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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Over the weekend PayPal informed us that they would no longer be willing to process payments for us due to “inappropriate content”. What this actually means is “we dont believe in your political opinion” both yours, and my own.
– Continental Telegraph
So even worse than the situation with Creative Destruction.
And in an era when it is rapidly becoming harder and harder to use physical cash, anyone who says “oh but PayPal is a private company…” yeah, so it Visa, American Express & MasterCard… good luck functioning at all in the modern world without at least one of them, and they too are doing the sort of thing PayPal has been doing. Just ask Gab.com.
“Totalitarianism depends on the enforcement of false beliefs. Postmodernism admittedly and purposively leaves us no way to adjudicate beliefs. Likewise, postmodernism lends itself to totalitarianism.”
– Michael Rectenwald
Yep, Deliveroo must be banned because consumers like it. That’s The Guardian we know and love, right?
– Tim Worstall
For centuries, women have fought for the right to bodily autonomy. Having an abortion is a medical intervention, and women are just as entitled to it as any other treatment. But by adopting a philosophy which surrenders our medical autonomy to the state, we are hypothetically giving governments the power to ban abortions. Moreover, we are giving them the power to enforce them, if they so choose.
The rights of the individual to assess risk and prioritise the quality of their own life has been forgotten
In the past 12 months, dramatic shifts in mainstream attitudes to public health have moved us closer to this reality. The rights of the individual to assess risk and prioritise the quality of their own life has not only been forgotten — it has been scoffed at and derided, as though it never existed in the first place. The precedent set by the smallest step towards this broken philosophy is incredibly dangerous. Over the next few weeks, we must all ask ourselves what kind of world we want our children to grow up in. Do we grant them ownership of their bodies — indeed, their self, their soul, their identities? Or do we bequeath that ownership to the state? Some may argue that vaccine passports are the first step towards eradicating a disease. Rather, they are the first step towards the eradication of basic human rights.
– Tom Moran
I saw this via Instapundit and have to share:
“Tweedy party-at-the-Verso-loft n+1 leftists aren’t making money. 33 year olds who follow Tik Tok trends for a living and communicate in slang that’s fifteen years too young for them aren’t making money. Arrogant white nerdoliberals with Warby Parkers and Moleskine collections aren’t making money. Sports bloggers who provide sports news and commentary but with attitude aren’t making money. Softening khaki dads struggling to understand Bitcoin and intersectionality in an effort to survive their next inevitable layoff aren’t making money. Talented and unfulfilled women writers who have learned too late that women’s media is a ghetto they will struggle to escape for the rest of their careers aren’t making money. Aspiring young data scientists who labor over their spreadsheets for hours only to see others copy and past[e] their R graphs without attribution and receive 40x the pageviews aren’t making money. And you won’t either.”
– Freddie deBoer (who has a Substack account; thanks also to Anne Althouse for putting this up.)
The past year has taught me that I’ve been walking amongst millions of dormant authoritarians my entire life…
It just took the right conditions to bring it out.
Scary.
– Zuby
“Elizabeth Warren — the ridiculous hustling flatbilly grifter from Massachusetts from Oklahoma who snookered the academic establishment by pretending to be a Native American while writing dopey self-help books that are so sloppy and intellectually dishonest that it’s a surprise skeezy old Joe Biden hasn’t plagiarized them yet, a political grotesque who prides herself on being in the first generation of her family to attend college but rage-tweets as though she were in the first generation in her family with opposable thumbs, as ghastly and deceitful and god-awful a sniveling and self-serving a creature as the United States Congress has to offer — is, in spite of the genuine facts of her sorry case, getting a little full of herself, and believes that as a senator, she should be above the petty “heckling” of the little people. You know, peons. Like you.”
– Kevin D Williamson. He does invective so well: “flatbilly grifter”. I am stealing that.
Dr Yaron Brook also gives the Massachusetts senator a hammering for her attack on Amazon. There needs to be more of this. And well done Amazon for not backing down.
