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]
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Somehow we have arrived at a place that the West never expected to inhabit. A generation after the collapse of the most powerful totalitarian regime in modern history, the “free world” has apparently lost its grip on the relationship between moral values and political decisions which was once its greatest strength.
The idea had seemed to win out against all the odds: that a government could uphold fundamental first principles of justice, liberty and the authority of the law while still responding realistically to changes in popular opinion and social conditions. This was a truly miraculous understanding of the relationship between morality and politics and, difficult as it might have been to manage, it seemed to deliver the life most people wanted.
It’s hard to believe but we might be witnessing the end of it.
– Janet Daly (£)
“Liberalism depends on institutions, including those for free speech and inquiry. Liberalism is also a project for freeing man from the physical constraints of nature. The personal autonomy of those with resources often advances the infrastructure and culture of liberalism that protects the personal autonomy of others who are not as well off. The dynamism of liberalism is its best defense.”
– John O Mcginnis
The author gives a sharp critique of a book by Ingrid Robeyns that claims we should eliminate rich people – not by killing them, but seizing their money. At the moment, we appear to live in a time when hostility to great wealth is respectable, and yet in my gut I sense the same kind of horrible, “tall poppy syndrome” mindset that has led to confiscatory taxes, and countless other abominations that are based on a zero-sum view of the world that at its heart is wrong and in my view, malevolent.
At the very least, given the scientific importance of the CET, the Met Office could at least move the stations to more suitable nearby locations away from the disqualifying heat corruptions.
But if adding near-junk figures to the collection is not bad enough, the investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.
– Chris Morrison
We like to think we are ‘modern,’ as every population in the present has always fancied themselves, and we like to think we’re too rational and scientific to subscribe to lunacies like phrenology or bloodletting with leeches. But we’re the same as we’ve always been, just as vulnerable to getting seized en masse by goofball ideas as we ever were. ‘Some people are born in the wrong body’ is right in there. One of the passages in MANIA I’m most attached to is the one in which the narrator explains that she used to be confounded by mass atrocities of the past, but now they all made sense: Nazi concentration camps, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Stalin’s show trials, Mao’s cultural revolution. That’s what I concluded after Covid, when in the land of the Magna Carta literally overnight people abdicated every civil right that they had the very day before imagined to be their birthright: free speech, freedom of assembly, a free press, free movement, even the right to leave your own home. Obviously people will believe anything, and for something like National Socialism to triumph in the UK it would take Adolf Hitler at the most about three weeks.
– Lionel Shriver via Laura Dodsworth
The moral hubris of these people is mind-blowing. Imagine how drunk on your own righteousness you would have to be, how in love with your own virtuous reflection, to imagine that your decision to boogie or not to boogie could reshape events in the Middle East. The idea that Olly Alexander withdrawing from Eurovision might help save Gaza is only outdone in dumbness by the idea that his remaining in Eurovision to yelp ‘Peace now!’ might help save Gaza. I hate to break it to you, fellas, but no one in Gaza, Israel, Iran, Qatar, America or anywhere else outside of the hip eateries of Dalston gives a solitary shit whether ‘Dizzy’ happens or not.
– Brendan O’Neill
The debate over censorship is maturing quickly. And the manner in which it is happening sends a clear message: the censors are losing the debate. They cannot defend what they have done over the last 4-plus years and now can only resort to forced silencing.
– Jeffrey Tucker
First, we have got to a point where there is huge ideological flabbiness and confusion in the party. This stems ultimately from a lack of hard thinking. It has of course always been true, and famously, that the Conservative party is a broad church containing many different kinds of opinion. That is true, but it still can’t contain every kind of opinion. Traditionally, the Conservative Party has had within it a range of views on economic policy, from strongly free market to a softer bigger-state conservatism, but it was always anchored by a strong collective belief in the nation, in standing up for the United Kingdom, and in social conservatism. But this has changed in recent years. The accommodation to the trends of secular progressivism and liberalism, about which I shall say more in a moment, and the changes in the composition of the parliamentary party which this has entailed, have dragged the party to the left on social issues. There is now a strongly socially modernising wing within the Party which, at times, and on the fringe, veers into active support of “woke” values. So the Conservative Party is now all over the political spectrum, socially and economically. It is no longer sufficiently distinct from the Labour Opposition either economically or socially. No wonder strong conservatives are drifting away.
– Lord Frost, discussing has British conservatism lost its way?
Imagine going back in time, a decade or so, and telling anti-fascists that one day they’ll be doing the bidding of fascists. Imagine telling anti-racists that they would soon become propagandists for racists. Imagine telling those woke campus feminists, the sort who thought that being propositioned at the student bar was ‘rape culture’, that in the not-too-distant future they’d be making excuses for literal rape. They’d have thought you mad. And yet it’s happened. Many of yesteryear’s self-righteous haters of bigotry have morphed into the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas – one of the most bigoted movements on Earth.
– Brendan O’Neill
So too there is nothing in the New Testament that makes behaviour worse if it is directed against black people or gay people. Rather what is radically new about Christianity is that it treats all people as being essentially the same.
I can find nothing in Plato or Aristotle that says that a deed is worse if it is done against this type of person or that type of person, nor do I find this sort of idea in Augustine, Aquinas, Kant or Mill.
Ever single system of religious, moral or legal thinking that I can think of treats humanity as being morally equal. From this we get “all men are created equal” in the United States Declaration of Independence, which is one of the cornerstones of western thought.
So not only has the Scottish government destroyed the objectivity of the law, so too it has destroyed the idea that we are all equal before the law.
– Effie Deans
The government, in that form of the NHS, is only 75 years late in having a plan for that thing that they’ve been in charge of all these decades.
And there are people who disagree with us when we mutter that perhaps government planning isn’t the way to do things, eh?
– Tim Worstall
As a Scot who grew up in the 1970s in the drawing rooms of Edinburgh’s New Town, the architectural manifestation of the Scottish Enlightenment, I am truly appalled that the legacy of Aikenhead and the Scottish Enlightenment – a historical event far more relevant to the modern world than the War of Independence of the early 14th century that so enthrals the SNP and its activists, an event which put Scotland on the map of the world and one of which the nation can be rightly proud – has been trashed by the Scottish Parliament and the Yousaf Government. From April 1st 2024, saying the wrong thing at your own dinner table, let alone in a drunken pub rant like young Thomas did, will once again land you in significant trouble with the law, 327 years, eight months and 24 days after Thomas died.
Mr. Yousaf, his ministers and those who drafted and will enforce this law would do well to remember how history judged those who hanged Thomas Aikenhead on that bleak winter morning on the road to Leith. In doing so they should recall that this gross act of overreach and tyranny was the high tide of the power of the Kirk, power which was swept aside by the forces unleashed when the people said ‘enough’.
– C.J. Strachan
“(Yuval Noah Harari is) really the worst prophet I’ve ever read,” says Megliloi. “Most of the predictions he made in the first book — that wars were over, that pandemics were over — went wrong. “Were we moving, as he claimed in Sapiens, towards empires? No, national sovereignty has been reasserted.”
Harari’s predictions have become even wilder and sillier. AI might produce a “useless class” of people, he predicted, since they “don’t have any skills that the new economy needs”. No wonder Dominic Sandbrook noted in 2018 how much he was beginning to resemble Alan Partridge. Others suggest he is becoming ever more messianic. While Harari is scathing about formal religion, he appears to be creating an ersatz religion of his own, Wesley J Smith suggested in a 2018 essay.
– Andrew Orlowski
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Who Are We? 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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