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]
The meltdown of the centrists is a wonder to behold. This is America’s ‘darkest dawn’, cried rhyming-slang-in-waiting, Ian Dunt. Emily Maitlis yelped on live TV that Trump is ‘batshit’, which is rich from someone who is essentially a Halloween version of Princess Diana. The Guardian put out a news notification that said, ‘Trump becomes the first convicted criminal to win the White House’. This really is all they have left, isn’t it? Sly asides to titillate depressed posh people on X? Smug jokes aimed at tempting suicidal liberals off the ledge? Utterly incapable of understanding Joe Public – both here and in the US – the Guardian opts to become the court jester of the cunterati instead.
Leftists weaponise these so-called ‘local identities’ by trying to emphasise their supposed distance from other ‘local identities’ in England. In the process of doing this, they (if only tacitly) also try to decrease the distance of these ‘local identities’, and indeed Britain as a whole, from genuinely foreign cultures: ‘a Cockney, a Brummie, and a Pakistani; all totally unique, but all Very British in their own way.’ An alternative, though slightly different, formulation of this strategy can be found in the attempt by left-wing Welsh nationalists to completely distance ‘Welsh’ from ‘English’, while readily accepting people into ‘Welshness’, no questions asked, with zero connection — ancestral or otherwise — to the British Isles as a whole. It is telling that one of the favourite pastimes of these socialist deviants is to have ethnic minorities put on a performance for them, getting them to memorise a few words of their funny language, entertaining the Welshmen while also stroking their egos. This is quite obviously unethical behaviour, although no-one has called them out for it yet.
This is why the Whiggish calls you used to hear that ‘Islam needs a reformation’ in response to Al Qaeda, Hamas, ISIS, Taliban etc were very misinformed.
And yet, once the Ukrainians ask for long-range fires, all of a sudden their importance is downgraded and minimized. There was the widely-discussed piece in Foreign Affairs by Stephen Biddle which recently kick-started this argument—but it was an argument greatly amplified by Defense Secretary Austin a few days ago.
During the latest Ramstein meeting of Ukraine’s partners in Germany Austin basically said long-range fires were not that important. As it was relayed by PBS:
After the talks, Austin pushed back on the idea that long-range strikes would be a game-changer.
“I don’t believe one capability is going to be decisive and I stand by that comment,” Austin said. The Ukrainians have other means to strike long-range targets, he said.
Its hard to know what to make of that extraordinary claim. Is he saying that the US Army’s number 1 priority for modernization is not nearly that important? That would be bold of him—but more than likely he is desperately searching around for an argument because he knows just how important long-range fires are in war.
Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.
On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.
And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.
This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Have I or have I not done anything different here? I don’t suppose they will be exhuming William Shakespeare any time soon, but what she said was no worse than this. It was words, nothing more. We are now firmly in an authoritarian police state. A substantial custodial sentence for hurty words is the kind of thing we thought was confined to the old Soviet Union, but it looks as if the ghost of that monstrosity is alive and well in modern Britain.
In the comments of Disparu’s video responding to a journalist on the subject of the failure of the Star Wars TV series The Acolyte, commentariopolitico1014 writes:
These people act as if they purchased a famous and profitable steak house chain, show up wearing “Beef is Murder’ t-shirts, change the menu to vegan, and now are complaining that all customers are gone and leaving 1/2 stars!
Williamlitsch5506 replies:
I think that this is exactly what they are doing, on purpose. A vegan doesn’t buy a steakhouse by accident. They do it with the intent to punish and admonish steak eaters. They do it because they don’t want to build a vegan restaurant accross the street and compete for who has the best lifestyle. They want to top-down smash the competition and other lifestyles using money and power. They don’t want to compete in the marketplace of ideas. They don’t want to tolerate the existence of alternative lifestyles. They have high religiosity, belong to a powerful cult, and have no principled opposition to authoritarianism. They believe they are better than you, but know they can’t compete.
All institutions are vulnerable to this. In entertainment, at least, market forces limit it. In open source software, projects can be forked. In politics, the threat is far more subtle and difficult to defend against.
Starmer has also always been happy to be accused of running a ‘nanny state’. Much of the agenda that he and his Health Secretary Wes Streeting have revealed more widely for the NHS borders on that, with a focus on preventive healthcare rather than waiting until a patient needs acute (and more expensive) treatment. But an interesting question is whether the new government would have gone for this kind of ban had the Tories not already suggested it. As Katy explains here, the fact that Rishi Sunak championed the move first has made it much easier for Labour to take steps to crack down on smoking more generally. It is, she says, plausible that this approach could be extended to fast food and alcohol consumption. In fact, it wouldn’t make much sense if Starmer talks about the cost to the NHS of smoking but takes no action on obesity, even if that problem is far more complex than the relatively easy win of making it harder to smoke cigarettes.
And it will be much harder for the Conservatives to argue against those further moves because they were the ones who started all this off – in legislative terms, at least.
We are witnessing a kind of unwitting absolution of Hamas. It seems the West’s cultural elite, drunk on woke, can only interpret this war through the warping prism of identity politics. So ‘white’ Israel is seen as the only true, conscious actor in the war, while ‘brown’ Hamas are the victims, or at least hapless players whose actions are not worth dwelling on for long. In this twisted vision, Israel acts, Palestine is acted upon – even though it was Hamas’s acting upon Israel on 7 October that started the entire thing. It’s time to stop blaming Israel for everything. It’s time to talk about Hamas’s culpability. It’s time to give evil its due.
We’ve all heard the prevailing narrative in recent weeks. The riots that hit our towns and cities were the consequence of a mix of ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ and ‘disinformation’ from malicious actors. Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, Nigel Farage – all these individuals have been depicted as the James-Bond-style villain responsible for the mayhem.
This misguided theory has repeatedly been advanced by various liberal sophisticates on social media – people who always appear so desperate to flaunt their ‘progressive’, high-status opinions (the better to win kudos from their peers, of course).
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What it all shows is that if you scratch a member of the liberal intelligentsia, an anti-democratic authoritarian will bleed. We see time and again that, when it comes to the crunch, the liberal ‘good guys’ are as illiberal as the worst despots.
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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