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]
A writer going by the name “Gurwinder” produces a popular Substack blog. In the following piece Gurwinder writes thoughtfully about the experience of discovering that one of his fans was a cold-blooded murderer:
We interacted on social media several times afterward, and each time he seemed as polite and thoughtful as he’d been in our chat. As the summer ended, I largely withdrew from social media to focus on my book, so I didn’t notice Luigi had vanished.
And then, a few months later, Brian Thompson was shot dead.
Many people celebrated the murder, mocking the victim and lionizing the killer. Some were frustrated that health insurance cost so much, and some were outraged that they or a loved one had been denied medical claims. For this they blamed Thompson, the CEO of the US’s largest health insurance company.
But while thousands reacted with laughter emojis to Thompson’s murder, and with love-heart emojis to his alleged murderer, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenceless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You in fact advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.
The murder would’ve been shocking even if I didn’t know the murderer. But when Luigi was revealed as the suspect, everything became surreal. My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues he could’ve done this. The only thing that stuck out was when Luigi briefly mentioned healthcare in the US was expensive, and said we Britons were lucky to have a socialized National Health Service. But even this statement, by itself, gave no indication Luigi was capable of what he was being accused of.
When someone is found to have committed murder, friends and relatives will usually say things like “I can’t believe it, he seemed like such a nice guy.” I instinctively said the same thing about Luigi. But as the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be surprised. I’ve long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity. It’s why many of the people celebrating the murder are those who self-identify as “compassionate” leftists. And it’s why most of history’s greatest evils were committed by people who thought they were doing good.
(Emphasis added by me, although Gurwinder himself has chosen to highlight this passage.)
Greg Eiden has an interesting idea we thought might be interesting/terrifying/amusing…
What might ChatGPT or other such tools derive from an analysis of the Samizdata blog post archives? To focus this on something timely: ask it to do the analysis and propose policy ideas for the new Trump Administration, ideas consistent with the perspectives and ideas of the Samizdatista community. Or at least the broad consensus of that community about liberty and limited, less regulatory government.
There are other ways this might be posed to an AI, e.g., “which proposed policies of the Trump administration are consistent with the broad governance perspectives at Samizdata.net and why? Which are not and why?” How would you set up such an analysis to have the model have the best chance at producing something useful?
I am not interested in an experiment that assesses if ChatGPT is a good model for this or a good model in general–I want a good analysis! If the product of such an inquiry was not compelling to enough samizdatistas, if it did not pass a laugh test, we stop there.
Maybe there is a better choice of large language model than ChatGPT; maybe ChatGPT is not optimized for this sort of analysis but other models are? If you have some knowledge here, please chime in!
There are many good Joe Rogan podcasts and this week’s episode with Mark Andreessen as the guest (opens Spotify if you have it) is right up there among them. I have to confess I didn’t know who Mark Andreessen was beforehand and I didn’t know who he was afterwards. Something in the Valley I guess but what he had to say – assuming it’s true of course – was dynamite. Government persecution of crypto, AI and anyone else it didn’t like. The government making Americans fat. Isn’t it odd how the health bureaucrats all look so unhealthy? I’m not sure about that one to be honest. Further research needed. Also, the importance of Elon Musk in not only giving us normies a voice but also the tech sector.
Someone tweeting under the name of “Lyndon Baines Johnson”, a supporter of Kamala Harris, explains how he would like a Harris administration to deal with technological innovators:
Lyndon Baines Johnson
@lyndonbajohnson
If Harris wins, fairly high on the agenda should be finding new federal contractors so that SpaceX and Starlink are shown the door. -OS
8:05 PM · Nov 3, 2024
For all his grievous faults, the actual LBJ would have known how to describe that proposal in a few choice words. He wanted the Apollo program to succeed.
As you might have guessed, the rocket concerned is small enough to almost spin out of control because of the weight of a slice of packaged cheese strapped to one of its legs. So perhaps Elon Musk need not lose sleep over his rivals, a group of students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, just yet – however the headline from Interesting Engineering describing this as “Europe’s most important rocket test” was more justifiable than one might think at first sight.
They ate the cheese after its flight. It was “slightly warm, but still quite tasty.”
This example of socialist priorities comes from “economic justice campaigner” Richard J Murphy:
Richard Murphy
@RichardJMurphy
Tackling obesity and all its related issues via an injection, instead of dealing with the cause, would be like saying: “Don’t worry about smoking; just take this anti-cancer drug”.
12:47 PM · Oct 15, 2024
Scores of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, including fighters and medics,
Oh, the poor Hezbollah medics!
were seriously wounded on Tuesday when the pagers they use to communicate exploded, a security source told Reuters.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.
A Reuters journalist saw ambulances rushing through the southern suburbs of the capital, Beirut, amid widespread panic. People said explosions were taking place even 30 minutes after the initial blasts.
I feel that this development deserves to be commemorated in period style.
Edit: It is now being claimed that a ten year old girl, Fatima Jaafar Abdullah, was killed by one of the exploding pagers. If true (and despite Hezbollah, like Hamas, being inveterate liars who regularly fake the deaths of children, it might well be true that she was handling her Hezbollah father’s pager or something similar), that is tragic. But overall one of the things about this operation that fills me with admiration is that it must be one of the most precisely targeted military strikes in history. Targeted to the very hip pockets of individual terrorists. Oh, and it would have been nice if a few more of the people denouncing Israel for this had also denounced Hezbollah for firing rockets at Israel completely indiscriminately for years on end. Only a few weeks ago, twelve Israeli Druze children were “shredded to pieces” by a Hezbollah rocket while playing soccer.
I am convinced that wannabe “Twitter aka X” replacement “Threads” is mostly threads started by AI bots trained on the Guardian & NYT, replied to by a mix of other bots and assorted NPCs whose political philosophy came from a fortune cookie. Nothing will convince me otherwise 😀
Earlier this month, the Met Office claimed that climate change was causing a “dramatic increase in the frequency of temperature extremes and number of temperature records in the U.K.”. Given what we now know from recent freedom of information (FOI) revelations about the state of its ‘junk’ nationwide temperature measuring network, it is difficult to see how the Met Office can publish such a statement and keep a straight face.
[…]
It’s almost as if the Met Office is actively seeking higher readings to feed into its constant catastrophisation of weather in the interests of Net Zero promotion. Whatever the reason – incompetence or political messaging – serious science would appear to be the loser. As currently set up, the Met Office network is incapable of providing a realistic guide to natural air temperatures across the U.K. Using the data to help calculate global temperatures is equally problematic.
Householders are angered by the discovery they cannot remortgage or sell their homes after installing spray-foam insulation to cut energy use.
Jim Bunce thought he was doing the right thing for his purse and the planet: in 2022, as fuel costs soared, he and his wife decided to improve the energy efficiency of their house.
They discovered that the government had endorsed spray-foam insulation, a quick and unobtrusive technique by which liquid foam is spray-gunned into roof spaces and walls. Their loft was successfully treated at a cost of £2,800 and their gas bills duly fell.
Now, two years on, they have found that, by making their home more energy efficient, they have also made it unsaleable. “We are unable to borrow against it, or potentially to sell it, unless the foam is completely removed,” says Bunce.
I feel sorry for Mr and Mrs Bunce. My title was not intended to single them out as being unusually insulated from reality; until recently the great majority of the population would have assumed that taking up a scheme promoted by the government was a safe choice.
It isn’t. On the contrary, if a new type of technological product is being pushed by government in order to meet national policy targets, that means that it has not been through the filter of large numbers of people freely deciding to buy it and telling their family and friends that it benefited them as individuals.
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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