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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The hold of mass psychosis on individuals in a crowd is not through logic or private incentives but through an emotional narrative. Therefore, it is through undermining that unifying narrative in the eyes of an individual that one loosens the bond between individual and group. It can be done through mockery or by persuading an individual to consume less (or no) mass-media messaging. The less propaganda is consumed, the easier one builds distinct communities and follows personal goals. The values of the crowd are often barbaric and contrary to those of individuals who join it; by encouraging the individual to return to acting as a moral agent, the individual will come to distinguish himself from the mass. However hackneyed and largely unexamined an individual’s personal ethics, they are at least different from those of the masses. Differentiation is done by making the individual aware of conflict between his/her morality and what the mass believes. It is possible to point out exceptions, especially relating to close relatives or friends or even inconsistencies in his/her own actions.
Here are some angles of persuasion that will help deprogramme the Covidian. Often, success rests on reminding people of their core values. Those mantras held up to March 2020 may have been unexamined and faulty but they were not worthless and their old shapes remain in the psyches of those currently under the sway of mass psychosis. Appeal to a person’s core values rather than presenting statistics, unless statistics are used to back up a moral argument.
– Alexander Adams, Deprogramming Covidian mass psychosis
“Stay safe” and the little things we could do for each other were like linguistic pacifiers, offering us a reprieve from the endless media reminder that we were in ‘unprecedented’ and ‘uncertain times’ and that, despite this, we were ‘all in this together‘.
I started to think about the other phrases that encapsulate an overabundance of caution which masquerades as compassion. And at what point does overemphasising caution become its own form of harassment? Certainly, we are seeing rising incidents of shunning and neuroticism since the start of the pandemic. These are notions favoured by the laptop-class: people who want to live in March 2020 in perpetuity, clamouring for more lockdowns and ‘stimulus’. Some people in the United States seem convinced – quite literally – that they are going to die. This is a problem. They perceive themselves as being in great danger when they aren’t, and view others as a threat in an overstated way. This is dangerous. I noticed that they also seem to take a strange sort of glee in telling others what to do – adult hallway monitors run amok. There was something fundamentally pathological about the sheer pleasure people – usually women and men who seemed off the deep end into over-socialisation – took in events being cancelled for ‘the greater good’. When LCD Soundsystem announced, due to public pressure, that they were abruptly cancelling the last three shows of their reunion performance here in NYC everyone started talking about ‘the greater good’. Those who voiced their disappointment in various comment sections were ostracised, while those who were sanctimoniously, righteously having their ‘concern for safety’ met seemed pleased to have their virtue reaffirmed. To be clear, I don’t necessarily think they enjoy the ongoing restrictions: I think they enjoy the righteousness of their perceived sacrifice.
– Nick Comilla
Full interview can be found here on Media Scum.
If it wasn’t so serious, we could just laugh. But green activists have been so successful over the last 30 years with their “settled” science propaganda that they have persuaded a Conservative Government in the U.K. to embrace the Net Zero agenda. A Marxist-inspired, control and rule agenda complete with reduced mass personal transport, higher energy costs, restricted diets and all the loss of personal freedoms that these entail. The Covid pandemic has shown just how many freedoms can be snatched away in a modern connected society by the spread of widespread fear, fuelled by selective state-sponsored science and, of course, made up models.
[…]
Meanwhile back in the real world, it is obvious that many green extremists are starting to think the unthinkable. Democracy is all very well but is falling short when decisions have to be made by self-proclaimed experts going about their important work of saving the planet. Writing in the American Political Science Review last month, Ross Mittiga, Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Chile, noted that as the climate crisis deepens, “one can find a cautious but growing chorus of praise for ‘authoritarian environmentalism’”.
– Chris Morrison
Another reason for de-covidification otherwise the current totalitarianism will serve as a model for other ones.
“Meeting people is part of the education. Online is great but not for everything.”
– Academic and writer Tyler Cowen, going out on a limb.
“The data show that from 2000 to 2021, the number of global weather and climate disasters declined by about 10%, which is very good news and completely contrary to conventional wisdom.”
– Roger Pielke Jr
You would assume that if the CDC was going to crush the civil and individual rights of those with natural immunity by having them expelled from school, fired from their jobs, separated from the military, and worse, the CDC would have proof of at least one instance of an unvaccinated, naturally immune individual transmitting the COVID-19 virus to another individual. If you thought this, you would be wrong.
My firm, on behalf of ICAN, asked the CDC for precisely this proof (see below). ICAN wanted to see proof of any instance in which someone who previously had COVID-19 became reinfected with and transmitted the virus to someone else. The CDC’s incredible response is that it does not have a single document reflecting that this has ever occurred. Not one.
– Aaron Siri
Just how racist is The Guardian against black Africans? That they must be condemned to longer and deeper poverty to conform to fashionable metropolitan ideas?
– Tim Worstall
“There is a growing Covid industry of companies selling security interventions. Some vaccine manufacturers are enthusiastically promoting repeated boosters. The private gains from PPE sales are so notorious that the Treasury should be considering a war profits tax. There is a burgeoning trade in ventilation and air-filtration equipment. Behind the push for vaccine passports are software companies with digital ID pages in search of customers.”
– Robert Dingwall, Daily Telegraph.
The commentary made me think of President Eisenhower’s farewell address about the “Military-Industrial Complex.”
What started with the strange tale of the pandemic of an easy to beat aerosolized virus has become a global battle over the onward march to eliminate the control group. The bidding began with a clash of the propagandized fear porn-driven narrative. The stakes were upped substantially over hydroxychloroquine and anything else that might treat patients before reaching a progressed disease state. Now that controversy over vaccine harms has ramped up substantially, two sides find themselves committed.
Vicious tribalism is in vogue, and the stakes could not be higher. One side wants the other to submit to a “my government can inject me with anything it likes, at any time” policy. The other has filed genocide and war crimes complaints in at the International Criminal Court.
When the end states of the game involve either of,
1. Rounding up one side into concentration camps, or
2. Holding international or military tribunals to hold the leadership of the other side accountable for genocide,
it becomes harder and harder to imagine either side backing down.
– Mathew Crawford
I think that the people who operate Facebook and other social media are concerned about facts. That’s why they go out of their way to disappear them
– Shlomo Maistre
“Say what you will, but Joe Biden’s first year in office has one crowning achievement to its name. It has provided a real-time, data-rich, high-intensity and ultimately devastating case study in the defining conceit of progressive politics: the idea that government is the solution.”
– Gerard Baker
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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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