Warren has called for Amazon to be broken up for some time. It bemuses me when I read even supposed pro-market folk calling for these firms to be “broken up”. Into what: floor paving?
Yet there has never been a more pressing time to engage with these issues in the classroom. If I were a teacher of Religious Studies, I would find it difficult to justify ignoring the question of the perceived conflict between religious faith and free speech, or not to discuss the murders of Samuel Paty and the satirists of Charlie Hebdo. While there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the potential offence that depictions of the Prophet Mohammed might cause, it is not a sufficient reason to avoid the topic altogether. I am sure that many pupils are disturbed by the anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda cartoons that are routinely included in history textbooks, but they serve an important function in the learning process. We know very little about the context in which the images of Mohammed were shown at Batley Grammar, but it is implausible that the teacher’s motives were anything other than educational.
– Andrew Doyle
There is, clearly, a religious quality to our implicit appeal to a sacred core as consolation for the weakness of our bodies. But our modern soul is a secular soul; it has no actual religious content, only content given to it by the biological, psychological and social sciences. And if we have learnt one thing during this past year, it is that such sciences are not above being conduits for the agenda of governments and corporations.
While we obediently cultivate a hatred of our bodies beyond any felt before in human history, we obediently look for our real selves in an imagined identity that is conveniently manufactured by scientific concepts advertised and distributed by those with power and influence.
And the effect is intensifying, with the roll-out of these treatments they are calling ‘vaccines’, new mRNA pharmaceuticals that have never been used before and that are still in the experimental phase of their development. We should investigate these treatments, and not allow those in power to simply ‘get them in arms’. For, we are not identities trapped in contemptible bodies. Whatever we are, we are embodied.
A Twitter bio I came across recently included the designators, 21y/o, ‘sapiosexual,’ ‘panAfrican,’ and ‘VACCINATED’. It is the endgame of the management of people with democratic freedoms, when they experience themselves as liberated by cleaving to newly invented, politically infused categories of race and sex, and are so scornful of their body as to replace its native immunity with an artificial version when, at the age of 21, it is highly unlikely to be improved upon.
– Sinéad Murphy, Research Associate in Philosophy at Newcastle University
We have so far “spent”, ie borrowed £410 billion to pay for the lockdown policy which was meant to “save the NHS”. Would anyone have agreed to that if they had known the cost? Vulnerable people could have been given a pension to stay at home and supplied by Ocado at a tiny fraction of the cost. We have shut down our society for the sake of a disease with a survival rate of over 99.5%. That is just decadent.
– JohnK
I want to ‘build back better’. I don’t know what the world leaders and international organisations are calling for when they parrot this phrase. But after the pandemic, we need far more critical thinking, rationality and constitutional protections. As soon as our liberties are restored, we must make sure they can never be taken away again. That is the cause to rally around now.
– Laura Dodsworth
Looking back, what I most clearly remember now about the febrile atmosphere of February and March last year was my own naïve optimism. I knew that some people were panicking. But I ascribed this to social media-led melodrama that would soon blow over. And I genuinely thought I was part of a silent majority of sensible people who weren’t getting swept up in the frenzy. I don’t think I appreciated at the time that I am, actually, a bit unusual: my father died of the ‘flu, so the idea that respiratory viruses can really be quite nasty was not a shock to me; I have lived through a bona fide life-threatening natural disaster and know what an actual catastrophe looks like; I don’t have any social media accounts so my antennae have not been borked by echo chambers; I have spent a long time overseas so I don’t imbue the NHS with quasi-religious significance or see it as my duty to ‘protect’ it; I have read my Hayek, my Bastiat, my Friedman, my Smith, and I am predisposed to value freedom and limited government. I hadn’t realised that I was somewhat different from my countrymen in these respects. So I was genuinely flabbergasted on March 23rd when it turned out people were actually going along with the nonsense. And since then I have found myself constantly surprised at just how out of step I am with the people around me.
– David McGroggan, Associate Professor of Law, Northumbria Law School
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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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