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]
|
Then do we give them back their freedom? Not at all. Then we move the goalposts, making freedom conditional on more and more people getting the vaccine. Until we make it to so-called ‘Freedom Day’, a month later than originally planned, and Boris Johnson chooses then to tell young people that their freedom to do the things they enjoy will be dependent on receiving a vaccine.
A vaccine that uses experimental technology and was rushed through trials without waiting for the full safety data (trials which will never now conclude as the control groups have been vaccinated). A vaccine, or rather vaccines, which the authorities now acknowledge increase the risk of dangerous blood clotting and heart conditions, particularly in younger people. Vaccines for which there are now more reports of fatalities in the U.S. than all other vaccines put together for the past 30 years.
– Will Jones writing about The Great Betrayal
The name of this website is about to change from Lockdown Sceptics to the Daily Sceptic. I intended this change to coincide with the bonfire of the coronavirus restrictions – the long-awaited terminus – but ‘Freedom Day’ has turned out to be a damp squib. Not only have many of the restrictions remained in place, but it’s been made clear by Chris Whitty and others that any freedoms we’ve been granted today will be snatched away as soon as the NHS comes under pressure again.
– Toby Young
I have been supporting the excellent & tireless Lockdown Sceptics & will continued to support Daily Sceptic. Samizdata.net’s sidebar link has been duly updated.
The path from…
“All we want is to be free to love”
to…
“Bake the cake or go to jail, motherfcker!”
is becoming quicker and more direct.
– staghounds
[Overheard on a train in UK]
Passenger 1: “Have you seen what’s happening in South Africa? The authorities have let order completely break down. It’s getting so bad even BBC is starting to show coverage.”
Passenger 2: “Yeah, it’s terrible, Natal is starting to look like Portland.
I didn’t look too closely when in 2015 a Conservative administration proposed changing the law on gender recognition. A few trans people want more easily to get official confirmation for the new gender they have become? Well, I thought, that’s probably OK. No skin off any part of me.
Then the issue appeared to morph into a different kind of conflict. It had clearly somewhere along the line become impermissible for those who thought that there was something ineluctable about biological sex to say so. It wasn’t whether they were correct or mistaken on the subject that was in question, but their right even to express their view.
A recognisably totalitarian declension seemed to be being imposed: if you said biological sex was real then you argued with the ability of someone who felt they should be the other sex to simply assert that uncontested. That meant you were denying their “existence” as the new sex. Which was tantamount to denying their existence as a human being. Which was close to saying you wanted them and everyone like them dead. Which is the kind of thing the Nazis did. So you’re a Nazi. And we can’t let Nazis publish Nazi thoughts in books. Or speak at universities, or sully our public spaces with their terrible prejudice.
Here I drew the line. I saw people I knew being bullied and harassed for having an opinion on biological sex (actually the majority opinion on biological sex), and even if I didn’t know whether I agreed with them, I knew that was wrong. …
– David Aaronovitch in the Times (£), writing about this book by Helen Joyce, quoted by and commented upon by Mick Hartley (not £).
“Today’s targeting of successful Asian-American kids lacks the crudity of a Jim Crow lunch counter or a whites-only drinking fountain. But it is no less ugly—and no less racially discriminatory—for being more genteel.”
– William McGurn, Wall Street Journal ($).
Here is a non-paywalled story at USA Today outlining the issue, and highlighting what a steaming pile Critical Race Theory is. And its doubly outrageous given the demoralising impact it has on children who study and work hard and on the families who encourage this effort. Given how these things work, this story is worth reading outside the US as well.
“The cliche goes that the UK is a former empire in search of a role. That is not strictly true. The NHS has become Britain’s all-consuming project, the millstone around its neck and the cloying source of confected national pride. Its hold over the country is so powerful that even a libertarian Conservative PM decided this week to risk sacrificing our ordinary freedom rather than dare to reform it.”
– Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph, 13 July (£) My only quibble is the appellation “libertarian”, in this case. Mr Johnson’s libertarian views increasingly resemble entities of myth and legend, such as the Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis, or the 1966 English World Cup winning football team.
At least her blasphemy law would be religiously inclusive. She namechecked Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Ram, Buddha and Guru Nanak as some figures whose dignity should also be protected, concluding: ‘When striking the careful balance to protect such emotional harms, can there and should there be a hierarchy of sentiments?’
So there we have it – a British MP in 2021 wondering out loud if people should be punished for disrespecting gods, messiahs, gurus and prophets. It goes without saying that if Shah were ever to succeed in this, it would be curtains for free speech any more than it already is: free speech was, after all, built on the right to blaspheme.
– Tom Slater
Some governments have also set up detention centres for international travellers entering into their countries, where they are forced to quarantine at their own expense while they wait for the results of their covid-19 tests. Shockingly, in early June 2021, the provincial government in Ontario, Canada, went so far as to announce that residents in long-term care homes would soon be permitted to engage in “close physical contact, including handholding” and “brief hugs” with visitors when both parties are fully immunized.
Unfortunately, instead of criticizing this state of affairs, the mainstream media and major social media platforms are fully on board. They have turned out to be willing collaborators of the governments in these matters by glorifying their oppressive and punitive measures, censuring critical viewpoints, and fostering a culture of surveillance, all while spreading fear. They have also been ceaselessly promoting the injection of experimental vaccines as the only solution that will bring totalitarian lockdown measures to an end.
– Birsen Filip
Yet in many ways, Mussolini’s notion of fascism has become increasingly dominant in much of the world, albeit in an unexpected form: in the worldview of those progressives who typically see “proto-fascism” lurking on the Right.
Mussolini, a one-time radical socialist, viewed himself as a “revolutionary” transforming society by turning the state into “the moving centre of economic life”. In Italy and, to a greater extent, Germany, fascism also brought with it, at least initially, an expanded highly populist welfare state much as we see today.
Indeed, Mussolini’s idea of a an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet.
– Joel Kotkin
“The truth is that China has come out of the lockdowns grimmer, stronger and more assertive. The world we knew has gone.”
– Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph today (behind paywall).
He is writing on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. An organisation responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and which continues to run a heavily authoritarian and dangerous place. It is nothing to celebrate – quite the reverse.
Democracy is this thing over here. Civil liberty is this other thing over here. They’re both desirable – as are apple pie and ice cream – but they are different things.
[…]
To get confused between these two ideas is to get close to ensuring that we achieve neither. Sure, we want democracy so we can throw the bastards out. We also want to have areas of life that simply cannot be affected by whoever is in power – those civil liberties and rights.
– Tim Worstall writing ‘If you confuse Democracy with Civil Liberty you’ll end up with neither‘.
|
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.
|
