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]
|
“The precautionary principle is a gigantic paternalistic arm around humanity to keep all risk at bay.”
– Philip Johnston, Daily Telegraph. (Item behind paywall.)
I have friends and relations in the EU (Italy, Malta, Germany, Belgium) so I cannot take pleasure from the Biblical-level clusterfuck of the EU’s approach to vaccines, and I am certainly angry at the bullying of Brussels vis a vis the UK as the EU top brass attempts to save face. But leaving my obvious personal reasons aside, it is hard not to also enjoy watching the European political classes make such tits of themselves, and in bright lights.
I’m sorry, but if you didn’t object to the Metropolitan Police’s brutal tactics in dispersing anti-lockdown protestors in Trafalgar Square last September, you cannot condemn their employment of identical tactics last night. Either you defend the right to protest for everyone, or you defend it for no one. You cannot just get worked up about it when it affects those whose cause you approve of.
– Toby Young
How do you feel about the palace hearing you speak your truth today?
“Your truth”. That phrase slipped off Oprah’s tongue with such ease during her interview with Meghan and Harry. But on this apparently simple construction hangs a question that has divided us with an explosion of animosity: how many truths can there be?
With the new world once again pitted against the old, I find myself reminded of the words of another Royal confidante, those of Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “To thine own self be true,” he advised his son. This sentiment seems to encapsulate so much of what is philosophically at stake in this interview, with the Prince and the Princess expressing “their truth”, a truth that was as much a function of the need to be true to who they are, as it was a reference to objective reality.
Put aside for one moment the on-going debate about their claims concerning Royal racism, for it seems to me that there is a troubling tension between two meanings of truth going on here: being true to yourself, something we have come to call authenticity, and truth as an empirical statement of fact.
– Giles Fraser
Inflation, like sin, is an inevitable consequence of choices people make. But to strategise it as a policy is wrong. It undermines confidence not just in the money supply of the moment, but in the nature of money itself. This government, via the Ponzi scheme of “quantitative easing” is pumping inflation into the financial structures of the UK. This is a deep subversion of the concept of money itself.
– Sean Walsh
But instead of this, I am facing enormous pressure to get a vaccine in order to recover my basic rights as a citizen. And even then, those in charge are saying, I will still have to run around with a completely useless, breath-robbing and personality-canceling mask on my face.
And all this for a disease that, even before the introduction of vaccines, gave those infected by it a roughly 997.5 out of 1,000 chance of survival.
The civil authorities have decided, in effect, that fully indemnified pharmaceutical companies, whose pasts are obscenely littered with fraud, and the calculated creation of crises in order to up revenues on their products (OxyContin anyone?), have the de facto “right” to force me to take an experimental vaccine that, in the very, very best of circumstances, will only match what my apparently well-functioning body has already given me without any side effects.
And this, while straight out telling me that even if I submit to their government-coerced medical experiment I will probably still not get my full constitutional rights back.
This is an important issue that needs to be addressed much more vigorously than has been the case up until now.
– Thomas Harrington
Interviewer: It is striking how scientific studies, also in this corona crisis, reveal very diverse results. Based on these results, scientists can defend almost diametrically opposed theories as the only truth. How is this possible?
Mattias Desmet: The research on corona is indeed brimming with contradictions. For example, regarding the effectiveness of face masks or hydroxychloroquine, the success of the Swedish approach, or the effectiveness of the PCR test. Even more curiously, the studies contain a huge number of improbable errors that a normally sane person would not be expected to make. This is still the case in terms of establishing the absolute number of infections, while a schoolchild knows that this means nothing as long as the number of infections detected is not compared with the number of tests taken. Obviously, the more tests you carry out, the more likely your infection rate will increase. Is this so difficult? In addition, it should be kept in mind that the PCR test can yield a large number of false positives, because the technique is widely misused for diagnosis. Together, this means that the inaccuracy of the figures distributed daily by the media is so great that some people understandably suspect a conspiracy, albeit apocryphally, in my opinion.
Again, this phenomenon is better placed in an historical perspective, because the problematic quality of scientific research is not a new issue. In 2005 the so-called “replication crisis” erupted in the sciences. Several committees set up to investigate scientific fraud cases found that scientific research is teeming with errors. Often the stated conclusions are of very dubious value. In the wake of the crisis, several papers appeared with titles that leave little to the imagination. In 2005, John Ioannidis, Professor of Medical Statistics at Stanford, published Why most published research findings are false. In 2016, a different research group wrote about the same topic, in Reproducibility: a Tragedy of Errors published in the medical journal Nature. These are just two examples of the very extensive literature describing this problem. I myself am well aware of the shaky scientific foundation of many research results. In addition to my master’s degree in clinical psychology, I earned a master’s in statistics. My doctorate dealt with measurement problems in the field of psychology.
