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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“Cambridgeshire council admits to discrimination after a woman was labelled transphobic for criticism of a ‘gender-fluid’ dachshund”, reports the Telegraph, with relish.
Tim Sigsworth’s report says that:
A lesbian social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled.
Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender-critical views at a meeting of the authority’s LGBT+ employee group.
She had disagreed with a male colleague who claimed his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog to provoke “debate about gender” in January 2023.
Ms Pitt, 62, was formally disciplined by management after complaints were made accusing her of making “non-inclusive and transphobic” remarks.
However, the council later admitted liability for direct discrimination on the grounds of her beliefs.
I am glad that Ms Pitt won her case, but how did we get to a state of affairs where a county council actually believed that one of their employees taking a less than respectful view of another employee putting a dress on his wee dog and declaring it to be “gender-fluid” had had a “detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being of the complainants”?
When I read this account, I was surprised to find out that it happened as late as January 2023. Poor old Cambridgeshire County Council, puffing to keep up with trends that more with-it London bodies like the Royal Academy of Arts dropped in 2021. But the greater question is how and why this particular form of absurdity swept round the developed world so quickly. The wave is receding now, less quickly than it arose, but still very fast in historical terms. The “dropped in 2021” link describes how the Royal Academy of Arts abruptly withdrew the work of the textile artist Jess de Wahls from sale in its gift shop because she said “humans can not change sex”. After bad publicity, it backtracked. There is a certain irony about the way that progressive artists such as Ms de Wahls (“Her work is part of a movement to depict vagina and vulva in art”) spent their whole lives changing cultural norms with such success that their vulva-themed embroideries ended up in the Royal Academy gift shop, a development which might have surprised Sir Joshua Reynolds, only to see the wind change against them in an instant. Why did that particular memo go around in 2020? It wasn’t directly related to Black Lives Matter, but maybe that movement had something to do with it.
I have just returned from a holiday in Switzerland, where I often go to do deplorable things. While visiting a country, I try to keep an eye on which news stories are trending there. The almighty algorithm has observed my interest in things Swiss and even after my return keeps sending stories from the “swissinfo.ch” website my way. I am sure you can guess what it was about the following story that struck me as odd:
Swiss colonial exploitation highlighted by National Museum
Switzerland’s colonial history is the focus of an exhibition at the National Museum in Zurich. Based on new research, it looks at the country’s role in colonialism and slavery, and considers its legacy today.
If it were not for the way that every museum in the Western world has scrubbed out and re-written the labels on its displays to be “anti-colonialist”, I might consider this exhibition to be a welcome corrective. The Swiss are an admirable people, but they do have a slight tendency to think that their neutrality and their benign absence from the indexes of history books are entirely the results of virtue rather than geography. As the exhibition points out, many Swiss were happy to profit from slavery. Then I read further:
It [the exhibition] tells the story of businessmen who took part in the transatlantic slave trade or made their fortunes trading in colonial commodities and exploiting enslaved populations. In particular, the exhibition presents the whips and handcuffs used on slaves on coffee and cocoa plantations in Ghana, which enabled Swiss businessmen to make their fortunes.
It also tells the story of people who traveled the globe as missionaries or left Switzerland to found settlements and exploit territories considered uninhabited.
Why are traders in colonial commodities, missionaries and migrants lumped in with slavers, as if trading with other peoples, trying to persuade them to believe in the same things you do, or moving to a place you thought was uninhabited were evils in themselves?
It looks to me as if this exhibition is less about telling the stories of the forgotten victims of Swiss oppressors than about classifying the Swiss as an oppressor people, or, to be more exact, about making sure the Swiss know that little things like never having had any colonies are not enough to acquit them of being members of a colonialist race.
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Related post: “N star star star star, not N star star star star star”.
A young cosmopolitan such as I did not need the foreign terms explained. When well-meaning people tried to tell me that the “Cookie Monster” was equivalent to a “Biscuit Monster”, or that the “trash can” in which Oscar the Grouch resided was the same as a dustbin, I responded, with some hauteur, that I already knew these things. There was, however, one thing that I did not understand about Sesame Street, and that was why on earth at some point in every episode the announcer would say something along the lines of, “Today’s show is brought to you by the letter P and the number 6”.
