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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A totalitarian state cannot tolerate privacy, even and especially within the family, the last redoubt of dissent. Hate-speech laws do not yet cover what you say in the privacy of your own home – you can’t be prosecuted for stirring up hatred at your dining table or in the bedroom.
The [law] commission, however, finds this idea of privacy intolerable. So, if it gets its way, any words you use in your own home that are ‘likely’, even by accident, to ‘stir up hatred’ against a vast array of ‘protected’ groups – including ‘punks’, if you can believe it – could get you sent to prison for seven years. These proposals will make parents fear their own children – and children fear their siblings.
– Radomir Tylecote
I’m also currently helping out a journalist who has been arrested four times and had his equipment taken by the police – without warrants. He is accused of trolling people who he has never communicated with. But he has never been charged. It is all possible because of the hate laws. Being a politician and a Brexiteer, I could have the police fully employed arresting people who say very offensive things to me online. I would not do that. But some people do. We need a major overhaul of all this, because it has set in motion a load of events that are extremely unhealthy for democracy.
– Andrew Bridgen MP in “Why we must repeal our hate-speech laws“
Don’t back down. Don’t apologize. Don’t make clarifications, and don’t try to appease the mob. All of these will only be taken as concessions, and embolden the mob to demand more. The real Achilles’s Heel of the cancel crowd is its short attention span. Once they bully someone into submission, they move on to the next victim. It’s a system designed for quick wins. If you don’t back down, they’ll raise the pitch as far as they can—but eventually they’ll be at a loss for what to do next, and all but the most fanatical will lose interest. The few that remain, now bereft of their backup, are just what you need to teach all of them a lesson, as we did in my case.
– Pedro Domingos from the excellent article “Beating Back Cancel Culture: A Case Study from the Field of Artificial Intelligence”
No government would want to accept that lockdowns were a terrible idea and that wider spread of the pandemic could result in the build-up of herd immunity and fewer number of deaths. However, it must be kept in mind that governments can neither be blamed nor credited for the spread of the coronavirus, because it was nature at work.
– Sanjiv Agarwal
The standard economics of taxation tells us that wealth taxes are a bad idea. The little get out available being that a one off wealth tax, unannounced and impossible to dodge, isn’t so bad. But that isn’t so bad bit rests, entirely and wholly, on the one off nature of it. Which is why those who would tax wealth are telling us it will be a one off, so that it can be introduced and then made more permanent.
– Tim Worstall
In answer to: Why can’t the Left let go of Trump?
It is the same reason a certain ilk of Remainers can’t let go of Brexit, and why the Left in media & academia can’t let go of GamerGate. These were each a cultural Stalingrad, defeats that indicated the world did not work the way High Status opinion demands that you think & say it does. Hoi Polloi keep throwing bricks through the Overton window & polite society really doesn’t like that.
So the people invested in these High Status opinions (shared by everyone they know) are obsessed by the fact they suffered defeats when they are suppose to own the future. They may have gotten rid of Trump now but the fact he was elected in the first place gives lie to their comfortable “inevitable march of history” narrative
– Perry de Havilland
So with regulation. Don’t change it, abolish the very idea of regulating vast swathes of the economy. Don’t reduce the state all over, kill parts of the state.
– Tim Worstall
See how strong governmentalist ideology is in both the principal covid narratives:
(a) the surge is because of the failure of the public to obey; and
(b) the surge is because of the failure of govt to act.
That some things may be beyond state control is not considered.
– Guy Herbert
Fascism is the organised attempt to introduce socialist planning with the consent of big business
– Edward Conze (1934)
Surrender is a choice, old chum. In the face of policies designed to cause fear & despair, refuse to be driven by fear & do not give in to despair. Even if that is the sum total one can contribute, do at least that.
– Perry de Havilland
I’d love to have a few here walk with me through South Minneapolis, down Lake Street, maybe talk to a few of my friends who still haven’t been able to re-open and who now seem likely to simply declare BK and walk away, about how it is so much worse that “government” property was invaded for a few short minutes this week. It was “just private property,” after all.
Maybe we could linger in the remains of the burned-down Minneapolis police precinct building that somehow doesn’t represent “government” in their eyes. Burning down the police is somehow less civil-war-ish than temporarily occupying The People’s Chamber?
Several large communities in Minneapolis are still teetering on failure following the riots. But I should be concerned that government staffers felt ill-at-ease?
They are both bad situations. Cooler heads should have prevailed in both, but didn’t. This “oh, but this is so much worse!” handwringing is why liberty declines.
– Bobby B
“There are so many serious problems raised by the nationalisation of medicine that we cannot mention even all the more important ones. But there is one the gravity of which the public has scarcely yet perceived and which is likely to be of the greatest importance. This is the inevitable transformation of doctors, who have been members of a free profession primarily responsible to their patients, into paid servants of the state, officials who are necessarily subject to instruction by authority and who must be released from the duty of secrecy so far as authority is concerned. The most dangerous aspect of the new development may well prove to be that, at a time when the increase in medical knowledge tends to confer more and more power over the minds of men to those who possess it, they should be made dependent on a unified organisation under single direction and be guided by the same reasons of state that generally govern policy.”
– FA Hayek, The Constitution Of Liberty, page 300. First published in the UK in 1960.
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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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