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]
On 28th September 2018, the fantasy author Niel Gaiman tweeted,
“On a day like today it’s worth saying, I believe survivors. Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to believed at the ballot box & with art & by listening, and change this world for the better.”
I presume the “day like today” referred to the fact that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a U.S. Supreme Court judge had been forwarded to the Senate that day. The previous day, 27th September 2018, Kavanaugh himself and Dr Christine Blasey Ford had both testified to the Judiciary Committee. In her testimony Dr Ford said that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her approximately thirty six years earlier at a party when both were teenagers. I say “approximately” because although Dr Ford said that the assault was “seared into her memory”, she could not say in which year it happened, nor in whose house the party took place.
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There are times when the message “You’ve reached your monthly article limit” is very welcome. I got it from New York magazine’s Vulture blog. That means I cannot re-read Lila Shapiro’s exposé of Gaiman’s sexual behaviour. Good, I’d rather not read that again. It is clear that he used his fame and status to sexually exploit young women who came into his orbit as fans or employees in a manner that is no less disgusting for being a tale as old as time. Some of his deeds may have reached the level of crimes.
Many now say, “Who cares about the “may”? Let Gaiman be hoist on his own petard! Let those making accusations of sexual assault against him be believed automatically, as he wanted to happen to Kavanaugh.”
I do not say this. The presumption of innocence is a universal principle. That means it applies to everyone, including those who would deny it to others. I used to think it was a settled principle; that anyone in the political mainstream understood its importance. That particular delusion died for me as I watched Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings and read hundreds of tweets and opinion articles like Gaiman’s that said that Ford should be believed because she is female, and Kavanaugh disbelieved because he is male.
The #MeToo movement had ceased to be concerned with justice.
I want the presumption of innocence to be re-established as a universal principle of justice. Justice demands that both sides be heard and that potentially exculpatory evidence be seen. And there are some things in the Vulture exposé to which Gaiman could point in his defence if this comes to a trial. I have talked a great deal about the evils of automatically believing women (or whites or blacks or rich people or poor people or any other category considered as a lump of virtue or vice). But there is an equal and opposite evil, that of assuming that adult women cannot be believed when they say “I consent”.
I had been groping towards a way to express this when Sarah Hoyt of Instapundit pointed me to a writer who had already expressed it better than I could. The piece in question is by Kat Rosenfield and is called “On what women want”. Rosenfield writes,
By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.
Whether Jaguar’s new electric car flops as a result of all this remains to be seen. It would hardly be surprising if Jaguar’s traditional audience – the people who actually buy its cars – give up on the company in response to all this insufferable virtue-signalling. After bending the knee so readily to the trans cause, that would be the least Jaguar deserves.
I see “leaving X” is trending on TwitterX, presumably driven by people who like to be governed more & fear without the threat of pervasive algorithmic censorship, they might write something that gets them cancelled.
A good article by “The Liberal Patriot”, Ruy Teixeira: “The Progressive Moment is Over”. The four main points he addresses to his fellow Democrats are:
1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
Twenty-two years ago, alongside John B. Judis, Mr Teixeira was one of the co-authors of a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, which itself was inspired by a book written in 1969 by Kevin Phillips called “The Emerging Republican Majority”. Judging by the popular vote in US elections over the last two decades, Mr Teixeira wasn’t wrong, but all such theses have an expiry date. I would not care to place a bet on who will win the coming US election in eight days’ time, nor on the next one, but I would place a bet on the winners of the 2028 election not being progressives.
‘We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.’
Several people have asked: why does ‘diverse’ content spark backlash now when it didn’t before?
I think it comes down to one thing: removal.
In the past, inclusionary moves didn’t try to clear out the previously enjoyed things. Kim Possible did not replace James Bond, she was just another secret agent you could watch alongside James Bond. In video games, serious action girls existed alongside miniskirted vixens, and everyone was fine with that. Avatar: The Last Airbender existed alongside Teen Titans. The Hunger Games existed alongside Harry Potter or Percy Jackson.
But now, the priority seems to be not addition, but subtraction.
It’s not enough to have a new Jedi; you have to remove the old ones. It’s not enough to have a female super-spy; you have to remove James Bond. It’s not enough to have serious action girls in your video game; you have to cover up or delete the vixens. It’s not enough to have new video games with modern sensibilities; you have to remove the old ones, or censor them in re-releases. It’s not enough to have new novels that fit modern ideological priorities; you have to censor the old ones.