Oh well. I liked the puppets.
I remain a fan of the letter P and the number 6. But when it comes to the American media I consume nowadays, I no longer like the puppets.
Oh, I can sympathise a little with the American newspapers for dutifully hastening to parrot every Word of the Week that the Harris campaign gives them. It is human nature to follow the herd. Although, as Glenn Greenwald put it in this tweet, “Not even herd animals are this flagrant about it. You tell me how and why corporate media constantly speaks from the same exact script this way, verbatim.” “Not happiness, not glee, not delight, not jubilation.” The cue card says JOY.
Until Kamala’s JOY expires and the next card comes up. The next card is Donald Trump’s dress sense, or lack of it.
As I said, I can understand, if not admire, the obedience of the American press. But why do British newspapers feel the need to immediately follow suit in complying with the “TRUMP’S SUITS” order?
Cue the Telegraph: The meaning behind Trump’s ill-fitting suits
Cue the Guardian: Donald Trump’s weird clothes: from shoulder pads to extremely long ties, what do they mean?
“Flashback: Harris fumed at Americans for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ before illegal migrants got protections”, Fox News reports:
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris warned Americans not to say “Merry Christmas” until there was permanent status for some illegal immigrants — amid a Trump-era battle over protections for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
“And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas,” she said at a 2017 press conference, a video of which was obtained by Fox News Digital.
Speakers pushed for the passage of the Dream Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors, NBC News reported.
Here is the video and here is the 2017 NBC article to which the article refers.
This clip has got a lot of play because it shows Kamala Harris as a purse-lipped woke puritan. Fair enough, she is one. Even if one completely accepted her point of view that passing the DREAM1 Act was a desirable objective in 2017, why should that not having been done be the thing that made it outrageous for Americans to wish each other “Merry Christmas” until it was done? There were plenty of worse things going on in the world in 2017: wars, famines, natural catastrophes, terrorism, poverty, crime. Why were these miseries not enough to prompt the curtailment of Christmas greetings until they were solved? Nor were these evils limited to the year 2017. So far as I know the DREAM Act has not been passed to this day. So we must assume Kamala Harris has now personally abstained from “speaking Merry Christmas” for six years and seven months and is still saying “How dare you” to anyone else who does it.
Yet in her defence, gestures of self-abnegation as a demonstration of commitment such as Harris made have a long history. In 1601, during the Dutch Revolt, Archduke Albert of Austria was laying siege to Ostend. His wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, declared that she would not change her shift until the city fell2. Since that did not happen until September 1604, her underwear got a bit grubby, giving rise to the colour term “Isabelline”.
Now that’s what I call commitment. If she wants to be taken seriously, Kamala Harris needs to follow the example of Isabella and urge her followers to do likewise.
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1No offence, Yanks, but for introducing the idea of bills or laws whose titles spell out aspirational words, your entire nation deserves to suffer the fate of Ostend.
2This story has been fact-checked to the standard expected of the Guardian or the New York Times.
We rarely comment on current affairs here, but the V-P has made an address to the Nation.
So we are in for a hot summer.
Have you met the hate monster?
Have you met the Hate Monster?
The Hate Monster, represents that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime.
The Hate Monster loves it when you get angry. He weighs you down till you end up targeting someone, just because they look or act different to you.
When you’re feeling insecure or angry, the Hate Monster feeds on that.
Why do some people let the Hate Monster in?
We know that young men aged 18-30 are most likely to commit hate crime, particularly those from socially excluded communities who are heavily influenced by their peers.
They may have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement.
Hurt people, hurt people
Committing hate crime is strongly linked to a range of risk factors including economic deprivation, adverse childhood experiences, substance abuse and under-employment. Those who grow up in abusive environments can become addicted to conflict.
Don’t let the Hate Monster rule your life
If you have committed or feel you are at risk of committing a hate crime, remember, it doesn’t make you feel better. Maybe for a moment, but in the end, you feel worse. The hate lingers. It can really mess up your life in other ways too, like when it comes to things like finding a job. A police record for hate crime is not a good look on anyone.
Go on, be good to yourself. Don’t feed the Hate Monster.
Watch award-winning stand-up, Liam Farrelly, lead a discussion about the impact of hate.
