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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Person of colour dares not sign name It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.
The well-written open letter from the professor with no (safe to add) name has (of course) been cancel-cultured from where it was first put, but I you can read the whole thing here (and I recommend you do). It is also on pastebin, and another link to the text is here.
(I wrote this as a Samizdata quote of the day – h/t instapundit – but decided the title needed to tell you something not in the bit I quoted. Read the whole thing.)
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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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Well one thing is blindingly obvious – the current woke year zero strategy has bugger all to do with helping black people.
In fact its not a novel proposition to say that the black community are being used by the Democrats as a club to beat white society, and will be discarded when no longer useful. The only novelty is the corporations joining in.
After all, the last “outburst” of black lives matter was in the summer of 2016, coincidentally just months before the last election. Then it was forgotten.
Read in full yesterday, little wonder They want to suppress it.
In this link you can also find the reaction of UC Berkeley: “We condemn”. We condemn the truth.
UC Berkeley reply: well they would say that wouldn’t they?
Self-awareness failure, endemic throughout the Loonie Left.
Clicking on the link that is provided in the OP gets me this message:
Sky Broadband Shield
web.archive.org has been blocked by Sky Broadband Shield, which lets you choose the websites that can be seen in your home.
If you’d like to access this website now, you can add it to your allowed list or change your age rating on your Sky Broadband Shield settings page. Otherwise you can close this window and continue browsing other websites.
Sky’s naughty website filter thinks that this is something that you shouldn’t be allowed to see.
Here is something to ponder. The more radically left wing the City government the bigger the drop in the black population over the last five decades.
Berkeley has had left wing City Governments since the early 1970’s. The Black population of the city has fallen from almost 25% to under 10%.
San Francisco has had left wing since the Moscone / Jim Jones “coup” in the mid ’70. Since then the Black population of the City has fallen from 13% to around 5%.
Portland, OR is the whitest big city in country. Almost as white as Idaho.
Funnily enough most of the few Republican run big cites have had fairly stable Black populations during the same time period.
In Seattle the Black population was rising decade over decade until the moderate city government was taken over by left wingers about 15 years ago. Since the the Black population has declined precipitously and formerly Black areas like the Central Distinct are now mostly non Black.
So why are big cities run by left wing Democrats such hostile places for Blacks to live that so many of them move out?
The pattern seems to be the louder the BLM slogans from the white left wing city politicians the more pronounced the decline in the Black population of the city.
Funny that..
Stonyground (June 13, 2020 at 5:38 pm), I trust you were able to click through – and are now considering getting Sky Broadband Shield out of the way of your browsing. I can all too well believe that Sky would prefer people not see it – but you can best judge whether it might honestly have wanted to ask you about pastebin.
Other links to the text are here and here.
Sky Broadband Shield has never before been an issue. I find it interesting that this link was the one time that it decided that I needed protecting. I have been able to access this post without too much trouble but several of the links lead to messages saying that it has been removed.
Stonyground (June 13, 2020 at 6:31 pm), my two links in my comment above work for me – I presume it is other links that say it has been removed (as indeed it has been from the original point of posting). I have saved the text.
ALL schools /Unis loyal to socialism MUST be closed.
It is that simple.
Mr Ecks (June 14, 2020 at 7:30 am), the abolition of the department of education, the providing of school vouchers (system to be run by the treasury on strictly financial lines, not educationalists on ideological lines) and the putting of all power in the hands of individual parents to use each voucher to fund whom they want teaching their child, will work better than a law, voted by the Tories but administered by Sir Humphrey Appleby, that schools must not teach ‘socialism’. All that will do is generate a different way in which socialists define things as “not real socialism” – and so legal to teach.
Remember, our enemies are about results. We are about process: what process change will improve things.
“We are about process: what process change will improve things.”
And what process cannot be turned around to bite us. If we can ban schools teaching Socialism, then they can ban schools teaching Capitalism. And it would be no use howling about ‘Free Speech’ if they did, given that we had previously done exactly the same.
