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]
We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an âoverwhelming scientific consensus.â
âItâs a manufactured consensus,â says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue âfame and fortune.â
She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change.
The good folk at The Cobden Centre have put together a very good documentary to explain how the fiat money system works, and has some suggestions as to what to do about it. At the instigation of the Sage of Kettering, (full disclosure, his cousin made it), here it is.
I have watched it and it is very good. Ex Nihilo: The Truth about Money. My only quibble is that it repeatedly refers to banks creating money out of thin air, but there is some substance to ‘thin air’, which, after all, can sustain respiration and hold up aircraft.
I haven’t trusted a word the BBC says about much for several decades, but I do remember a time when at least weather reports could be taken at face value.
Now I don’t even know if they are lying about that. Turns out many of the breathless inferno weather reports from southern Europe were being drastically overstated, sometimes by as much as 10 degrees!
Make no mistake, the “nudge unit” is at work, spreading its statist bullshit far and wide.
Either the Independent‘s “Race Correspondent” (who, to add to the comedy, is called Nadine White) has written a report almost designed to be misunderstood, or she is a satirist of genius. I present to you this story:
Juicy! Which one of ’em was it? Will Meghan’s Spotify podcast be coming back so she can discuss it? Sorry to disappoint, but the connection to the current royal family is strong as a cobweb: it seems a catalogue of gems and jewels owned by the Royal Collection “contained more than 40 mentions of offensive racial terms”. The aberrant public catalogue concerning a sub-collection of jewels, cameos, and other small items was actually published fifteen years ago in 2008 but remained on the Royal Collection’s website until the intrepid offence archaeologists of the Independent found it last Thursday. Since the cataloguing and study of the whole collection by historians is an ongoing process, those particular entries could have been written decades earlier. Here is the current webpage. Fear not, it has been purged.
And about that “offensive racial term” in the 2008 version… it wasn’t the n-word the Independent wants you to think it was.
In the latest instance, the offensive terms are mostly used to describe people of African ancestry who appear on the jewels. The words are also included in a number of names of items in the collection.
One brooch is described in the following terms: âHead of a n**** in three-quarter profile to the right, with drop-pearl earring. This type of a n****âs head is found on several sixteenth-century cameos.â
Another item depicting a white person is accompanied by this description and slur: âAthough it uses the dark layers of the stone for the profile, the features are not n*****dâ.
Count the asterisks. Four, not five. Ergo it was egro, or in the final example, egroid.
UPDATE 16:20 BST: Someone at the Independent read the readers’ comments. The newspaper has now changed n**** to n***o throughout the article.
âŠand Piers Morgan is someone who literally his entire career is now fuelled by this sort of nonsense. And as you know I have been on Good Morning Britain four times now. I have always found it to be a deeply unpleasant experience even when Iâve âwonâ. Because the way it happens – and most people wonât know this – but when you are backstage they keep you separate from the guests that you are supposed to be debating. They try and psych you up. They try and say âYou should feel free to interrupt as much as possibleâ and the one time I was on with Peter Tatchell who for all his flaws I deeply respect and I didnât want to be a dick and interrupt him all the time they actually basically had a go at me afterwards and that clip was never even put on the internet because it was not seen as being inflammatory enough. So the whole purpose of these shows is to create conflicts and create soundbites and create all this nonsense and Piers Morgan is like a parasite feeding off the carcass of civil discourse.
– about 14 mins from the beginning of a Triggernometry âRAWâ live stream from c. March 2021. Piers Morgan, of course, left GMB in a row over Meghan Markle. Earlier this year he appeared on Kissin and Francis Fosterâs Triggernometry podcast.
Generally, the story of a lucrative trade established centuries ago is one of brutal colonisation of the unlucky occupants of a suddenly valuable land â and a rising tide of misery thereafter. Our greater consciousness of this fact makes a visit to such a land by a posh, white lady born in India under the Raj inherently, unavoidably tricky.
Evil Joanna Lumley, arranging to be born in India in 1946.
The revelation that the adjective was the European’s secret weapon all along comes as part of a description of a scene in which Joanna Lumley eats nutmeg and says how much she likes it.
Lumley recommends grating it over your green beans with lots of butter. But first she eats a fresh one. âHonestly, itâs divine.â This is what things are when they arenât âsensationalâ, âstunningâ, âextraordinaryâ, âravishingâ or â in the case of the bum-cleaning bucket-and-hose set up on the ferry from Ambon â âenchantingâ. Empires were built on exploitation â and adjectives.
I cannot help feeling that this statement from Lucy Mangan is problematic itself. If the English, or in the case of the Banda Islands, Dutch, adjective played a significant part in the subjugation of nations, surely that implies that the native adjectives that failed to stand up to the invaders were less puissant, less krachtig? I am not a believer in the popular theory that language determines thought, but since Lucy Mangan seems to be, someone ought to let her know that the theory implies that some languages are just better than others. Or did Mangan mean that Lumley ought to have been using Banda Malay adjectives rather than oppressive English ones? Wait, wouldn’t that be cultural appropriation? It’s so hard to keep up. Maybe she meant that Joanna Lumley’s sin was to use adjectives at all. Only a Raj-born 1946-ite such as Lumley wastes the people’s oxygen with words like “divine”, “sensational”, “stunning”, “extraordinary”, “ravishing” and “enchanted” when “doubleplusgood” is available, to continue the 1984 theme from yesterday’s post on “doublethink”.
