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]
Anyone who cares about our liberty and security (the two are deeply entwined) needs to work tirelessly to ensure the future does not belong to tyrants, be they tyrants in Russia, China, or much closer to home. Even the smallest of daily acts of defiance can add to a countervailing pressure; every little decision you make, what you say, who you spend your money with, needs to be done thoughtfully and above all bravely.
At a time when it would be nice to have at least a measure of trust in our own institutions, the last two years have made that completely impossible. Putin and his ilk are predators who sense weakness, and culturally we have been greatly weakened by enemies within our own institutions public and private.
All these years they walked among us pretending to understand how economies work, pretending to be seasoned analysts of costs and benefits, pretending to have learned from the great genocides, and pretending to respect free expression, informed consent and bodily autonomy.
The police are corrupt. The government is corrupt. The opposition is corrupt. Parliament is corrupt. The print and broadcast media are corrupt. The medical and scientific establishment is corrupt. I cannot think of a single public institution in which I have any faith at all. Until fairly recently, I believed that the courts were not corrupt, but their refusal even to hear Simon Dolan’s case against the most extreme and dictatorial policy this country has ever seen is clear proof of their grotesque corruption.
The truth is almost too shocking to contemplate. When faced with a public health emergency, those tasked with running the country did not think for a moment about how they might act in the public interest to protect the vulnerable. They already had a scientifically rigorous plan, carefully worked out over many years, which would have done that. Instead, they jettisoned this plan immediately and concentrated exclusively on two objectives: profiteering and totalitarianism.
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On Christmas Eve 2020, I looked up the guidance on the NHS website for people who were suicidal. It was three years old and suggested spending time with family and friends. What was this? Gross incompetence? Complete indifference to the mental health of a suffering nation? A very sick joke? Who knows.
Character is more important than brains. The first time I heard this assertion, it was uttered with exaggerated disdain by an Oxford history don. He went on to remark that this was a quotation from one of the leading generals of the twentieth century, a veteran of two world wars. This statement, the professor opined, clearly revealed the anti-intellectual prejudice typical of an upper-class military officer. I remember wondering even at the time whether it had occurred to him that the opposite assumption was equally typical of a middle-class academic.
In fact, the UKHSA have given us a great gift, in that they finally provide separate case and severe outcome statistics for the triple-vaccinated and the double vaccinated, allowing us to compare rates across all three groups. They don’t do that themselves, of course, but no matter. We can use the raw numbers and rates from last week’s report to derive the total number of double and triple vaccinated, and the rates in this week’s report to derive the triple vaccinated population. A little subtraction then gives us a decent estimate of how many double but not triple vaccinated people there are in each age bracket.
The COVID crisis has been utterly absurd from the start, and we – conspiracy theorists or Team Reality advocates (choose your point of view :-)) – have been on a wild goose chase all along, going down one rabbit hole after another… But the very justification of it all, a dubiously high lethality was never challenged as the narrative was overwhelmed by a constant flow of apocalyptic news.
Frankly, I haven’t been able to watch television peacefully ever since, sickened by the stream of idiotic fallacies.
“If you don’t vote Tory, then Labour might get in” is the main argument I hear from people when I tell them I live in a very marginal Tory constituency and have no intention of voting Tory again. But frankly the Tories are just Labour with a better wine list, as is made clear in this ghastly article in CrapX by Damian Collins, the ‘Conservative’ MP for Folkestone and Hythe.
Proper regulation won’t suppress freedom of speech online – it will protect it […] Making sure the Online Safety Bill is not a ‘Censor’s Charter’ was also our priority.
Because nothing says “the state will not censor the internet” quite like a bill that enables the state to censor what you can say on online. I seem to be developing a Pavlovian condition that every time Damian Collins opens his mouth, I send a thousand pounds or so to Reform UK.
“Stay safe” and the little things we could do for each other were like linguistic pacifiers, offering us a reprieve from the endless media reminder that we were in ‘unprecedented’ and ‘uncertain times’ and that, despite this, we were ‘all in this together‘.
I started to think about the other phrases that encapsulate an overabundance of caution which masquerades as compassion. And at what point does overemphasising caution become its own form of harassment? Certainly, we are seeing rising incidents of shunning and neuroticism since the start of the pandemic. These are notions favoured by the laptop-class: people who want to live in March 2020 in perpetuity, clamouring for more lockdowns and ‘stimulus’. Some people in the United States seem convinced – quite literally – that they are going to die. This is a problem. They perceive themselves as being in great danger when they aren’t, and view others as a threat in an overstated way. This is dangerous. I noticed that they also seem to take a strange sort of glee in telling others what to do – adult hallway monitors run amok. There was something fundamentally pathological about the sheer pleasure people – usually women and men who seemed off the deep end into over-socialisation – took in events being cancelled for ‘the greater good’. When LCD Soundsystem announced, due to public pressure, that they were abruptly cancelling the last three shows of their reunion performance here in NYC everyone started talking about ‘the greater good’. Those who voiced their disappointment in various comment sections were ostracised, while those who were sanctimoniously, righteously having their ‘concern for safety’ met seemed pleased to have their virtue reaffirmed. To be clear, I don’t necessarily think they enjoy the ongoing restrictions: I think they enjoy the righteousness of their perceived sacrifice.
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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