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]
Douglas Young ponders how close to the edge our lives are.
In the wake of the near assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, a large number of Americans have wondered if he survived solely “by the grace of God.” Indeed, many believe that the Almighty Himself must have altered the direction of the assassin’s bullet so that it grazed Mr. Trump’s ear instead of hitting his head.
But if we accept this and are logically consistent, do we not also have to believe that God guided the assassin’s bullet that killed the devoted father shielding his wife and children at the event, as well as the bullets seriously wounding two other men? Or that He simply did not care about them?
I think the July 13 assassination attempt is all the more disturbing because it highlights so starkly just how huge a role luck plays in our lives. It is sobering to realize that, no matter how good or careful we think we are, very often we have no control over whether we get terminal cancer, crippled or killed in a car wreck, or even shot.
I suspect the major novelist Norman Mailer was right that this is why we prefer conspiracy theories to make sense of senseless tragedies. So instead of a total loser like Lee Harvey Oswald being able to kill President John Kennedy and change history all by himself, we much prefer to believe that only a massive cabal involving the CIA, our military-industrial complex, the Mafia, the Russians, or the Cubans could have managed such a massively consequential crime.
Now, despite clear evidence of recent rank incompetence at the U.S. Secret Service, we are sorely tempted to believe that last month’s extremely close call with the GOP presidential nominee had to be the result of a well-coordinated plot involving the CIA, other government officials, and/or even the Secret Service – anything but that awkward and lonely assassin barely out of his teens acting by himself. Yet almost every shooter of an American president has been an utter failure who somehow single-handedly pulled off what was assumed to be almost impossible.
In 1835, President Andrew Jackson survived an assassination attempt by a deranged man convinced he was a 15th century English king. In 1881, President James Garfield was murdered by a lone gunman and likely schizophrenic whose life had been a complete catastrophe. In 1901, President William McKinley was shot to death by an unemployed socialist-anarchist. In 1963 President Kennedy was cut down by a mentally ill high school dropout who had become a communist. And in 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot by an insane loner hoping to impress a famous actress he had not even met.
As I have often stated I am keen to see the ‘Conservative’ Party not just lose but be annihilated, I was asked the very reasonable question:
And what happens next, after the cataclysmic labour government?
So…
The impending disaster as Labour dials all the Tory idiocy up to 11 is what will hopefully create the political space for an actual small-c conservative party, likely some messy mishmash of nationalists, classical liberals and old-school pre-woke former tribal labour supporters.
The not-very-ideological “tribal voters” (which face it is a large chunk of both Labour and Tory voters) will only be up for grabs when it become impossible to pretend the old tribes still exist. Most Tory tribal voters have got the message, and some Labour ones as well. The next few years will convince what remains.
It will be a ruinous, horrible intermediate period (in the Egyptian sense of the term). Close to nothing Labour does will make people’s lives better, and as Labour gets desperate, they will become ever more rapacious as they try to fund various doomed-from-the-start schemes (such as the nationalised energy company, which I imagine will quickly become the British Leyland of our time). As a result, many with movable assets will indeed move them and themselves elsewhere until it becomes clear how things will shake out in the medium to long term.
That is how I see it. No prizes for guessing what I am going to do during the ‘intermediate’ period.
“We often read critics of either ideological stripe bemoan the lack of originality in our art, our music, and most certainly, our movies. Old franchises suffer from Woke narratives smuggled into stories that should never have been revived. Nostalgia is the only thing that motivates moviegoers now because we really have no new stories to tell. We’re only entertained by ‘content creators’, influencers, and the next series to watch on Netflix, Hulu, Apple Plus, Paramount, Max, and Amazon Prime. But the Woke left and the TradCon right both suffer from the same affliction — a lack of imagination. That lack of imagination was caused by the death of allegory, metaphor, hyperbole, parable, myth, sarcasm, poetry, and the woodcraft to express it — all replaced by an autistic literalism needed to protect the egos of lazy, mediocre minds.”
– Rollo Tomassi, a US-based writer and podcaster who talks about issues such as intersexual dynamics.
Former Pink Floyd band member Roger Waters, who has spoken about the Russian invasion of Ukraine (he has excused it, so it looks), is a regular critic of Israel, and so on, thinks it was going to be a smart idea to dress up in, er, rather 1930s-looking German militaristic sort of gear at a concert where there is also some sort of large, inflatable pig, with staring eyes, flying through an arena. There is red light, there is talk about conspiracies and the like.
