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]
I’ve tagged it “self-ownership” because it’s a self-own. Sue me.
For those that don’t know, Nikole Hannah-Jones (who gets to appropriate the historic name of Ida B. Wells, a pioneer of the civil rights movement, as her Twitter handle) is the developer of the New York Times’s1619 Project, though presumably not the author of all the edits the NYT had to stealthily make to it later. She is also someone who has stated that “All journalism is activism”. Thomas Sowell is the author of…
1971. Economics: Analysis and Issues. Scott Foresman & Co.
1972. Black Education: Myths and Tragedies. David McKay Co. . ISBN 0-679-30015-5 .
1972. Say’s Law: An Historical Analysis. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-04166-7.
1974. Classical Economics Reconsidered. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-00358-0.
1975. Race and Economics. David McKay Co. ISBN 978-0-679-30262-9.
1980. Knowledge and Decisions. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-03736-0.
1981. Ethnic America: A History . Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02074-7 .
Chapter 1, “The American Mosaic .”
1981. Markets and Minorities. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-04399-2 .
1981. Pink and Brown People: and Other Controversial Essays . Hoover Press . ISBN 0-8179-7532-2.
1983. The Economics and Politics of Race. William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-01891-2.
1984. Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-03113-7.
1985. Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. Quill. ISBN 0-688-06426-4.
1986. Education: Assumptions Versus History. Hoover Press. ISBN 0-8179-8112-8.
1987. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles . William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-06912-6 .
1987. Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays. William Morrow. ISBN 0-688-07114-7.
1990. Preferential Policies: An International Perspective. ISBN 0-688-08599-7
1993. Inside American Education. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-5408-2.
1993. Is Reality Optional?: and Other Essays. Hoover. ISBN 978-0-8179-9262-0.
1995. Race and Culture: A World View. ISBN 0-465-06796-4.
1995. The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy. Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-08995-X.
1996. Migrations and Cultures: A World View. ISBN 0-465-04589-8. OCLC 41748039.
1998. Conquests and Cultures: An International History. ISBN 0-465-01400-3.
1998. Late-Talking Children. ISBN 0-465-03835-2.
1999. The Quest for Cosmic Justice . ISBN 0-684-86463-0.
2000. A Personal Odyssey. ISBN 0-684-86465-7.
2000. Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy (1st ed.) . Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-08145-2.
2002. Controversial Essays. Hoover. ISBN 0-8179-2992-4.
2002. The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late. ISBN 0-465-08141-X.
2003. Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One. ISBN 0-465-08143-6.
2004. Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press . ISBN 978-0-300-10775-3 .
2004. Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy (revised and expanded ed.). New York: Basic Books.
2005. Black Rednecks and White Liberals. San Francisco: Encounter Books. ISBN 978-1-59403-086-4.
2006. Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays . Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. ISBN 978-0-8179-4752-1. OCLC 253604328. ASIN 0817947523 .
2006. On Classical Economics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12606-8.[118]
2007. A Man of Letters. San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books. ISBN 978-1-59403-196-0.
2007. Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (3rd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00260-3. OCLC 76897806.
2008. Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One (2nd ed.). Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00345-7 . OCLC 260206351 .
2008. Economic Facts and Fallacies . Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00349-5. OCLC 1033591370. ASIN 0465003494.
2009. The Housing Boom and Bust. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01880-2.
Chapter 5, “The Past and the Future.”
2010. Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (4th ed.). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02252-6.
2010. Dismantling America: and Other Controversial Essays. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02251-9 . OCLC 688505777 .
2010. Intellectuals and Society . Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01948-9 . Lay summary .
2011. The Thomas Sowell Reader. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02250-2.
2011. Economic Facts and Fallacies, 2nd edition. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465022038
2013. Intellectuals and Race. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-05872-3.
2014. Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (5th ed.). New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-06073-3.
2015. Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective.[119]
2016. Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective (2nd ed.). ISBN 978-0-465-09676-3.
