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

Judgement
This case is about whether Missouri’s Department of Health and Senior Services regulations can abolish representative government in the creation of public health laws, and whether it can authorize closure of a school or assembly based on the unfettered opinion of an unelected official. This Court finds it cannot.

– via Bad Cattitude. Read the whole thing.

Samizdata quote of the day

Things descended into absurdity when A. abruptly asked:

Do you seriously believe that countries all over the world have coordinated and agreed to order restrictions like these? Northern Italy last year, China, etc.?

I was totally dismayed by her open cluelessness. Had she slept through these world-historical moments? Did she have no idea that lockdowns were demonstrably imported from China, with the help of the WHO and other actors? Was her implication that all these restrictions had arisen in spontaneous response to conditions, and that everything must therefore be in order? In any event, she called me “naive,” because I naturally answered her question with “yes.”

A. and B. are both intelligent and competent people in their fields, and I value both for different reasons. Nevertheless, they are swimming in these currents as if hypnotised, like countless others, and with their complicity our country has devolved into a dystopian dictatorship.

Martin Lichtmesz

Samizdata quote of the day

Resisting tyranny depends on the courage to not conform.

Barry Brownstein

Samizdata quote of the day

The fact that Chinese state media so widely shared a particularly credulous New Yorker article by Peter Hessler about China’s coronavirus response did not escape China expert Geremie Barmé, who cautioned its author that it reminded him of “another American journalist, a man who reported from another authoritarian country nearly a century ago … Walter Duranty …”

Michael Senger

Samizdata quote of the day

“Two months ago an education activist told a small group in Virginia that people don’t yet understand that Americans’ relationship with public schools changed during the pandemic. For the first time ever, on Zoom, parents overheard what is being taught, how, and what’s not taught, and they didn’t like what they heard. The schools had been affected by, maybe captured by, woke cultural assumptions that had filtered down from higher-ed institutions and the education establishment. The parents were home in the pandemic and not distracted. They didn’t want their children taught harmful nonsense, especially at the expense of the basics.”

Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), pondering the losses by the Democrats in the recent Virginia elections. A state that was going “blue”, has gone “red”, and the promotion of Critical Race Theory in public, state schools is a part of why.

Maybe the pushback is also a victory for a new breed of scholars and writers who are starting to seriously hammer CRT and parts of the “woke” movement, such as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and John McWhorter, or in the UK, the likes of Douglas Murray. This episode also highlights why much of the Left loathes school choice.

Samizdata quote of the day

“Capitalism isn’t perfect, but there is no perfect system, and fantasies of a world in which there are no conflicts, no borders, no pollutants, no waste, and no crime are simply that: fantasies. Capitalism has been the best means ever devised of mitigating these problems – betting everything on an unfounded pipe dream is dangerous, illogical and should not be entertained in the 21st century. It may not sound exciting but the change we need will not come from revolution, but controlled, steady and logical improvements to our existing society.”

Joshua Taggart, writing in response to the latest pollutant to come out of the brain of George Monbiot. (I hadn’t heard from Mr Monbiot lately, but he’s still there, calling for some sort of totalitarian order where growth and material advancement are strictly regulated, by people such as him. He really is quite something.)

Samizdata quote of the day

COP26 will help to consolidate this neo-aristocracy. And, bizarrely, the left will cheer it on. The left once said: ‘We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance… We do not call for a limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’ (Sylvia Pankhurst.) Now it pleads with the super-rich to come up with more and more creative ideas for how to rein in the filthy habits and material dreams of the masses. What a disaster. It isn’t climate change that poses the largest threat to humanity in the early 21st century. It’s the bourgeoisie’s loss of faith in its historic project, and its arrogant generalisation of that loss of faith into a new ‘green’ ideology we must all bow down before. A revolt against environmentalism is arguably the most necessary cause of our age. Who’s in?

Brendan O’Neill

Samizdata quote of the day

Decarbonising our economy is the Greenies’ equivalent of the Soviet collectivisation of agriculture, or the Great Leap Forward. With similar effects.

Fen Tiger

Samizdata quote of the day

“COP26, not as an event but as the beginning of a process, has the potential to provoke revolution. Not certainly and not in the immediate future; but the unfolding future of climate totalitarianism, already fairly clearly delineated in the plans of governments, is the one phenomenon that anyone with an historian’s insight will identify as a conceivable long-term cause of revolution. What shape such a revolution might take, whether purely political or violent, would probably vary according to the culture of any society in which it occurred. If politicians do not heed the warning signs that will eventually proliferate, future historians may compare the assembling of COP26 to the convening of the Estates General in France, in 1789.”

Gerald Warner

Read the whole thing. If you are from Glasgow, please don’t take offence.

Samizdata quote of the day

The most dangerous thing to do, at this point, would be to vaccinate children. The virus is not a threat to them, and if they are infected by the new forms of SARS-2 that are sure to emerge every winter, we will begin to establish – through them and the as yet unvaccinated – the layered immunity that is the only way of coming to terms with SARS-2 in the longer term. As long as the vaccinators are permitted to continue their radical and increasingly insane campaign, though, nothing will improve. Indeed, their policies threaten to bring about a semi-permanent pandemic state for generations to come.

Eugyppius

Samizdata quote of the day

“The alarmism is the goal. The goal is the alarmism.”

Michael Shellenberger, as interviewed by Jordan Peterson. He is talking about the fearmongering of much of the contemporary Green movement, and what drives it. I really hope that a pushback is coming when the public fully wake up to what’s involved.

Samizdata quote of the day

I fear that, having once been sacrificed on the altar of the NHS and its limited capacity, our freedoms are no longer safe from the utilitarian knife. The same people telling us to shop alone, drink alone, and be in bed by eleven, to save lives from Coronavirus, will continue to make the same arguments over lesser risks.

If we accept pubs serving no alcohol, or alcohol only with a meal, or closing at ten, on the shaky ground that it reduces the spread of a virus, why not accept similar measures to take the strain of drunkenness off A&E departments every weekend? It can’t be coincidence that those rules fit so well with public health campaigners’ longstanding desire to wean us off our boozy nights out.

Timadra Harkness

There are some questionable assumption in the linked article but the points above are an absolute certainty. People need to push back and not be too concerned with being polite.