Worse, if you banned the teaching of Socialism in schools, that wouldn’t stop anyone teaching it outside of school, where they could use dishonest and one-sided propaganda to persuade. Banning things doesn’t stop them happening, it just drives them underground where you can’t get at them.
The right answer is to require that both Socialism and Capitalism are taught, and all the best arguments for and against both. If Capitalism is right and Socialism wrong, Capitalism should win the argument in a fair fight. And it would mean everyone is armed with intellectual defences against Socialism when they encounter it outside of school.
And it would be quite nice if schools taught people about Free Speech, and why it’s essential to a free society.
I thought the liberal* position was about principles (and also results). The results following from the principles as day follows night. Historically freer societies have tended towards better economic results etc. As to process… I’m confused as to what you mean Niall.
*I’m thinking more Gladstone than Biden here.
Nulles in Verba
‘ If we can ban schools teaching Socialism, then they can ban schools teaching Capitalism.’
There aren’t any.
“As to process… I’m confused as to what you mean Niall.”
I think he means it’s against our principles to use that process – i.e. having the government shut down schools that don’t teach what we the government want – even if that gets the immediate result we want (i.e. schools stop teaching Socialism).
It’s not just about getting the result we want, it’s also about the methods we use to get there.
Of course, “putting of all power in the hands of individual parents to use each voucher to fund whom they want teaching their child” doesn’t entirely solve the problem, because the result will be Socialist parents will send their children to Socialist schools, Islamic Jihadi parents will send their kids to Islamic Jihadi schools, and political opinions will become yet more isolated and entrenched and hereditary.
Most parents are don’t vote libertarian. They voted for the governments that implemented our current schools. Many parents are not interested in giving their kids the freedom to choose, and the information they need to do so. It ought to be the child’s choice what to believe, not the parent’s, or the government’s.
“There aren’t any.”
Even supposing that was true, do you want to be able to argue they shouldn’t be able to do that?
It’s not just about getting the result we want, it’s also about the methods we use to get there.
Sounds very olose to my use of the word “priniples”… I would like to hear from Niall though.
@Nullius in Verba
Most parents are don’t vote libertarian. They voted for the governments that implemented our current schools.
I think that is true but misses the point. I live in a very nice suburb of Chicago, and the schools here are generally excellent. Me? I don’t really need school vouchers to ensure my kids get a decent education. I don’t advocate school choice to benefit myself, but for the very large number of parents who are not as fortunate as me. Who are stuck is school systems that teach more about robbery and violence than algebra and science. I’m not even so much concerned about ideological indoctrination as just ensuring that kids have the option to get at least a basic education, free of threat, free of danger.
It is one of he few things that gives me long term hope in these terrible times. All parents across the political spectrum want their kids to have a shot at life. And pretty much all of them know that education is the key to that. Many of them are left hopeless and dis empowered by being trapped in their disgraceful school systems. Absent another option they flail around thinking the politics will save them. Given an option to chose a school for their kids many of them would jump at it. I don’t know the statistics, but based on people I have talked to parents, especially poorer parents, long for the option to get a decent education for their kids. That is why charter schools (which are a poor shadow of what is possible) are massively over subscribed. It is the one lottery ticket for a parent to rescue their kid from the horrible public school system.
And, FWIW, I hate the word capitalism. To use it is to give a weapon to its enemies. I don’t advocate capitalism, I advocate freedom, and free markets. It isn’t about capital, it is about two people’s right to chose whatever agreements and arrangements they want.
What I was actually saying was that the Tories tried that process before (anyone remember Margaret Thatcher’s ‘National Curriculum’?) and it would work no better for us next time. Yes, one could make a ‘principle’ case against it, but why bother when the practical experienced case against it is so strong?
Another absurd mandated result! Any socialist will tell you they are teaching capitalism as part of explaining socialism. And if you order them not to teach socialism with favour then the more they favour it – the more they believe truth is what serves the interests of the party – the more they will use their power to circumvent the order (which, while they have the organisational power, they will succeed in doing).