2018. Discrimination and Disparities. ISBN 978-1-541-64560-8.
2019. Discrimination and Disparities (revised, enlarged ed.) ISBN 978-1-541-64563-9.
2020. Charter Schools and Their Enemies. ISBN 978-1-541-67513-1.
“Canada wrestles with euthanasia for the mentally ill”, reports the BBC. Actually, the headline starts with the question “Who can die?” to which I would have thought the answer was obvious. But while death undoubtedly comes to us all eventually, when the state pays for healthcare it pays the state to make death come sooner:
… last autumn, authorities launched an investigation after at least four veterans were prompted to consider Maid [the acronym for Canada’s medical assistance in dying programme] by a Veterans Affairs case worker, who now no longer works for the department. In one instance, veteran and paralympian Christine Gauthier said she was offered the option by the employee after she asked for a wheelchair ramp to be installed in her home.
No, I don’t mean torture. Torture will make people say they believe whatever will make the pain stop, but what I am talking about here is using physical mechanisms to make people truly believe something different by literally changing the manner in which their brains function.
“A joint team of American and British scientists have discovered that powerful magnetic pulses to the brain can temporarily change people’s feelings on a variety of subjects – from their belief in God, to their attitude to immigration.
The study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, saw scientists use a metal coil to create strong magnetic fields around certain parts of the brain.
The non-invasive practice is called trancranial magnetic stimulation, and has can be used to treat depression.”
Induced changes in belief do not all go in one political direction:
“Summary: We tested the fixity of political preferences of 136 healthy males during the 2011 U.S. presidential election season by administering synthetic testosterone or placebo to participants who had identified the strength of their political affiliation. Before the testosterone treatment, we found that weakly affiliated Democrats had 19% higher basal testosterone than those who identified strongly with the party (p=0.015). When weakly affiliated Democrats received additional testosterone, the strength of their party fell by 12% (p=.01) and they reported 45% warmer feelings towards Republican candidates for president (p < 0.001). Our results demonstrate that testosterone induces a “red shift" among weakly-affiliated Democrats. This effect was associated with improved mood. No effects were found of testosterone administration for strongly affiliated Democrats or strong or weak Republicans. Our findings provide evidence that neuroactive hormones affect political preferences.”
What do you think about this? I make no specific point and ask no specific question, but it seems to me worthy of discussion that it would take only a minor advance on presently available technology to make a lot of dystopian science fiction into reality.
A retired and now ennobled supreme court judge writes in the Times that the decisions of the government during a crisis were wise and good and that if, perchance, any slight errors were made, fear not, lessons will be learned.
Bzzt. Click. System error. Commence program reset.
In a remarkably candid interview with The Spectator, Rishi Sunak has blown the gaff on the sheer superficiality of the decision-making process of which he was himself part. The fundamental rule of good government is not to make radical decisions without understanding the likely consequences. It seems obvious. Yet it is at that most basic level that the Johnson government failed. The tragedy is that this is only now being acknowledged.
Sunak makes three main points. First, the scientific advice was more equivocal and inconsistent than the government let on. Some of it was based on questionable premises that were never properly scrutinised. Some of it fell apart as soon it was challenged from outside the groupthink of the Sage advisory body. Second, to build support, the government stoked fear, embarking on a manipulative advertising campaign and endorsing extravagant graphics pointing to an uncontrolled rise in mortality if we were not locked down. Third, the government not only ignored the catastrophic collateral damage done by the lockdown but actively discouraged discussion of it, both in government and in its public messaging.
Lockdown was a policy conceived in the early days by China and the World Health Organisation as a way of suppressing the virus altogether (so-called zero Covid). The WHO quickly abandoned this unrealistic ambition. But European countries, except Sweden, eagerly embraced lockdown, ripping up a decade of pandemic planning that had been based on concentrating help on vulnerable groups and avoiding coercion.