– Rawle Nyanzi, writing on TwitterX. I think he absolutely nails a key driver behind increasing radicalisation in the culture war.
Twenty years ago it was simple: to any problem, freedom was the answer. But in recent years I have become less sanguine. Some might say I have grown up. Still, I have this uneasy feeling that Western societies are beset with problems and that freedom is not always the answer.
I thought what I would do was to write down the biggest problems facing us here in Britain, write down the libertarian approach and assess in a blog post if it would be successful or not. Well, like many of my big ideas that soon ran into the buffers of indolence. But I did manage to identify what I think are the biggest problems – or crises as I call them – that we face. They are (in approximate order of importance):
1. The Freedom of Speech Crisis. Cancel culture, de-banking, lawfare and actual punishment are being used to prevent people from expressing their opinions. Much of this is being done in the nominally private sector. If this continues the results will be disastrous.
2. The Integration Crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people live in this country and have no affection for its people or its customs and more are coming every day. This is a recipe for an Ulster on the grand scale.
3. The Debt Crisis. Government spending is unsustainable. Mind you, I was thinking that 15 years ago.
4. The Housing Crisis. Young people cannot afford a home where they can bring up children.
5. The Net Zero Crisis. OK, this hasn’t happened yet but when the electricity goes off, modern society will come to a halt.
6. The Ukraine Crisis. Well, you can add in Israel, Taiwan and probably a few other places too. The West is under military attack by people who would like to see it destroyed.
7. The NHS Crisis. Long waits for poor care and indifferent service.
There are a couple that tend to get mentioned regularly that I haven’t included. The Migration Crisis is really part of the Integration Crisis and part of the Housing Crisis. Wokery is part of the Integration Crisis (again) and also part of the Freedom of Speech Crisis.
People occasionally mention the Population Crisis – not enough babies being born. I tend to think this is either not a problem at all (the market will sort it out) or something that is beyond politics.
Is there anything I’ve missed? Do libertarians have the answer?
Because all three of the values underpinning the revolution – liberty, fraternity and equality – are now disappearing into thin air in Europe, the birthplace of democracy.
And the political changes seem irreversible: In seven European democracies, far-right parties have entered government, and in several more states, including France, they are pushing at the gates of power. Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia and, of course, Russia, have quasi-autocratic governments. Last Sunday the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ), a party that even the conservative media describe as “radical rightwing”, won a general election for the first time. They campaigned on the slogan “Fortress Austria”, in effect advocating an ethnically and culturally cleansed country. The term is reminiscent of “Fortress Europe” – a phrase favoured by Goebbels.
The FPÖ manifesto calls for “two genders” to be enshrined in the constitution, “remigration” to be radically implemented and for the creation of a two-tier society in which only “real” Austrians are entitled to social benefits. In the words of the FPÖ, it wants to “gain full power over government, space and people”.
“Ethnically cleansed” … “Goebbels” … “full power over government, space and people” … With the mad courage of despair, in the next sentence Mr Rau gets down to specifics about what form this onrushing horror will take:
In the area of cultural policy, it wants to follow the example of neighbouring Hungary and Slovakia and cut public subsidies for “woke events”, such as the Eurovision song contest
I wasn’t expecting that.
and the Vienna festival, which I am the director of.
Ah, now I understand.
In the eyes of the FPÖ, “woke” is presumably anything that is not brass band music, operetta or Germanic-pop schlager music.
In doing so, it is politicising a trend that has been apparent throughout Europe for many years: I remember in 2019, when I was still artistic director of the NTGent in Belgium, we demonstrated against the Flemish region’s budget cuts. The process of allocating subsidies was akin to distributing scarce food after a natural disaster: institutions and independent companies were thrown together into a pool that had far too little money at its disposal.
In neoliberal fashion, the actual problem – namely, insufficient subsidies for the arts – was translated into a competitive conflict.
From what I have read about the FPÖ, it does seem that the party’s “far right” label has more substance behind it than is usual, but the party “cutting cultural budgets on the grounds that they are not economically viable” does not contribute to my having that opinion. Mr Rau seems to think that that the disbursement of government subsidies being a political matter, taxpayer money being treated as a finite resource, and subsidy-funded arts organisations actually having to compete with each other all constitute outrages against the natural order.
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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