Perhaps I err in trying to ascribe meaning to that sentence at all. How bourgeois to think that an anti-colonialist review of a TV travel show published in the Guardian has to withstand analysis. There was an excellent Newspeak word for phrases like “Empires were built on exploitation â and adjectives”, “duckspeak”, meaning speech that issued from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all, like the quacking of a duck. Note that so long as the speech was orthodox, to call someone a doubleplusgood duckspeaker was a term of praise.
Tara Reade, the woman who accused Joe Biden of having sexually assaulted her when she worked for him as a Congressional aide, has “defected” to Russia.
I first noticed her direction of travel when I saw a tweet by her in praise of Vladlen Tatarsky. Plenty of people had concerns about his killing without gushing over him in the way she did. I cannot find that tweet now. It was there. Perhaps she deleted it when she read the replies. At any rate, she has now gone fully Putinite.
And her accusation against Joe Biden should still be taken seriously by the authorities. Note that “taken seriously” does not mean “automatically believed”. #BelieveWomen is a literally prejudiced sentiment on a moral par with #BelieveWhitePeople. Nor does it mean “automatically disbelieved”. As a woman and a Putinite, Tara Reade’s report of a crime being committed against her should be taken seriously, because as an anything whatsoever anyone whatsoever should have their report of a crime taken seriously.
The gross disproportion between the way the media lined up not merely to cover but to profess their unquestioning belief in Christine Blasey Ford’s unevidenced accusation of sexual assault against Justice Brett Kavanaugh yet refused to even look at Reade’s considerably more detailed accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden will never be anything other than a disgrace.
The âgatekeepers of the newsâ have become stenographers of virtually every dubious or false public health narrative. Nobody (who really matters in the Big Picture) is challenging the never-ending lies, manipulated data and false narratives.
If this lack of skepticism persists, it seems almost a certainty that all the important organizations in the world will continue to be led by people who either arenât intelligent enough to challenge false narratives or know the narratives are false and simply donât care.
For some reason, it turns out that if someone suggests that there is something wrong with a white family having white offspring in front of a gazillion people, you are supposed to enthusiastically nod along and pass on your congratulations. Naively, I failed to comply and recklessly set out on a voyage of light-hearted piss-taking, asking immature questions such as ‘does everything have to be viewed through the prism of race, sexuality and culture?’.
Turns out the answer is: YES! And what’s more, your skin colour dictates the type of questions you’re allowed to ask.
And apropos that, the other day commenter Ferox made this remark:
My view has always been (and I have argued it here on this site) that if you need to know the color (or demographic trait in general) of the speaker before you know if you are offended or not, then the hate is coming from you – not from the speaker. What you hate is not what was said but the person saying it.
It was about a minute later that I encountered Feinstein coming off an elevator, sitting in a wheelchair and flanked by staff. Itâs been hard to find the senator since her return; sheâs kept her movements mostly to the least-populated passageways and skipped luncheons and non-urgent committee hearings.
I asked her how she was feeling.
âOh, Iâm feeling fine. I have a problem with the leg.â A fellow reporter staking out the elevator asked what was wrong with the leg.
âWell, nothing thatâs anyone concern but mine,â she said.
When the fellow reporter asked her what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return, though, the conversation took an odd turn.
âNo, I havenât been gone,â she said.
OK.
âYou should follow theâI havenât been gone. Iâve been working.â
When asked whether she meant that sheâd been working from home, she turned feisty.
âNo, Iâve been here. Iâve been voting,â she said. âPlease. You either know or donât know.â
After deflecting one final question about those, like Rep. Ro Khanna, whoâve called on her to resign, she was wheeled away.
Senator Feinstein, who is 89, appears to have forgotten that she was in hospital with shingles for two and a half months.
If youâre a Democratic senator and youâre not at least privately urging Feinstein to resign, and urging Schumer and Durbin to take action, you have failed the people who sent you to Congress. Youâre lying to yourselves that this đđœ is *okay*
He is right, but Feinstein’s is not the only photograph that could be placed below that downward-pointing finger.
My spellcheck pulsates in impotent frustration, but I don’t care. An Equater is a person who equates. In this context, which I get to decide because it is my post, an Equater is a person who is not content to compare something bad done by a liberal democratic government to the very much worse things done by despotic governments in order to shame the former into better behaviour, but who insists on going from comparison all the way to equation.
Since the death of Her Late Majesty, there have been many occasions when the British police reverted from their recent tendency to exceed their legal powers while stamping down on those who say rude things about illegal aliens or the LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flag, in order to return to their traditional role of exceeding their legal powers while stamping down on people who say rude things about the monarchy. Or even on those who film other people saying rude things about the monarchy: in this tweet, a documentary filmmaker called Rich Felgate writes, “Yesterday I got arrested whilst filming a @JustStop_Oil supporter holding a banner on the pavement near the coronation route. I’m a filmmaker and had my @BECTU press accreditation visible around my neck. Police deemed this to be “conspiracy to commit a public nuisance”.
That is bad. Dammit, it almost looks similar to what you would expect to see in a communist country. Similar, much too similar for comfort, but no one with any respect for the millions murdered by communism would say “identical”.
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.
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