At first Britain stood up against the stampede. Then Professor Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London published its notorious “Report 9”. Sunak confirms that this was what panicked ministers into a measure that the scientists had previously rejected. If No 10 had studied the assumptions underlying it, it might have been less impressed. Report 9 assumed that in the absence of a lockdown people would do nothing whatever to protect themselves. This was contrary to all experience of human behaviour as well as to data available at the time, which showed that people were voluntarily reducing contacts well before the lockdown was announced.
I find myself in the odd position of being slightly more in sympathy with the government than is a former supreme court judge. Frightened men make mistakes. I also find myself slightly more in sympathy with Rishi Sunak than I was yesterday. However, I have to ask why he did not voice his doubts at the time.
When I first saw this story, “Daughter who buried father in illegal woodland pagan funeral avoids jail”, my outrage-meter went off the scale at the apparent violation of religious freedom. Unnecessarily, it turned out. Eirys Brett was not in court for conducting a pagan funeral. She would still have been in court had the funeral service been the Order for The Burial of the Dead from the Book of Common Prayer. She was in court because she did not register her father’s death and because she buried him in a place not set aside for that purpose:
Merthyr Tydfil Crown Court heard that frail Mr Brett made last requests that he wanted to be buried in woods in a medieval non-Christian style near his farmhouse home, in Aberedw, near Builth Wells.
The judge was not without sympathy. He said,
“Everybody’s entitled to their beliefs and make no comment about yours. But you should have gone about it in a different way.
“You could have achieved the same objective by following the law and that is not simply where you think or where he thinks is appropriate but where you are permitted to bury him and to register the death – those were the two things you failed to do.”
It is not clear to me whether the woodland area where the late Mr Brett was buried was on his own land. If it was, I can see no reason why he should not be buried there. However, if the vaguely specified “woods” were not his woods, I do see a problem. If I found out that someone had buried their dead relative in my garden I would be disconcerted, however well they cleared up afterwards.
As an inveterate reader of detective stories, I can think of some good reasons for this law. But as a libertarian, I feel obliged not to simply accept it because it is a law that goes back to the days when the State laid fewer burdens on us than it does now.
On Sunday 15th May, Paris Saint-Germain played Montpellier. On that day, players in the French Ligue 1 were meant to wear football jerseys with the numbers in LGBT rainbow colours in order to commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. Unexpectedly, Mr Gueye did not play in that match. So far as I can find out with my limited ability to search news reports in French, he has not said why he sat out the match, but it is widely believed that it was because he felt that it would be incompatible with his religious beliefs to wear a shirt in Pride colours. He is a practising Muslim.
Via Paul Embery, I found this quotation from a letter that the FFF (Fédération Française de Football / French Football Federation) sent to Mr Gueye on May 17th:
“There are two possibilities, either these allegations are unfounded and we invite you to speak out without delay to silence these rumours. For example, we invite you to accompany your message by a photo of yourself wearing said shirt.”
“Or the rumours are true. In this case we invite you to realise the impact of your act, and the grave error committed. The fight against discrimination towards different minorities, whoever they might be, is a vital fight for all times. Whether it’s skin colour, religion, sexual orientation, or any other difference, all discrimination is based on the same principle which is rejection of the other because they are different from the majority.”
“By refusing to take part in this collective operation, you are effectively validating discriminatory behaviour, and rejection of the other, and not just against the LGBTQI+ community. The impact of football on society and the capacity for footballers to be a role model for those who admire them gives us all a particular responsibility.”
One does not have to share Mr Gueye’s religious beliefs, or his (probable) opinions on LGBT issues, to see something sinister in this demand that he make a display of loyalty to prove his “innocence” of a charge that he did not participate in what is effectively the visual equivalent of compelled speech.
Why do they bother? They say Gueye must get himself photographed in a rainbow shirt because he’s a footballer and thus allegedly a role model. But such gestures of solidarity are inspiring only if they are known to be sincere. No one is going to be inspired to rethink their prejudices regarding gay people if and when Idrissa makes some obviously reluctant gesture of support.