And the kicker: this event took place in Berlin. I read that authorities are investigating the concert. I am no fan of hate-speech laws, being a hardline free speech guy, and I also reserve the right to state my views about this guttersnipe as loudly as I can. But however much one should stay on the JS Mill straight and narrow, it is mighty tempting to wish all bad legal and other consequences for this piece of excrement. No wonder his old band members broke off from him and have no time for him. (See this controversy.)
He’s an anti-semite, plain and simple. The old saying about “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action”, applies.
The first few dozen grownup books I read were an odd selection. As I sampled them almost at random from my parents’ bookshelves, I became dimly aware that my parents were different people from each other, were different from what they had once been, and read books by people with whom they disagreed. Alongside the works by G K Chesterton and C S Lewis one would expect on the shelves of liberal British Catholics of the 1970s, I found such things as a book of essays by the Stalinist physicist J D Bernal – and a copy of Ideology and Insanity by Thomas Szasz. Attracted by the strangeness to my young eyes of the name “Szasz” and the wonderful cover art of the Penguin edition that depicted two men playing chess across a Escher-like dimensional warp, I gave it a go.
Almost a decade before I heard the term “Libertarian”, I thus had my first introduction to an important strand of libertarian thought. Until the copy of that same 1970 Penguin edition I just ordered on eBay arrives, I shall have to go by memory and Szasz’s Wikipedia biography as to exactly what the book said, but I do remember being thrilled to feel my perspective suddenly widen, in a manner akin to what I had felt when I realised that the Earth was but one of an infinite number of possible vantage points in the universe.
Szasz cited drapetomania as an example of a behavior that many in society did not approve of, being labeled and widely cited as a disease. Likewise, women who did not bend to a man’s will were said to have hysteria.
He thought that psychiatry actively obscures the difference between behavior and disease in its quest to help or harm parties in conflicts. He maintained that, by calling people diseased, psychiatry attempts to deny them responsibility as moral agents in order to better control them.
And
Szasz believed that if we accept that “mental illness” is a euphemism for behaviors that are disapproved of, then the state has no right to force psychiatric “treatment” on these individuals
Paul Johnson, one of the great figures of post-war British journalism, has died at the grand age of 94. He was the author of about 50 books, and I read several of them in my youth. Of all the books, the one that stands out for me is Modern Times. That was a one-volume study of the 20th century. Johnson was unafraid to challenge stereotypes. He defended US Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Nixon from the reputational shade cast upon them and was unsparingly hard on the likes of F D Roosevelt and JFK. He slammed the United Nations, lauded the NATO alliance, and pointed out how so many “third world” countries went disastrously wrong in embracing Fabian socialist ideas after the Western empires ended. In that sense, he gave every impression of enjoying how he trashed one Received Wisdom notion after another.
Johnson was a deeply religious man – a Catholic – and an awareness of God’s wrathful judgement on sinners was never very far away. I don’t share his faith but can respect how, at its best, the English Catholic tradition in the West has produced writers of great insight (GK Chesterton is another outstanding example). And he anticipated the “culture wars” in many respects. His insight that much of the New Left had given up on the idea that there is such a thing as objective truth stuck in my mind. He regarded one of the big disasters of the 20th Century was how scientific concepts such as relativity morphed, wrongly, into the idea of moral relativism, and all the horrors (communism, fascism, etc) that stemmed from it. His was a theological analysis, with a fair sprinkling of Aristotelian common sense (he was a great admirer of Thomas Aquinas).
In the first part of his journalist life this man, easily recognisable with his mane of reddish – later gold – hair, was a man of the Left and despised the Tory establishment of Eden, MacMillan and the like, although he was also a liberal in the sense of valuing free speech and democracy (the sort of Left that gave us George Orwell, for example). He worked as a young writer in France, and later became editor of the New Statesman magazine.
In the 1970s, as trade union strikes raged, inflation accelerated and old certainties crumbled, Johnson shifted to the Right, and became a fan of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He was a champion – with some caveats – of free market capitalism, mass prosperity and individual liberty. He admired Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore and people like that. He was unafraid to attack high-profile intellectuals’ reputations, however grand, such as JJ Rousseau, Sartre, Brecht, Ibsen, Hemingway, Mailer and Marx. His heroes were people such as JW Turner (the painter), Churchill, Eisenhower, De Gaulle and Adenauer. In later life, Johnson took up painting, and wrote intelligently about art. A man of varied tastes and enthusiasms.