What to do if you see the hate monster
If you experience hate crime, report it.
If you are a witness to hate crime, report it.
Find out more about the different ways you can make a report.
The official hate monster video would have been perfectly acceptable for primary schools to show to pupils in their PSHE lessons. But if Police Scotland’s idea of a message for adults is “The Hate Monster loves it when you get angry”, I dread to think what the kids’ version is like…
I tawt I taw a hatey monster!
I did! I did! I taw a hatey monster!
Hatey watey monster said hatey tings. Hatey monster said bad tings ’bout all lotsa peepuw coz of pwotected kawactewistic. Hatey monster said, “They may have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement.”
This is c. 7 years old, but it is quite marvellous and a tribute to the great tradition of engineering in Sweden. A video done by a Swedish chap who built himself a pulse-jet powered sledge or ‘ice boat’ to run around on frozen lakes. It is basically a V1 doodlebug-type engine on a frame, with some seats and steering. What strikes me is the need for some form of suspension.
I have set the video where it has its first ‘ice road test’.
We also visited the sense-dulling intersection of sports, wokeness, and science journalism, via the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, in which we were told, “The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences, but of biases in how they are treated in sport.” That such male-female differences and their implications for athletes have been widely studied and quantified seemed somehow to have escaped detection. That Allyson Felix, an 11-time Olympic track and field medallist, would place six hundred and eighty-ninth on a ranking of high-school boys was one of many details carefully avoided. And which again suggests that wokeness is actively stupefying, a kind of rapid-onset morony.
– David Thompson, presenting us with a roundup of 2023’s lunatic antics. Read the whole thing and prepare to be stupefied by the cavalcade of idiocy.
From the Wikipedia entry for Lin Biao:
Lin became instrumental in creating the foundations for Mao Zedong’s cult of personality in the early 1960s, and was rewarded for his service in the Cultural Revolution by being named Mao’s designated successor as the sole Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, from 1966 until his death.
Lin died on 13 September 1971, when a Hawker Siddeley Trident he was aboard crashed in Öndörkhaan in Mongolia. The exact events of this “Lin Biao incident” have been a source of speculation ever since. The Chinese government’s official explanation is that Lin and his family attempted to flee following a botched coup against Mao.
Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin presumed dead after Russia plane crash – BBC
Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the passenger list of a jet which crashed killing all on board, Russia’s civil aviation authority has said.
Earlier, Wagner-linked Telegram channel Grey Zone reported that the private plane, which belonged to the 62-year-old, was shot down by air defences.
Grey Zone posted later on Wednesday that Prigozhin died “as a result of actions of traitors of Russia”.
Prigozhin led a failed mutiny against the Russian armed forces in June.
This surreal turn in the 2023 plotline is a bold stroke, but if the writers can pull off the swivel from tragedy to black comedy, I could get to like it.
Russia-Ukraine war live: Wagner chief claims to be in Rostov military HQ; Moscow accuses him of trying to start ‘civil conflict’ – the Guardian. Note that Rostov is in Russia, not Ukraine.
Putin to speak as Wagner mercenary chief accused of mutiny – BBC.
Both those links go to constantly updated blogs, so the headlines will almost certainly change in the next few minutes.
Update 10:30am BST: the BBC’s rolling blog now says “Russian sources are now saying that Wagner fighters have taken control of all military facilities in the city of Voronezh, a halfway point between Rostov-on-Don (where Wagner also says it’s in charge) and the capital Moscow.”
Will someone please ask the Swedish Doom Goblin if I have time for another Armagnac?
I thought they only did that when they were literally digging for dead bodies. Come now, Police Scotland, just because you have arrested the husband of the recently resigned First Minister of Scotland, no need for all the drama. It’s only a few hundred thousand quid.
That link goes to the Wings Over Scotland blog. Stuart Campbell owns this story and has every right to say, “I told you so” to every professional journalist in Scotland, whether Nationalist or Unionist.
By the way, when commenting on this story, remember that “arrested” does not mean “charged” and “charged” does not mean “guilty”. The presumption of innocence is never more important than when a public figure you do not like has his collar felt. A lot of people in the States could do with that reminder following the arrest of Donald Trump.
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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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