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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At my personal blog, on Friday February 28th (Friday being my day for animal kingdom related stuff, most of it very silly), I posted a link (among other links of a similar level of profundity) to a video, of a snake that had swallowed a towel having the towel extracted back through its mouth by helpful vets. Ho, ho.
The link I posted, to a tweet someone had done, no longer works, but here is the drama I’m referring to.
But now, today, AndrewZ added a comment to that posting of mine which seems to me to deserve rather wider attention than it would get if I merely left it where he first put it. He wrote this:
A snake is a simple creature driven by its instincts. It follows a set of hardwired rules which it can’t question and which can lead to dangerous errors when it encounters something outside of its normal experience, like a towel. In other words, a snake’s mind is a very limited algorithm. But the world today is saturated with algorithms, from Facebook to FinTech to facial recognition systems used by the police and ten thousand other things. The $64,000 question – perhaps, the $64 billion dollar question or the 64,000 lives question – is how many of them are still operating at the “dumb snake swallows a towel” level of sophistication.
This is not, to put it mildly, my area of expertise. But, on the other hand, this is just the kind of thing that the Samizdata commentariat enjoys chewing on, metaphorically speaking. So, ladies and gents, chew away.
I did not pick this gem out of the mud all by myself. This has been the quote of the day at all sorts of places, this one included, for quite a few hours:
Next up, Walker’s crisps and Pringles.
Harry Miller: “This is a warershed moment for liberty”
The police response to an ex-officer’s allegedly transphobic tweets was unlawful, the High Court has ruled.
Harry Miller, from Lincolnshire, was contacted by Humberside Police in January last year after a complaint about his tweets.
He was told he had not committed a crime, but it would be recorded as a non-crime “hate incident”.
The court found the force’s actions were a “disproportionate interference” on his right to freedom of expression.
In a separate story from the one I quote above, the BBC goes on to report that
Mr Justice Julian Knowles said the effect of police turning up at Mr Miller’s place of work “because of his political opinions must not be underestimated”.
He added: “To do so would be to undervalue a cardinal democratic freedom.
“In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”
I did not know we still had judges like that.
Edit: This is the text of the judgement: Miller -v- College of Policing, 14 February 2020.
In the spirit of what Julie near Chicago said in a comment, at 11:33am, on this, which was this, …
I love Samizdata. You learn so much arcane stuff hereabouts!
(She then adds, by way of example, something about the Cloak of Invisibility, whatever that is. (I’m not asking.))
… I will add another little bit of arcane stuff here. Before today ends, because it concerns today. I refer to this:
02 02 2020
This is the first time in over 900 years (since 11/11/1111) the date is palindromic no matter the date format.
I learned this in a tweet, which I encountered because the noted military historian Peter Caddick-Adams, with whom I was once upon a time acquainted and whose twitterings I now follow (and more to the point whose books I also read with great pleasure), drew it to my attention.
Although, what if you just say 2/2/2020? Doesn’t that count as a “date format”? I think I just destroyed this posting.
Personally, I always try to put the name of the month and only use a number for the day, because once you get confused about the all-numbers way of identifying dates the confusion only ends with your death. (When trying to work out when a photo taken early in the month got taken, I tend to get brain-ache and have to work it out like a crossword clue.)
I notice that Samizdata also uses month names for all dates. Very wise, and further proof of why all should love Samizdata.
Whilst the British ‘comedy’ circuit has long been the preserve of the Left, events have taken a dramatic turn as Titania McGrath, radical socialist, feminist, intersectionalist, Twitter SJW par excellence and all-round good egg has escaped from Twitter into real life and has brought her insight to the stage.
The Culture War rages on.
Continuing my series of “Newspaper headlines mentioning vaguely newsworthy persons that I thought at first sight were jokes but turned out to be literally true”,
Prominent lawyer Jolyon Maugham clubs fox to death while wearing kimono.
Well, I suppose it is traditional to kill foxes on Boxing Day.
Yesterday’s entry: The Attorney General reads “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”
“Twitter to ban all political advertising, raising pressure on Facebook”, reports the Guardian.
Having sent one tweet in my life, I am ill placed to say whether this is much of a loss to the world. Twitter is under no obligation to allow political advertising but Jack Dorsey’s stated reasons for forbidding it sound like a newly-ennobled Victorian peer attempting to efface the memory that he made his money in trade. Mr Dorsey, an advertising billionaire, thinks that the spread of political messages online “should not be compromised by money”.
Stackoverflow is a website so focused on getting good technical answers to good technical questions that thank-you notes are removed because they are noise. And yet somehow there is now a 17 point FAQ about the gender pronoun rules recently added to the code of conduct. Says one response:
I am all in favor of wanting to be respected, I really do, but this is the most overhead to “don’t be mean” I have ever seen.
Another takes aim at the people who run the web site:
Putting identity politics front-and-center in what is supposed to be a neutral, objective Q&A environment promotes division and strife, not inclusion, and more importantly, it distracts from the primary mission of these sites: getting good answers to good questions. Our values reject it.
If you truly value your community, that means respecting the community’s values, not attempting to impose new and incompatible ones by fiat. Your values are out of alignment with the values of the community you are supporting. Please fix them.
Another points out that too many rules do not help:
I would very much like if we could all get along. We have rules and moderators because in a big community, there’ll always be a few participants who can’t get along. But increasingly, getting along is against the rules.
One of two things is going on.
- This is just people on the Internet arguing because they can and anyone with things to get done will simply ignore them.
- This is an example of an attempt to infiltrate and change a community, and the resistance to this attempt.
See also: Linux and its code of conduct.
“Corbyn’s policies will reduce hate crime in this country”
Yes indeed, Corbyn, being a Marxist & anti-Semite, will nationalise hate crime & it’s well know that nationalised industries are gawd-awful at doing what they set out to do, epidemiological research supports this.
– Perry de Havilland
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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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