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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Samizdata quote of the day – Hard copy edition

· Culture Wars · Slogans & Quotations

[T]his also proves that relying on a Kindle or other tech is a folly. I have quite a library in my flat, and sometimes friends of mine poke fun at it and ask why I don’t put all this on a digital device. The naivete is clear.

Buy the actual books; learn to look after them, keep copies of really valuable ones. And give them to those whom you respect and love in your will. Beware anyone whose bookshelf is smaller than their plasma TV.

– Johnathan Pearce

March 2nd, 2023 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)

Re-writing the Fleming and Dahl books to make them “safer”

· Culture Wars · Deleted by the Woke Media

Well done on James Bond enthusiast David Zaritsky for taking a stand. Let’s treat readers like adults. Sure, the language in some of the books isn’t what I would want it to be, but then Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, and many other writers could be faulted on the same basis. I understand that the Fleming family (I know some of the members and they are good people) has authorised this. But I think this is a mistake, because this process isn’t going to stop.

In a free market (I hardly need to stress the point in this neighbourhood) the owners of copyright and so on can of course do what they want. Their house, their rules, etc. But from a broader perspective, caving into this sort of pressure for change is a mistake that the owners will regret. Fleming wrote books that were racy at the time (even the late journalist, Paul Johnson, was furiously angry about them, showing his prudish side). Fleming had a journalist’s ear for accuracy in conveying dialogue, and the Harlem and Jamaica scenes in Live and Let Die, for example, show that. It isn’t nice, but segregation America and the language used at the time wasn’t nice, and Fleming was both beguiled by American prosperity and shocked by its underside. He conveyed that in muscular prose. (This is a man, who, remember, covered the Moscow show trials in the 1930s, and he knew what censorship meant.) I also think it is presumptious for his descendants to suppose that he’d be fine with having his books re-written to suit more sensitive tastes. The evidence cited in support of this claim is flimsy. One thing he condemned, as the books show, was moral priggery. (This short collection of essays nicely explains this.)

And then there is the Roald Dahl case. Puffin, the publishers of books for children and young adults, has re-written his stories, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to remove words and sentences that, for various reasons, are deemed unacceptable, such as making some characters gender-neutral, or removing the word “fat” around one of the various horrible children, etc. It is bowdlerisation, and some of the actual story “punch”, and that sense of subversive naughtiness that Dahl had, has gone.

Here’s an incisive commentary on the sorry business from Yaron Brook. Dr Brook thinks the whole “woke” phenomenon has peaked, and maybe it has. There is a defensiveness and sneakiness around what’s gone on in the Dahl case that suggests the perpetrators know what they are doing is bad. I am unsure: I think a lot of foolishness lies ahead of us. The Fleming adjustments are more open and proud, and that bothers me.

Anyway, my take is it that if you don’t like a book, fine. Explain why. That’s what learning, and education, is supposed to give us in developing a capacity to judge and discriminate. A person who cannot do that is not educated.

In the meantime, pre-censorship copies of Dahl, Fleming and others will be worth a lot more money. I have sets of all the Bond stories, and several moth-eaten paperbacks. I intend to keep good care of them. They’re not for sale.

By a sort of savage irony, today is World Book Day. Isn’t that nice?

March 2nd, 2023 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day – Universities cannot withstand the assault on objective truth

· Culture Wars · Education & Academia · Slogans & Quotations

After expressing my general admiration for the course, I raised my misgiving in the following way (and this is nearly an exact quote): “We need to keep in mind that we’re a state university. Our mission is to pursue, ascertain, and disseminate objective truth, and to equip our students to do the same. Given that mission, I don’t think we can list a learning outcome that requires students’ assent on a matter of personal morality. The other learning outcomes are fine. You don’t need that one, so I’d just cut it.” My colleague was fresh out of graduate school and not yet tenured, which (theoretically) put her in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, she became apoplectic; so angry, in fact, that she had difficulty getting out her first sentence. “I can’t believe people still think that way!” she spluttered. “Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity!”

– Mark Goldblatt, The Approaching Disintegration of Academia.

February 13th, 2023 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day – treat these tyrants as what they are: awful people

· Culture Wars · Slogans & Quotations

The woke think of themselves — and want everyone else to think of them — as deeply moral. If they have a flaw, it’s that they just care too much. They’re too idealistic, too empathetic, too eager to make the world a better place.