“Looking at abortion opinion, it’s actually quite striking how little men and women differ on this question. The whole pro-life is about men telling women what to do with their bodies” schtick simply isn’t grounded in reality . . . Men are more likely to self-id as pro-life, and women as pro-choice, but when you drill down into specifics, it’s clear this stems from differences in labeling quite similar views.
She backed up her opinion with a link to this article by the polling organisation Gallup: “Abortion Trends by Gender”.
On specific questions relating to abortion, the opinions of American women and men were amazingly close. For instance, in this detailed survey from 2012, 71.5% of men and 69.4% of women said abortion should be legal if there is a strong possibility of a serious fetal defect, and 43.1% of men and 43.3% of women said abortion be legal for married women who don’t want more children.
Opinion has also been remarkably consistent over the years. According to the Pew Research Center, in 1995 60% of Americans thought that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Now it’s 61%. In 1995 38% of Americans thought abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. In 2022 it is 37%.
Why are the lines so flat? Over the same period church attendance has dropped. Support for other ideas once considered the preserve of the radical left, such as gay marriage, has steeply increased. The standing joke is that the Right won on economics and the Left won on culture. So why did the Left’s advance falter on that one issue?
By the way, although I talk about abortion as a left-right issue, because it certainly is one in US politics and to a lesser extent in politics across the Anglosphere, in this post I am not making an argument for or against abortion. If you wish to read my slightly indecisive thoughts on the issue you can do so here: “Thinking aloud on a mountainside”.
I am just interested in the Left’s relative failure to change the minds of Americans on abortion when in the same period it did so well in changing minds (including mine) on issues usually bundled with abortion.
I think it was because in the US and the UK, the pro-choice side almost never engaged with what their opponents actually believed. Over the years I must have read hundreds of Guardian articles on abortion, mostly in its US section because abortion is such a live issue there. I do not recall a single one that argued against the main sticking point of the pro-life side, namely that abortion takes a human life – let alone argued for it. On other issues the Guardian would occasionally let the odd Conservative or other non-progressive have their say about fossil fuels or the nuclear deterrent or whatever, and would often feature writers who, while left wing themselves, at least knew enough of the right wing view to argue against it. However when it came to abortion the line always was, and judging from Twitter in the last few days, still is, that opposition to abortion arises (a) only from men and (b) only from men who wish to control women’s bodies.
It works, a bit. Some men who read that will decide that they do not want to be that sort of man, others will decide that they do not want to be thought to be that sort of man. But an argument that does not even acknowledge the existence of female opponents of abortion will obviously not change their minds. Nor will silence reassure women who are not firmly pro or anti. If the Left will not talk to them about their doubts, then by definition the only arguments they hear will come from the other side.
How about male opponents of abortion and/or men who are not sure what they think? In most cases they simply will not feel that this charge that they want to control women’s bodies has any relevance to them. It’s like being accused of bank robbery when the most you’ve done is put non-recyclables in the recycling bin. Or like being accused in the modern fashion of misogyny rather than sexism: a conscientious man might examine himself and admit that some unjustified assumptions about women might be lurking in his subconscious, but that does not mean he hates women. All in all, that way of presenting the abortion argument is great for firing up those who already agree, but ensures that practically no women’s minds will be changed, and few men’s.
The above “model” is just my supposition, of course. But the remarkable stability of US opinion on abortion over decades is a fact that needs explaining, and that would explain it.
Two years since “two weeks to slow the spread,” life appears to have returned to some kind of normal. With a few indefensible exceptions, most pandemic mandates have been rolled back. The vaccine passes that cropped up across the western world in a wave of faddish illiberalism have largely been abandoned, at least for now, often with little pretext of an apolitical rationale. Lost in the mainstream media’s memory hole, the strict lockdowns that brought the free world to its knees in 2020 seem to many like a distant memory.