He was one of those writers, such as the late Auberon Waugh, P J O’Rourke and Roger Scruton, where I read everything they wrote, whatever the quality. More often than not, I learned something valuable, even if I disagreed with what Johnson wrote. Like other political “converts” to the liberal free market point of view, he had a certain zeal of one who has forsaken old nostrums. His writing output was prodigious.
I think the Christian in him thought that he was put on this Earth to write and that there was no time to waste. I understand that the final years of his life were blighted by Alzheimer’s. For such a brilliant man and polymath to be afflicted seems particularly cruel.
Anyway, I am sure that I will revisit his books and glean fresh insights. May he rest in peace.
I’ve regularly said that Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil types are the most ridiculous people in society right now – their combination of intellectual ineptitude and ethical irresponsibility makes both a mockery and a disgrace of them as human beings. And I think it’s clear to see now that the more they persist, the more harm they are doing to the cause they claim to support. I think ‘claim’ here is the operative word, because it is obvious that lies are at the heart of what they are doing. In case you missed it, the big giveaway is this. It’s that the more this country and its politicians, establishments and media institutions cravenly bend to their narrative, the more paranoid and frenzied they become.
If you’ve not noticed this, you’ve not being paying enough attention. Politicians have done way more than is needed in terms of enshrining extreme climate policies in law, allocating billions to green projects, subsidising renewables, imposing Pigouvian penalties on carbon emissions, and pushing for the Overton window to be shifted to the extreme left on environmentalist dogma. While at the same time, we’ve seen the eco-alarmists grow ever more extreme, hysterical, hateful, immature and resentful of human achievement and material progress, trying more and more outlandish things in order to get attention, and disrupting society from within the purview of their entitled, middle class playpens. They will never be satisfied, because the only thing that could begin to make them see the light is a total transformative escape out of their narrow, bitter and parochial minds.
The comment got me thinking that with certain types of protesters, what they want is to protest, period. The last thing they want is for businessmen or politicians to actually do things that are practical or necessary. They crave a cause, and developments such as more fuel-efficient cars, or carbon capture technology, are cases of “shooting their fox”. I get the impression that in much of the West (this seems less so in Asia) a part of the affluent class of young and not-so-young feel they missed out on the “great causes” of civil rights in the 60s, or anti-war protests of various kinds. I think this explains some, if not all, of the rage around the trans lobby and aspects of Critical Race Theory. (Mind you, I haven’t seen a lot of protest from such people about the brutalities of Iran, or Russia’s criminality in Ukraine, or the persecutions against various groups by the Chinese Communist Party.)
What we are seeing are the frustrations of those who crave membership of a cult and I think demonstrates the loss of any coherent philosophical anchor in their lives.
On a separate and related note on the “green” front, I see that France has banned short-haul domestic flights. So you have to take the train, drive, cycle, ride a horse, or walk.
I first became aware of David Trimble some time in the early 1990s. I was impressed. He was way more impressive in his media appearances than any other unionist of the time. I was so impressed that – wearing my National Association of Conservative Graduates hat – I interviewed him. We covered the basics of the Ulster issue, why Northern Ireland existed, and, er… memory escapes me. The fun part was when he claimed that the Conservative Party had ceased to be a British party. At the time pretty stinging.
Sometime later, after he had become leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, and about a week after the IRA had bombed Canary Wharf, thus ending their ceasefire, I walked in to his Westminster office – I had somehow managed to acquire a pass – and declared that I was working for him. And so I did for the next year. In that year, we had Drumcree II, John Major’s government losing its majority and endless talks about talks in Belfast.
About the first thing he said to me on that day I joined, after asking whether or not I took sugar in my tea, and quite unprompted, was that the British governent was forever on the lookout for a unionist leader who would on the one hand keep unionists in line while on the other making endless concessions.
I was lucky enough to have a desk in his office – there is less space than you might think in the Palace of Westminster. I learnt an awful lot.