– Patrick Dewals: The Emerging Totalitarian Dystopia: An Interview With Professor Mattias Desmet
Original text here.
Once the continent of innovation, art, democracy and non-conformity, Europe has been laid low by a heady brew of bureaucracy, over-regulation, over-taxation and debt. A crisis of political leadership has in turn produced a deficiency of bold, innovative ideas, a shortage of vision and a huge expansion of government intervention. Nowhere is this clearer than in the EU’s ill-fated monetary misadventures.
– Nikola Kedhi
Lord Sumption: Our status as a free society doesn’t actually depend on our laws or our constitution, it depends on convention. It depends on a collective instinct as to the right way to behave. There are many things governments can do which it is generally accepted they should not do. And one of them, until last March, was to lock up healthy people in their homes.
Interviewer: So, do you think we have taken an irreversible step towards being more Chinese, more dirigiste?
Lord Sumption: I very much fear that we have
– From an Unherd interview titled: Lord Sumption: mass civil disobedience has begun
I do not agree with Sumption on every point by any means but this interview is well worth your time.
It was also Blair’s government that criminalised the right to silence at British ports. Thanks to Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to this day any person may be detained and questioned, with no need for reasonable grounds. It remains a criminal offence not to answer questions during such an interrogation. These laws were originally intended for Irish Republicans, and came to be used largely for jihadist terrorism — but typical of government mission creep, they were eventually applied to obstruct controversial journalism. The most publicised example of this occurred in 2013, when Glen Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained under these powers at Heathrow airport for nine hours.
– Maajid Nawaz discussing Blair’s constant war on freedom
Wikipedia’s [neutral point of view] is dead. The original policy long since forgotten, Wikipedia no longer has an effective neutrality policy. There is a rewritten policy, but it endorses the utterly bankrupt canard that journalists should avoid what they call “false balance.” The notion that we should avoid “false balance” is directly contradictory to the original neutrality policy. As a result, even as journalists turn to opinion and activism, Wikipedia now touts controversial points of view on politics, religion, and science.
– Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia writing Wikipedia Is Badly Biased
I have a research background in the social sciences and dozens of peer-reviewed publications to my name. There’s a lot that sets off my crap detector in Ferguson’s comments – mostly to do with overestimating the validity of his own data, and using this to in effect depoliticise political questions and naturalise a kind of technocratic despotism under the guise of neutral science. I don’t think this is a deliberate conspiracy; I think it’s a predictable result of a particular way of seeing.
The political assumption is that ‘we’ as a society make decisions for the whole society (i.e., society is not an aggregate of individuals), that within this range of decisions, anything goes (the only criteria are quantitative), and that the decisions should be made based on expert data. These are highly contentious beliefs: they are not apolitical or scientific
[…]
In other words, it’s a strategy based on damage reduction, permitting or increasing human suffering so as to preserve state/Government stability (again clearly a contentious view, and again with Hobbesian and behaviourist roots). Yet Ferguson embeds this view of politics in such a way as to make it seem obvious, apolitical. It isn’t. It is a choice in favour of technocratic governance.
Ferguson’s desire not to ‘politicise’ science involves effectively making policy decisions based on the ‘expert’ conclusions arising from computer modelling. This kind of technocratic model is perfectly compatible with how countries like China are run.
– Lockdown Sceptics
Perhaps the most stark form of differend lies in what philosophical logicians call ‘The Fallacy of Many Questions’. When, in the court dock for instance, a wily prosecutor asks a witness for the defence, “And do you still have a drink problem, sir?”, the witness had better be on his toes to avoid confirming the prosecutor’s implied allegation. If he answers “yes” – well, the game is over. If he answers “no”, then he implies, at least, that he has had a drink problem. One hopes that a good judge would overrule this question, on grounds of its leading the witness – that is to say, leading him without his knowing it to confirm some version of the drink-problem narrative, the framework of the question having excluded the option that there neither is nor ever was a problem with alcohol consumption.
Owen Jones’s ‘Denier’ allegation commits a similar fallacy: either Sikora, Gupta et al. do not deny ‘Covid’; or they do deny ‘Covid,’ in which case they are cast in the role of refusing to accept that Britons have this year died in their thousands. The option of accepting that there have been deaths but rejecting that they have been extraordinarily due to a ‘Covid pandemic’ is taken out of play.
– Sinéad Murphy discussing An Incredible Berk of Staggering Ignorance.
The “differend” is not just a difference of opinion, it is a disconnect between fundamentally different world views. This is a discussion about what in these parts we refer to as “meta-context”, the unspoken & largely unexamined axioms that underpin how people understand everything.
|
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.
|
