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]
Police professional standards departments, detecting the mood music, react accordingly. The Police Federation has pointed out how, from 2022-2025, 100 police officers and staff died of suicide — partly attributable to heavy-handed internal investigations. Then there’s the roll-call of officers thrown under the bus for political expediency — like Pc Lorne Castle, who had the temerity to call a knife-wielding male suspect “a bitch”, Sergeant Rhodri Davies, accused of using disproportionate force against a 6’7” prisoner in custody, or Pc Matthew Pike, charged with causing death by dangerous driving (it was the suspect he was chasing who was driving dangerously, as a jury later found).
Then, if criminal “remedies” fail, the Independent Office for Police Conduct gets a second bite of the cherry by pursuing officers for professional misconduct. Compare such cases with that of the former West Midlands Police chief, Craig Guildford — found to have not only constructed a bogus intelligence case against Israeli football fans, but misled Parliament too. Operational officers go under the prosecutorial bus. Senior cops have “teachable moments”, after which they quietly retire.
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don’t get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force – just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of “civilisation”, with its overtones of Samuel Huntington’s poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush’s father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel’s 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
Gaza, eh? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Seamus Milne continued as a Guardian columnist for another fifteen years until he left to become Executive Director of Strategy and Communications for the Labour Party under its then-leader Jeremy Corbyn. In all that time I never once saw him recommend that Palestinians, or Muslims more generally, or anyone other than Westerners should ask themselves why they are hated.
Covering your face is clearly an affront to trust, openness and civility. Progressives know this, of course – although they only say so when it suits them. And their double standards aren’t only on show when it comes to the burqa.
The recent anti-immigration protests in Dover and Portsmouth were condemned as ‘thuggish’ by Labour’s crime and policing minister, Sarah Jones, who admonished the protesters for being ‘dressed in all black and wearing face masks’. But when hundreds of Islamic sectarians – dressed in all black and wearing face masks – marched through Whitechapel in east London last year, there were no such complaints from the left. Nor has there been much criticism of the thousands of protesters who have covered their faces with keffiyehs while calling for the destruction of Israel on pro-Palestine marches over the past few years. It seems it’s only when white working-class men start masking up that we hear all the talk about law and order, and the importance of seeing each other’s faces.
The HOMEFRONT Act is a GRANITE-style foreign censorship shield bill, the seventh such GRANITE-architecture bill or model policy to be advanced by American legislators in the last seven months, and the third such bill to be advanced in the last ten days. I anticipate there will be even more GRANITE-style bills, both state and federal, in the next several months.
What we witnessed in Portsmouth was a public explosion of the deepest fissure in British society right now. On one side stands a state that has abdicated its prime responsibility, which is to defend Britain’s territory and Britain’s people from external forces. And on the other stand everyday citizens enraged by this managed suicide of British statehood, by the sacrifice of our sovereignty at the altar of a phoney globalist virtue that says borders are bigotry and migration is splendid.
A Home Office whistleblower has said what many of us have suspected for some time: that the vast majority of “asylum seeker” claims are false. In fact, he says, only around one per cent are genuine. For the state to keep foisting strong, fit, aggy men onto communities that don’t want them, while barking “They’re asylum seekers, you racists”, is wicked and preposterous. If the state wants to put a stop to the kind of vigilantism we saw in Portsmouth, then it just needs to do one simple thing: its job.
Why has capitalism lost the argument with the young?
Because they have never been allowed in. Capitalism did not fail them. They were never offered it.
A system where a young couple on decent wages cannot buy a house, cannot save against inflation, and watches asset holders grow rich on planning scarcity is not capitalism. It is a rigged market defended in capitalism’s name.
So a generation has looked at what it was told was capitalism and drew the obvious conclusion. If this is the market, the market is not for me. And of course they are right.
You do not win them back with pamphlets. You win them back with the title deed to a flat. People who own things rarely vote to abolish ownership.
Imagine having a tax even more stupid than the one generally agreed to be the most stupid ever?
Mansion tax inspectors will target homes with views of the countryside and driveways, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Government valuation agents will be sent out with a checklist of features supposed to signal an increase in a property’s estimated value.