I learnt that Henry VIII died a Catholic. I learnt some very grim things about the Republic of Ireland’s justice system and the retribution the IRA visited on Ulster Britons after Bloody Sunday. I learnt that there is a difference between a member of the Irish peerage and and Irish member of the British peerage. I learnt that there were moles in the RUC. I learnt that if you receive an invitation to a Royal Banquet the stated dress code is black tie but don’t you dare turn up in anything less than white tie. I learnt that there was a time when ballots were not secret. Your vote would be published. David looked up to see how one of his ancestors had voted in a previous election. He was delighted to find that he had voted Liberal. I learnt that joining the Orange Order was “something you just did” and that a lot of loyalists have Irish names (O’Fee, O’Hare, that sort of thing). I learnt that journalists will twist your words at the drop of a hat, while giving your opponents a free pass. I learnt that the IRA is something of an aristocracy and that beyond the leadership quite a lot of them are really rather thick. I learnt that internment is essential in defeating terrorism.
I also saw him lose his temper now and then. It was quite something to see so long as you weren’t on the receiving end, his face turning a very deep red indeed. By far the best explosion was the day one of his fellow Ulster politicians showed up. Within five minutes – it may have been less – the two were shouting at one another at the top of their voices. The meeting was not a success.
It wasn’t all shouting though. At some point in the day he would just stop being the leader of a political party and start playing Windows Solitaire.
To my mind if you want to do good in Ulster you have to understand the issue. That’s not so easy when an awful lot of people are trying to obscure it. Clue: it has nothing to do with religion and nothing to do with civil rights. David was very helpful in this regard. The upshot was Ulster for Beginners which I rather self-indulgently re-published here a while back.
Sadly, David’s understanding of the issue was not – in my eyes at least – combined with a strategy for getting the word out. Very quickly, his leadership descended into a series of fire-fighting actions which I felt took away from the key job of making the case for unionism.
I left shortly before the 1997 Blair landslide. It was a good time to leave. The Labour Party had never held unionism in any great affection and was determined to make some sort of deal with the IRA. The result was the Good Friday Agreement with the nonsense of power sharing and later on the abolition of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. It also included a promise from the IRA about disarmament which they probably didn’t mean at the time but after 9/11 probably did.
David became the first First Minister of Northern Ireland’s new devolved government but it didn’t last. What he didn’t see – I didn’t either – was that power sharing meant that voters had to elect the most extreme representatives their tribe could offer. The result was that the moderates of the Ulster Unionist Party and the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party were to all intents and purposes wiped out. So, it was with Trimble who eventually lost his Westminster seat.
David Trimble was one of the smartest, most knowledgeable people I have ever met. He combined that with an unusual ability – certainly amongst unionists – to get his message across. Had he been a mainland politician he would almost certainly have been a member of the Cabinet. It was even at one point suggested that he should join the Cabinet just the way he was. They say you should never meet your political hero. Well, I met mine and got to know him very well. And I am glad I did.
David Trimble as I remember him. Taken in the office at a time when taking photos on the Parliamentary estate was forbidden.
I am an atheist – I don’t even seek any cover in the “foxhole” of agnosticism, or pull the “religion isn’t true but it keeps the plebs in line” sort of argument that I have sometimes come across. Full disclosure: I am a confirmed Anglican but fell away over the years, primarily because I could not engage with the idea of belief via faith. I know a lot of people who are religious, if not noisily so. I respect them and love many of them, and vice versa. It really is as simple as that.
Occasionally I come across the phenomenon of the “noisy atheist”, and am reminded what an unlovely creature that is. On my Facebook page, I follow a few groups such as one dedicated to Second World War allied pilots (I am an aviation history geek. Bite me.) Recently, a Canadian pilot, who flew Spitfires in the war, died at the tremendous age of 100. I wrote something along the lines of “Rest in Peace and blue skies to the brave gentleman.” All of a sudden, when I woke up the following day, I noticed that my comment and that of many other people had elicited comments from a person who wrote words to the effect of “religion is crap – grow up” or “your beliefs are a piece of shit”. The person has his own FB page on the subject of military history and makes a big point of his being an atheist. So it is probably not a Russian bot, although one never knows.
What to make of this other than the fact that some people are sociopaths, or just plain unpleasant and in need of some direct lessons in manners? Well, what it proves to me is that if you firmly hold to the idea that belief in a Supreme, omniscient god is nonsense, then it is absolutely fine to express that view, but not in a way that is so rude, or by injecting your views into the conversations of others, and ignoring context completely. Ironically for this digital yob, he has achieved the opposite effect in anyone whom he might have tried to convert, by associating unbelief with rudeness and crassness.
Atheism is the absence of belief, rather than a positive belief in X or Y. (To go further, atheism is the view that the idea of god is incoherent and therefore existence of gods cannot be true. A thing cannot be beyond nature and above it, as a god is, because nature is all of existence and to be outside it makes no sense. (That is my understanding of what atheism is, properly defined.)