That’s bulls–t (pardon my French, Pepé!). If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.

Historically, it’s not the good guys who are out burning books and censoring speech. It isn’t the caring, empathetic people who try to destroy lives based on something someone said years ago, often while young, often taken out of context. It isn’t the good guys who take undisguised glee at the ruining of lives, families and careers.

You know who does these things? Horrible, awful people. Selfish people. People with serious mental and emotional problems who seek some sort of vindication for their deficient characters by taking power trips while imposing suffering on others.

Treat these tyrants as what they are: awful people who shouldn’t be listened to and who need to work hard on joining the better half of the human race. And remind them of it, over and over. Because it’s true. Deep down, they know it, too.

– Glenn Reynolds

February 12th, 2023 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)

The inadequacy of political “kindness”

· Aus/NZ affairs · Culture Wars · Philosophical

In response to a Times article called “How I watched the halo slipping from Jacinda Ardern”, a commenter called Iain Thorpe made a very good point:

There are deep problems with “kindness” as a political philosophy. If kindness is the answer to all problems, then the problems must be caused by unkindness. And people who disagree with you must be unkind people. Obviously you don’t have to listen when unkind people try to tell you anything. And you certainly don’t have to offer them the same concern or compassion as other people. Their unkindness is their own fault. You don’t have to do anything for it, or for them. And so “kindness” ends up being without empathy, the opposite of inclusion. Adern’s inability to deal with people who disagreed with or were disadvantaged by her government’s policies was striking. She seldom even attempted to speak to them and seemed incapable of winning over anyone who opposed her.

January 30th, 2023 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day – offence taken edition

· Culture Wars · Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs

Just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right

– Great Grass MCR Ltd 😀

January 11th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

A young Frenchwoman says “I don’t like America that much”

· Culture Wars · French affairs · North American affairs · Opinions on liberty

Allowing for the fact that she is speaking a language foreign to her, I think she has a point.

December 30th, 2022 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)

A speakeasy for archaeologists

· Culture Wars · Education & Academia · Historical views · Privacy & Panopticon · Totalitarianism

“Stone Age Herbalist” is a pseudonym adopted out of necessity by someone who wants to practise an activity condemned by respectable society: scientific archaeology. Their piece for Unherd is called “The Rise of Archaeologists Anonymous”.

Why do these academics seek to do in secret what they used to do openly in the universities? Because academic archaeology has changed:

Historian Wolf Liebeschuetz and archaeologist Sebastian Brather, to pick on just two, have both firmly insisted that archaeology must not, and cannot, be used to trace migrations or identify different ethnic groups in prehistory. To quote from Liebeschuetz’s 2015 book, East and West in Late Antiquity: “Archaeology can trace cultural diffusion, but it cannot be used to distinguish between peoples, and should not be used to trace migration. Arguments from language and etymology are irrelevant.”

At a stroke, this line of reasoning would essentially abolish several centuries of work unravelling the thread of movements and evolution of the Indo-European peoples and languages, not to mention the post-Roman Germanic Migration Period, Anglo-Saxon invasions, Polynesian and Bantu Expansions and almost all major changes in the human record.

and

This became clearer than ever following the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which saw archaeology departments and professional bodies across the world fall over themselves to pledge curriculum “decolonisation” and an explicit commitment to politicising the discipline. To quote from the “’The Future of Archaeology Is Antiracist’: Archaeology in the Time of Black Lives Matter”, published in American Antiquity:

“Consequently, Black archaeology has been and must remain purposeful in practice. It rejects research and practices defined in sterile, binary terms of objective-subjective positionality. Archaeology at historic Black sites must be conducted with an explicit politics… To the field of archaeology, it serves as a moral guide with the potential to elucidate historical wrongs and explore forms of contemporary redress.”

