f56f30012a6450a629e7232a1a The rage in the media has been most instructive.
I hope he does not do as many drugs as I hear about, otherwise the wheels are going to come off his life.
I saw this mentioned elsewhere and immediately imagined that the Hamster Forum represented the sexual proclivities of a small group within the overall furry community.
If something is endorsed by all parties and by all leading “NGOs” or “charities” (which are largely taxpayer funded and run by paid managers) OF COURSE it is going to be terrible – that is exactly what one should expect.
This is not a recent thing – after all “Social Reform”, an ever bigger and more interventionist government, has been in fashion in the United Kingdom, and around the world, since at least the 1870s.
After a 150 years people should know that if all factions of the establishment support something – it is, most likely, a bad thing.
In practical terms – what it means is that, eventually, internet sites will have to be based outside the United Kingdom, and people will need VPNs (and so on) to access them – even if they are about the care of hamsters.
Vice President Vance did try and appeal to European governments not to carry on down the road to tyranny – but the response was patronizing contempt from the international establishment (including the American branch of it).
So just what IS this hamster story? We Americans don’t know.
Not a British thing, but a follow-the-link thing.
Summary:
Notice: Hamster forum shutting down because of Online Safety Act.
Question: What does the OSA have to do with a hamster forum?
Response: New red tape for UK internet forums, and possibly new expenses.
Tourist: Bah! It’s cheap, fast, and easy to satisfy the new requirements.
Response: Hobbyists, when threatened with red tape that no one is quite certain how to comply with and threatened with life-destroying fines for guessing wrong, are likely to decide that their hobby isn’t that important.
Tourist: Maintains that compliance is cheap and easy, with the implication that anyone objecting to the OSA red tape (and subjecting themselves to the penalties for navigating it wrong) are just making a mountain out of a molehill.