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]

Samizdata quote of the day – campus horror show edition

“Enough is enough. It’s time to stop this nonsense. Students should be expelled and acts of violence should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Foreign students who harass Jewish students or commit acts of violence and vandalism should have their student visas revoked and be deported immediately. Colleges and universities that cannot or will not protect their Jewish students should suffer consequences as well, having their federal funding suspended. Alumni should suspend donations to their alma maters. And under no circumstances should universities cancel graduations or force students into virtual classrooms. There should be thorough investigations, and university presidents should be forced to resign, or be fired.”

Vikram Mansharamani

Samizdata quote of the day – Another day, another fatuous ‘fact’ check from Reuters

Another day, another fatuous ‘fact’ check from Reuters. This time the news agency accuses the Daily Sceptic of “cherry-picking” Arctic sea ice extent data to provide a “misleading” story. Being accused of “cherry picking” by an outfit that funds a course for journalists that encourages them to pick a fruit such as a mango and discuss why it isn’t as tasty as the year before due to climate change is beyond ridicule. Taking lectures on responsible journalism from a Net Zero-obsessed operation that has promoted a course speaker who has suggested “fines and imprisonments” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science is laughable, if also a tad sinister.

One of the activists called to admonish the Daily Sceptic with a ‘straw man’ argument was Walt Meier, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, who said: “Comparing two specific years is not an indicator for or against long-term changes”. The Daily Sceptic did not do that. Interestingly, this would appear to be the same Walt Meier whose comments on ”mind blowing” low winter levels of Antarctica sea ice last year made headlines around the world. Meier claimed at the time that it was “outside anything we have seen”. Happily, the Daily Sceptic was able to remind Meier that he had been part of a team a decade ago that cracked open the secrets of early Nimbus weather satellites and found a similar sea ice low in 1966. At the time, Meier commented that the Nimbus data show there is variability in Antarctica sea ice “that’s larger than any we have seen” since 1979.

Chris Morrison

Samizdata quote of the day – capitalists sincerely want you to be rich

Capitalists sincerely want you to be rich. Because that means there’s more money they can bastard out of you, obviously. Which is a bit of a problem for that Marxist claim that the capitalists want others to be poor, isn’t it?

Tom Worstall

Samizdata quote of the day – Europe’s relative decline edition

“The EU, by contrast, is in danger of becoming the left-behind continent, with its economy stuck in the mud, its corporate sector sluggish and its polity adrift. In the two decades since 2004, US productivity growth as measured by output per hour worked has been more than double that of the Eurozone. Whereas Eurozone productivity has, at best, flatlined since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, US productivity has risen by more than 6%. The EU bureaucracy is preoccupied with being a regulatory superpower, treating access to its consumers as one of its main competitive advantages. But this obsession with regulation is killing the animal spirits that drive capitalist growth. Europe is terrified that a Trump victory in the November presidential election will produce instability. It should also worry that it will produce a mixture of deregulation and tax-cutting in the US, similar to Trump’s first two years, which will suck even more capital and talent from the EU to the US.”

Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($). Wooldridge’s book on the history of American capitalism, co-authored with Alan Greenspan (who is probably about 1,000 years’ old by now), is well worth a read. The chapters on agricultural innovation struck me as particularly good, and often neglected by journalists who find farming boring. The book generally debunks myths about Big Business and anti-trust, as well.

Samizdata quote of the day – the regulation problem edition

“Regulation is arguably the least scrutinised part of government. But it may well be the most important. At the moment, Government too often sees imposing costs on business as a pain-free solution. Unless that changes, we can kiss goodbye to any hope of growth.”

Robert Colville. CapX. He writes about a new policy paper about the UK problem. Needless to say, the lessons extend far beyond the shores of the UK.

Samizdata quote of the day – Rishi Sunak’s Big Plan

That’s why I hate “devolution” and wish that a Conservative government had had the balls to roll it back. But I might as well want a pet unicorn as hope for any vision from a Conservative politician. All we get is a smoking ban and compulsory maths till 18. That’s Rishi Sunak’s Big Plan.

JohnK

Samizdata quote of the day – Man is born free but…

Rousseau: Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.

Marx: Man is born free but everywhere jobs.

Feminists: Woman is born free but everywhere men.

CRT: POC are born free (like Rousseau said) but everywhere wipipo.

Queer: Queers are born free but everywhere normality.

Kant: Man is born free but everywhere Reason.

Nietzsche: Man is born free but everywhere morals.

Nazis: German Volk are born free but everywhere Jews and queers and blacks and retards.

Hamas: Arab Muslims are born free but somewhere Jews.

James Lindsey

Samizdata quote of the day – only Israel

It seems that the usual rules don’t apply when it comes to Israel. The atrocity that happened last October was a reasonable justification for turning Gaza into glass, frankly. Rooting out and killing Hamas, crushing it completely would have been a proportionate response, yet before Israel had responded, there were calls for a ceasefire and accusations of genocide (a grossly misused word and certainly not applicable here). What would any other country have done?

Longrider

Samizdata quote of the day – 1945 in reverse?

The result is that American public debate has shifted in a way that has taken America’s allies – and many Americans themselves – by surprise. The public takes peace for granted. “To some extent we are paying the price for our own success. In several generations now we have not had to deal with certain types of situations, or only very narrow slices of generations have had to deal with them since we’ve eliminated the draft. And so increasingly America is just in a very different place psychologically,” says Dr Haass.

In other words, Trumpism will not die with Trump, argues Mr Arnold, and betting British security on 300,000 swing voters every four years is not a viable long term policy.

“Trump is unpredictable. As military people say, hope cannot be part of the strategy. We have to understand there is a risk and we need to be ready for this risk,” says Mr Zagorodnyuk.

“And as such we need to understand what we are going to do to be self-sufficient. And it is actually possible. It is difficult but it is possible, especially with this massive technical transformation of the landscape of the world.”

Roland Oliphant

Samizdata quote of the day – Gaza edition

“Hamas is perhaps the first regime in recorded history to fight a war designed to maximize casualties among their own population.”

Gatestone Institute.

Samizdata quote of the day – prices are important edition

“This ‘Great Forgetting,’ as Cutsinger and Salter call it, has consequences. One is that many young economists ‘focus on applied research using sophisticated statistical tools without an underlying theoretical framework to guide them.’ The effects, however, go beyond formal economics. The marginalization of price theory in the academy is increasingly mirrored in the conduct of public policy—and the results are dire.”

Samuel Gregg. He is writing in relation to a new CATO Institute publication that addresses why price theory is, so it appears, a neglected field in mainstream economics, and why this matters. The way I see it, prices are information about relative scarcity and plenitude. I learned a few things about what’s known as “Austrian” economics, and one of them is that a reason why central planning and socialism do not work, is that from an epistemological point of view, they are barren in terms of information. And that leads to barren economies. (At the extreme, you get the terrible famines of Communist nations, in part because economics is, in a sense, banned.) George Gilder, who writes a lot about business and technology, even has a book on the topic of the “information theory of capitalism”.

Samizdata quote of the day – three cheers for emissions

The reason emissions exist, they continue, is not because 57 corporations are doing us down. It’s because 8 billion of us have a sharp eye for what produces what we desire. Therefore we buy these things.

Tim Worstall