All around, artefacts of the psychosis that gripped the global psyche for two years remain. Holdouts of COVID hysteria cling to their N-95 masks, even while alone in their own vehicles, and insist that others do the same. Medical offices demand proof of vaccination and perfunctory COVID checklists upon entry. Airports, ever the bulwarks of security theatre, continue to enforce all the bells and whistles of the biomedical state. Every day, workers and students are forced out of their institutions over noncompliance with vaccine mandates.
A fanatical cult continues to preach the gospel of COVID doom, hoping that some new variant or surge in hospitalizations will again empower them to dictate the lives of their neighbors and silence all who disagree. They peddle the same circular arguments, insisting that more lockdowns and mandates are the key to preventing lockdowns and mandates, bolstered by their faith that although every policy they’ve suggested has failed, this was merely the fickle nature of an ever-changing “science.” Thus, even if they were wrong, it was the right time for them to be wrong, and their opponents, even if right, were right for the wrong reasons.
To reiterate. The mRNA shots don’t stop infection or transmission, we don’t know whether they interfere with the development of durable immunity post-infection, and whether the next variant is deadlier than Omicron is “mostly a matter of luck.”
Politically, none of this matters at the moment. The people who pushed the shots – in other words every Western government and the entire public health establishment and media – have zero incentive to admit that the roulette wheel is still spinning.
The events of the past two years have been a wake-up call to those of us who naïvely believed our liberties were more or less secure under Western democracy. We discovered that a viral epidemic with an estimated Infection Fatality Rate somewhere in the range of 0.15-0.3% was sufficient for governments to claim the power to lock citizens up in their homes, prohibit citizens from taking walks in the park, tell citizens how many visitors they could have in their homes, shut down religious worship indefinitely, and order mass closures of businesses, all “for our own good.”
If all of this can happen once, it can surely happen again, especially if we are hit by another global crisis, be it global warming, terrorism, a global recession, an energy crisis, or a food shortage.
And if the crisis is not quite severe enough to convince citizens to renounce their liberties, governments can apparently count on the support of an uncritical media to stoke up people’s anxieties and fears, priming them for more “emergency” interventions and ever more illiberal restrictions on their property, life, and mobility.
Governments have restricted a wide range of civil liberties during the pandemic on the basis of unsubstantiated doomsday predictions, highly unorthodox methods of disease control, and hardly any serious consideration of the likely harms such restrictions would inflict on citizens and on our way of life. Future governments could exploit this dangerous precedent in a future crisis, whether real or manufactured, especially if the media jump on board to drum up some public hysteria.
I have been struck in my reading of the media, in conversations with people in the City and elsewhere, as to how the topic of COVID-19 has suddenly disappeared from regular conversation. It is true that the UK came out of lockdowns a bit earlier than some other countries. It is true that the embarrassments of the Boris Johnson Downing Street machine meant that Mr Johnson was afraid to reimpose any controls given that no-one would take him seriously. (One reason I am very sad about the passing of the late P J O’Rourke is the sport he would have had the expense of various governments over such hypocrisies). Even so, it is striking how fast Russia’s attack on Ukraine was able, in a flash, to take the bug away. Gone. Kaput. This is a virus that seems to know the news agenda. Amazing.
But we should not forget the past two years or more of lockdowns, of the pettiness, the bullying, the hysteria, the use of fear, the “what we can get away with”, the suspension of civil liberties, the North Korean-style worship of “Our NHS”, and indeed, we shouldn’t overlook the heroism of medical staff who dealt with the crisis particularly in the early months when the full nature of this bug was unknown. We should not forget China’s refusal to enable a clear analysis of what caused this shitshow, or its bullying of those who asked questions, of the biases of the World Health Organisation, the questionable actions and financial involvements of people such as Anthony Fauci in the US and the unease in asking if this bug came from a lab. We should not forget the shenanigans over PPE contracts in the UK, the frauds over loans to businesses, the cowardice and horribleness of the teaching unions and damage to education. We should not forget the stoicism of lorry drivers, supermarket workers, farmers, delivery drivers and logistics workers. We must not forget how parents could see what their children were learning online, and were shocked.
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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