As people from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman have explained – so you’d have thought we’d have got it by now –
so merely ordering it to behave adversely to the way it naturally does is like saying
You can remove the power structure that is the education department – or you can imagine it obeying your order to teach capitalism as well as (or instead of) socialism, in which case you will have something in common with socialists who imagine socialism working.
I was expressing an opinion as to which approach would achieve more, and describing an example process for disempowering the educational establishment.
Cummings comes from an experience of the education department that left him filled with contempt for it, and seems to care about education. Whether that will lead to sensible policy, we’ll see.
“Another absurd mandated result! Any socialist will tell you they are teaching capitalism as part of explaining socialism.”
Quite so. Which is why you need Socialists to teach Socialism and Capitalists to teach Capitalism. (Or if you prefer, Free Marketeers to teach the Free Market.)
But that’s besides my original point, that it’s not about whether a centralised or market-based would be better at keeping one side of the debate out of schools, but that we need both sides of the debate to be presented. A belief in Free Speech does not allow the teaching of Socialism to be shut down or excluded. People must be given the opportunity to make an informed choice, and not even parents should have the right to take that away.
“I was expressing an opinion as to which approach would achieve more, and describing an example process for disempowering the educational establishment.”
Sure. But the ultimate goal isn’t to disempower the educational establishment, but to ensure children get a well-rounded education, and learn the mental tools they need to be able to make informed decisions as citizens in a democracy. Simply replacing the biases of the educational establishment with the biases of the parents gets us no further forward towards that goal.
I think vouchers and a market of education providers is also a good idea, for other reasons. But it does not, on its own, solve the problem that lots of people don’t want their kids to hear both sides of the story. They only want them to hear their own side.
“Cummings comes from an experience of the education department that left him filled with contempt for it, and seems to care about education. Whether that will lead to sensible policy, we’ll see.”
Agreed.
Re: Stonyground, and anyone else having problems relevant to our cyberpunk dystopia:
I’ve been using NordVPN for the past few months, and it seems like a good service. A VPN can do many things for you: It can get around censorship by creating an encrypted tunnel to an outside server that your ISP can’t block. (Unless they want to block all VPN users in general). It allows you to browse content without being monitored, in case someone is trying to build some Stasi dossier against you.
If you’re into web-bot experiments (please keep them respectful and legal, and respect the robots.txt file if it exists), it can he a way to avoid auto-bans from being applied to your home-IP address if you make a mistake.
One thing I *wouldn’t* to through a VPN is visit any banking site or site containing personal information. While the VPN providers are probably legitimate, if they were untrustworthy, they could execute a man-in-the-middle attack and record your usernames/passwords. Do personal stuff through your personal connection. Do anonymous stuff through the VPN.
MadRocketSci (June 15, 2020 at 2:16 pm), +1 on the value of VPNs, and your personal/controversial split. Thanks to work, I can afford the costly commercial, but I’ll check out NordVPN against its rivals.
@MadRocketSci
I must be missing something but if you run https through a VPN tunnel I see no reason to think it is any more vulnerable to a man in the middle attack than if you run it un-vpn-ed through your local ISP. https is not perfect, but it really is a pretty strong protocol for preventing this kind of thing. So, perhaps I an wrong, but I see no downside to accessing your bank through a VPN. (Though I don’t think there is much upside either. Banking and privacy are not words that go together well in a sentence outside of some specific jurisdictions.)
I mention this only because having to turn on and off a VPN to use banking might discourage its use — unnecessarily so.
And if you bank isn’t using https? Then you need to get a new bank, and you also need to look at your credit report.
As I and others have often pointed out – BLM and its allies are MARXISTS, they could not give a damn about black people, other than to use them in the struggle to destroy “capitalism” and establish Marxism.
They do not care about George Floyd – any more than they care about DAVID DORN and the other black people killed by Social Justice Looters.
As for this Professor – to BLM he would be just another “reactionary” to exterminate.
It is relevant to this post that the Catholic Chaplain of MIT got fired for this sermon. Apparently university chaplains are no more safe in their jobs than professors of colour if they express a not-100%-on-narrative view of the Floyd matter.