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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Regardless of the opinions of Boris, if fusion comes on line in the middle of the attempts by the likes of the Rebellion to turn the western world into a weakened communist hive that the East will invade, high profile teenagers will likely be exposed as the anti-progress communists they are rather than environmentalists.
A certain teenager wants the West to emit less carbon so the East, who already emit over 60% of if, can emit more carbon. Check out her TED talk – she says it out loud (and much of the rest of the manifesto of the people who switched to Green politics in the 80s and early 90s after their preferred ism failed).
– the delightfully pseudonymous BeamUpDenied casting his or her pearls before the Gadarene swine on the Guardian
“Did you know that your dog owns your house, or rather some portion of it? If this is not immediately obvious to you, you will find it helpful to consider some aspects of the ethics and economics of redistribution.”
– Anthony de Jasay, the political philosopher who died not long ago, and one of those intellectuals that many people will not have heard of. A marvellous writer. The essay from which these words come is a gem.
These people who live a vigorous life to 70, 80, 90 years of age—when I look at what those people “do,” almost all of it is what I classify as play. It’s not meaningful work. They’re riding motorcycles; they’re hiking. Which can all have value—don’t get me wrong. But if it’s the main thing in your life? Ummm, that’s not probably a meaningful life.
— Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s department of medical ethics and health policy and “a chief architect of Obamacare”.
Emotion-based appeals not only allow politicians to avoid the far more difficult business of rationally and politically justifying themselves and their policies to the electorate — they also help to disguise the character of measures that would be a very hard sell indeed if they were made explicit. The UK government’s declared target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, for example, apparently feels so good that others have sought to heighten the sensation by declaring a 2030 or 2025 target. The harsh realities of immiseration, upheaval and austerity that meeting such a target would entail, however, are unlikely to be spelled out openly in any election manifestos.
– Philip Hammond (no, not that one, a different one)
By the end of my teaching career, ahistorical undergraduate students were becoming disturbingly common. They did not know the hellish poverty the vast majority of humanity had endured for millennia. They didn’t believe the past could have been as brutal as writers such as Matt Ridley described in his book The Rational Optimist. Even worse, exposed to hard evidence, some students refuse to question their positions.
Camille Paglia explains that because “Everything is so easy now, [undergrads] have a sense that this is the way life has always been.” Paglia continues, “Because they’ve never been exposed to history, they have no idea that these are recent attainments that come from a very specific economic system.”
Capitalism, she continues, has “produced this cornucopia around us. But the young seem to believe in having the government run everything.”
– Barry Brownstein
As seen on a person’s Facebook feed, in relation to those Extinction Rebellion characters as referenced in the post immediately below this one:
There once was an extinction rebellion
Led by a diminutive hellion
Who lives in a yurt
And is covered in dirt
With beliefs distinctly Orwellian.
Enjoy!
If anyone can suddenly get a loan with a negative interest rate, then it is to be expected that the credit demand will get out of hand. To prevent this from happening, the ECB will have to resort to credit rationing: It determines in advance how many new loans it wishes to hand out, and then allocates this amount of credit. The credit market no longer decides who gets what and when and on what terms and conditions; those decisions are made by the ECB.
According to which criteria should loans be allocated? Should anyone who asks for credit get something? Should employment-intensive economic sectors be favored? Should the new loans only go to ‘the industries of the future’? Should weakening industries be supported with additional credit? Or should Southern Europe get more than Northern Europe? These questions already indicate that the planned economy is established through a policy of negative interest rates.
More than ever it will be the ECB that reigns over credit: It will effectively determine what will be financed and produced and where and when; it will determine who will be in a position to buy and consume on credit. As a central planning authority, the ECB — or the groups that greatly influence its decisions — determines everything: which industries will be promoted or suppressed; which economies are allowed to grow stronger than others; which national commercial banks are allowed to survive and which are not. Welcome to the planned economy in the Eurozone!
– Thorsten Polleit
(The IEA) have declined the Guardian’s invitation to delete books, reject their polemical assertions, and are publishing this piece in response. We regard their inquiry and improper suggestion as both an attempt to mislead their readers, and as strong evidence of a growing and dangerous trend in public discourse on climate change to stifle debate, delegitimise dissent, and wilfully confuse matters of science with matters of policy, by denying uncertainty and trade-offs.
– Andy Mayer
Y’all need to remember that heteronormative whiteness is the discursive cultural mechanism by which an oppressive hegemonic discourse of phallogocentrism serves to delegitimise a black/homoexclusive modality and reinscribes a proxi-fascist rearticulation of power structures.
– Titania McGrath
That’s the entire Tweet, but the replies are worth a look too. This one is my favourite so far.
“Extinction Rebellion is a menace to reason and progress. It is reliant on the politics of fear. It uses exaggeration and hyperbole and emotion to try to convince us that End Times are around the corner. It demonises as a ‘denier’ anyone who questions this depressing, anti-human script. And it campaigns, tirelessly, for less — less production, less consumption, less meat, less travel, less joy.”
Brendan O’Neill.
I looked at the folk of ER last night as I walked to a drinks reception at the gloriously pro-capitalist Adam Smith Institute. The ER people seemed to be mostly quite elderly. It is a gut feeling, but I don’t think they are connecting with more than a small sliver of public opinion.
The argument being that post-WWII we put in place those global economic regulators. Bretton Woods, the IMF, the World Bank and so on. Now we should do so again. Simply because it’s obvious that there should be global economic regulation from the centre.
Obviously.
Except that’s to miss the point of the past 40 years. We did indeed have those global institutions. And the poor countries didn’t grow. Then we started – this global neoliberalism – to use market processes and the poor countries did grow. We are enjoying that delight of falling global inequality as a result. The progressive eradication of absolute poverty. We actually have, in place right now, the correct economic policies that is.
But, obviously, because it is just obvious that there must be a Fat Controller, we must reinstitute the failed policies we’ve proven wrong just because. Thus this current call. Climate change is only the excuse here.
– Tim Worstall
“Silicon Valley suffers from a classic case of Stockholm syndrome: Its leaders have developed sympathy for their government and social-justice captors.”
– Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal (behind paywall).
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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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