December 28th, 2022 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)

Progressivism, the shield against Covid

· Culture Wars · Deleted by the Woke Media · Health & medical · North American affairs

This tweet by “the Rabbit Hole” is possibly the most damning, and the funniest, single image of media double standards I have ever seen:

In case someone else buys Twitter and it goes away, the image shows matched pairs of headlines from Vox, the Washington Post, Forbes, ABC News, the Insider, CNN, CNBC, the New York Times, the Verge and the AP. Every one of these outlets decided to run essentially the same pair of stories a few months apart. Taking but two examples,

The Insider said “Don’t blame Black Lives Matter protests for the spike in coronavirus cases across the US” and “The Capitol insurrection seems to have caused a superspreader event among lawmakers. Some Republicans refused to mask up.”

The Verge said, “Blaming protesters for COVID-19 spread ignores the bigger threats to health” and “COVID-19 cases in the Capitol are only the tip of the iceberg.”

And so on for the rest of them.

I can remember a time when if separate reports written by many different journalists in a whole bunch of famous newspapers and TV channels all said the same thing, it made me more likely to believe them.

December 27th, 2022 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day – NewSpeak edition

· Culture Wars

Antiracism means dividing people by race.
Equity means segregation and racial preferences.
Man means woman.

– Wanjiru Njoya

December 14th, 2022 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)

A real-world ethics question that is not especially hard

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Culture Wars · Media & Journalism · Mindless "Inequality" Blather · North American affairs · Self defence & Security

In New York Times, John Leland asks,

Real-world ethics question: In a well-used city park, a man with a history of erratic behavior attacks a dog and its owner with a stick; five days later, the dog dies. The man is Black, the dog owner white; the adjoining neighborhood is famously progressive, often critical of the police and jail system. At the same time, crime is up in the neighborhood, with attacks by emotionally disturbed people around the city putting some residents on edge.

In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do? How do you protect the public without furthering injustice against this man?

The question is not theoretical. On August 3rd, Jessica Chrustic and her dog Moose were attacked in Prospect Park, Brooklyn by a homeless man.

According to Ms. Chrustic, he started yelling about immigrants taking over the park,

Had he not been black, that detail would have answered Mr Leland’s question in short order.

then grabbed a bottle of what she later concluded was urine and sloshed it at her and her dog. She tried to run away, but Moose, her 80-pound golden retriever mix, was straining toward the man, trying to protect her.

The man started swinging the stick, she said. One blow hit her, not seriously. Another connected solidly with the dog’s snout. Mary Rowland, 56, a hospital manager who was walking her dog nearby, said she heard the crack of wood on bone and came running toward them, screaming at the man to get away.

The man fled, but the next weekend, Moose developed sepsis from a perforated intestine. Emergency surgery was not enough to save him.

What was done about this unprovoked attack on a woman and her dog? Nothing.

She was especially frustrated that the man, who was well known to people in the park, had not been arrested. “You have a person who is walking around the park who is violent and needs to be removed,” she said. “He’s known by the community. It’s disheartening.”

It was a random incident that might once have been discussed by a group of dog owners. But now it had a forum for a much wider community, with arguments about policing, vigilantism, homelessness, mental health care and progressive obstinacy all feeding into a conversation that evolved beyond the crime that set it off.

“It’s complicated,” said S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University. “It’s a conflict of values, between wanting security and social justice. Everybody has a responsibility in some ways.

All together now… WE ARE ALL GUILTY! Dr Heinz Kiosk has been reborn, but not as funny this time.

I disagree with Professor Liao. It is not complicated at all.

Regarding Mr Leland’s question, “In a dog-loving, progressive enclave, where pushing law and order can clash with calls for social justice, what’s the right thing to do?”, Suzy Weiss of the New York Post described what some of the residents of this dog-loving, progressive enclave did do: “Bizarre meeting of Park Slopers over how to handle murdered pooch”.

October 8th, 2022 | 75 comments - (Comments are closed)

Samizdata quote of the day

· Culture Wars · Slogans & Quotations

We live in a world where Ricky Gervais and JK Rowling are, to everyone’s surprise, not least their own, ‘right-wing’. The supposed rule breakers such as Frankie Boyle, Nish Kumar and Stewart Lee are crushingly orthodox. Roger Waters has a portfolio of crankery going back decades but remains unbesmirched, whereas a single tweet from Winston Marshall saw him exiled from polite society. (As I write, it seems Craig L Potter of the band Elbow might be heading the same way, merely for daring to criticise trans charity Mermaids.)

– Gareth Roberts (£)

September 20th, 2022 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
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