They include whether the house is set in scenic surroundings, if it has a conservatory, and even the number of parking spaces and bathrooms.
It comes after The Telegraph revealed that HMRC agents will be able to demand entry to people’s properties to assess their value for the levy.
Sigh. So, the most stupid tax ever is generally agreed to be the Windows Tax. This led to people bricking up their windows in order to avoid the tax and therefore live in the dark just to middle-finger the revenue. Well, OK, giving the revenue the middle-finger is an honourable thing to do but still, forcing people to live in the dark and dank via your choice of taxation methods is generally agreed to be very stupid indeed.
Caught pushing an apocalyptic scenario they knew couldn’t occur, climate scientists are now claiming their policies prevented it.
A clique of stealth activists, including the former head of the National Academies of Science, claimed a high-emissions future was possible long after it had been falsified.
Climate policies saved the world from catastrophic warming, say leading climate scientists. On September 1, a consortium that produces analyses for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released new scenarios. They say the new worst-case scenario is just 3.3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 over pre-industrial temperatures. That’s down from 4.6 to 4.9 degrees of the last three generations of climate scenarios used by the IPCC. “Our business-as-usual projection of 3C of warming – rather than 4 or 5C – is a testament to the progress in global decarbonization over the last few decades,” wrote climate scientists Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters, and Piers Forster back in May.
Others agreed. Chris Smith, a modeler at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis who helped build the new scenarios, told Carbon Brief that “back in 2010, RCP8.5 wasn’t an implausible future, we’ve now made it an implausible future.” Gavin Schmidt, the longtime director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, argued that scenarios shifted “in light of what we (as a society) are doing,” so that “we have already done things and so ‘business’ is no longer ‘usual.’” Robert Vautard, cochair of the IPCC working group on physical science, said the old high scenarios “assumed no climate policies,” while “there ARE now many climate policies in many countries, developed in particular with the Paris Agreement signed in 2016.”
But the high emissions scenarios were never plausible.
This brings us back to legal fetishism and the importance of grasping regime politics and how it informs judicial thinking. Judges do not simply make and apply rules ‘neutrally’. As I said earlier, judges are representatives of a regime and protect its interests. And at the heart of our regime is faith in, essentially, open borders – mass immigration is one of its central principles and tenets.
On none of these matters have Trump’s tactics worked. The US trade deficit is unchanged. Greenland has not been sold. Ukraine has not been forced to agree a peace deal with Russia. Iran’s nuclear capability remains. The current conflict with Iran, which began after Boys’s book was completed, is the clearest evidence yet that other states have seen through Trump’s bluster and faux belligerence. Despite numerous threats of armageddon, the Iranians have not backed down, and they called Trump’s bluff because he appeared unwilling to accept the economic consequences of escalation. China has taken a similar approach to managing trade wars, forcing concessions on the export of chips while finding ways to circumvent tariffs.
[…]
The so-called realists have been bolstered in recent decades by the failure of more ambitious American strategies. Russia, China and other autocracies have not been converted to liberal democracy via capitalism, as many hoped in the years following the Cold War. The post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are now acknowledged by almost everyone to have been disasters on a historic scale, undermining the US’s moral and military authority at enormous expense in terms of lives and cash. The US’s humanitarian interventions have a chequered record: they stopped Slobodan Milošević from massacring Kosovar Albanians, but failed in Somalia and Libya. The realists also argue that the conflict in Ukraine is a direct result of overreach in the 1990s and 2000s, as the US and western allies unnecessarily provoked Russia by interfering in its “sphere of interest” – though others would note that Vladimir Putin’s own imperial fantasies might have more to do with it.
When Sanchez came into power, he did so not via an election but by winning a no-confidence vote against former PP leader Rajoy in June 2018. In this moment, he promised to wash away the corruption of PP and lead Spain with dignity. After eight years of premiership, his ministers are in prison, and his only idea for economic growth has been the now completely discredited policy of importing waves of immigrants with cheap tourism to avoid reforming the country. He has hollowed out institution after institution, including his own party.
His legacy? Pedro Sanchez is the dead end of Europe´s open borders experiment. Let us pray that when he goes, he takes that corpse with him.
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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