There are, in my experience, a great variety of atheists, such as by their political beliefs and for some, belief in political or other ideologies fills a sort of philosophical hole. For other atheists, the lack of belief in a God creates no such “gap” – they have a coherent philosophy of life requiring no props of any kind. That is where I stand. Some atheists can be socialists/collectivists, others on the libertarian, classical liberal/Objectivist end of the spectrum, others traditional conservatives and so on. Some can be agreeable, philosophical and rounded as human beings. Some, alas, are just plain bloody awful. It seems to me that I have encountered the latter.
Anyway, I share these musings to reflect on etiquette and how social media has given opportunities to encounter humans at their best and their worst. On a positive end point, I have met a lot of good people via social media, in terms of actual friends whom I meet for real.
One of the first things I was told on being diagnosed with lung cancer was ‘you are going to need your friends’. That was said to me by the doctor who diagnosed me and the point is that it was true. I now have a small but superb group of close friends.
Neither by nature nor by nurture I haven’t been good at friendship. My parents, like many parents, thought they were doing a good job raising me then, particularly better than many of my contemporaries.
They did not believe in extravagant entertainment, they believed there were more important things in life. They told me that and I thought that was true. As a result I considered myself as a superior person. Why couldn’t others see that? But others didn’t see and said so and made my life a misery.
Like all parents they had the virtues of their vices and vices of their virtues. Swings and roundabouts, all the money they didn’t spend on extravagant entertainment, a quarter of that is mine, which makes my life easier.
As the years went by I realised my contemporaries were much better at running their lives than I was. At some point I had to ask the question – if I am so superior why am I so miserable? Clearly, I am not running my life as well as I thought I was.
As the years went by, I also realised they knew about friendship and I didn’t. And now I realise that my parents didn’t tell me how to do friendship. I had to work it out for myself. I was in my 20s when my attitude enabled me to meet people as friends.
There are two kinds of friends – there are people who enjoy the same things as you do and there are people with whom it goes deeper than that. You help them. And the view I arrived at was rooted in economics which I was getting to grips with at the time. My method of making friends, which seemed to have worked, has been based on easily done favours but for people on the receiving end these have been a major source of comfort.
The trick is not to go crazy or part with resources you can’t afford when helping people but if you got the resources you could spare and they would benefit from, then go ahead.
It’s a lot like early stages of a trade when you are looking to make a deal where you’d be willing to pay more and they’d be willing to sell for less, so both parties gain.
And then forget about it, assume you don’t have any rights and see how things go. Spend the effort noticing what other things you could do.
This didn’t come naturally to me, it was like a fear of life and working out how to live.
This is not objective knowledge, just a set of rules that I arrived at and it would appear that they worked for me. Am I the only libertarian that has gone through this sort of process? I suspect not. Which is why I am writing this.
You are often a good teacher of things you had to struggle to work out. All the best sports coaches are the ones to whom it didn’t come naturally. Contrast the football coach, Jack Charlton, and his more naturally gifted brother, Bobby Charlton. So much so it’s rather rare that brilliant sportsmen become good coaches.
The ones who have had to struggle and discover the process for themselves, explicitly and self-consciously, when faced with a problem can pass that knowledge on. This is what I did.
If someone’s a natural, the problem somehow solves itself in their head and they don’t really have a process of getting there. Then they face a challenge of having to explain how they did it.
Because I had to think about how to make friends, maybe these thoughts and other recollections like them will be useful for some.
“Tweedy party-at-the-Verso-loft n+1 leftists aren’t making money. 33 year olds who follow Tik Tok trends for a living and communicate in slang that’s fifteen years too young for them aren’t making money. Arrogant white nerdoliberals with Warby Parkers and Moleskine collections aren’t making money. Sports bloggers who provide sports news and commentary but with attitude aren’t making money. Softening khaki dads struggling to understand Bitcoin and intersectionality in an effort to survive their next inevitable layoff aren’t making money. Talented and unfulfilled women writers who have learned too late that women’s media is a ghetto they will struggle to escape for the rest of their careers aren’t making money. Aspiring young data scientists who labor over their spreadsheets for hours only to see others copy and past[e] their R graphs without attribution and receive 40x the pageviews aren’t making money. And you won’t either.”
– Freddie deBoer (who has a Substack account; thanks also to Anne Althouse for putting this up.)
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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