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]
Ten seconds after I wrote a comment to this Guardian story, “Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’”, it was gone. Oh well. My comment was no great loss to the world (I forget the exact words, but it was something about how the US media didn’t report it when Biden fell asleep in meetings either) and, of course, a newspaper has every right to delete whatever it wants from its comment section.
But the sheer speed of its deletion made it obvious that it was done by A.I. That happens a lot these days, and not just at the Guardian. Some people on Twitter write “unalive” when they mean “kill” to avoid having their post automatically censored. Cens*red. Cenrosed. There are so many other instances of workarounds to avoid the robot censor that I begin to think we may be evolving something like the avoidance speech that is a feature of languages that originate as far apart as Australia and China.
The current state of Artificial Intelligence is particularly likely to result in pervasive stupid censorship; censorship that does not even serve the objectives of the censors. Four or five years ago the programs caught single words. “Unalive” dates from this period. Sometimes the algorithm caught utterly harmless instances of a given word, for example when a mention of a blue tit – the bird – would be deleted for obscenity. But one could work round it. In five years’ time, or maybe sooner given the speed at which this technology is developing, the A.I. will no longer mistake a blue tit for a tit. We’ll still have the political censorship, of course, and the system will be cleverer than we are when it comes to spotting evasive wordplay. Pray for Elon Musk’s health.
For several years the Guardian automatically deleted any reference to Hunter Biden’s laptop. As I said in this post, for some reason they briefly lifted the prohibition in January 2025:
What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop in a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.”
MJuma2018’s comment is still up, but when I try mentioning the laptop every now and then out of a maternal concern for the imprisoned brains of Guardian readers, my comments do not get through.
However my experiments during those four, now five, years only showed comments relating to Hunter Biden getting the chop. My comment of today only referred to “Biden”. They do not delete all my comments. They do not delete all my comments that refer unfavourably to Joe Biden. It looks like the AI is just sophisticated enough to recognise a criticism of the Guardian’s own coverage.
Further work by the same scientists along with other people’s studies show that persuasive methods do exist. They don’t change everyone’s minds, but they can make enough difference to win elections and build a kinder, fairer, greener country. These techniques are known as “deep canvassing”.
Deep canvassing works only if you have a large army of volunteers, ideally from the community you’re trying to reach. Instead of delivering a message then scuttling away, as conventional canvassers do, their role is to connect and listen. Across conversations that might last for 10 or 20 minutes, they let people discuss their feelings. Then, without arguing or judging, they share their own experiences and ask questions (“have you ever been treated unfairly?”) that might reveal common ground.
Done honestly, non-judgmental listening is an excellent idea. “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak”, as the Stoic philosopher Epictetus once said.
Far though Mr Monbiot’s political beliefs are from mine, I acknowledge that on several occasions he has demonstrated both honesty and a willingness to listen, by publicly stating that he had changed his views in directions that made him unpopular with his fellow Greens. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident, he surprised many by saying that he had changed his mind in favour of nuclear power, and, so long ago that I cannot find the reference, he realised that the policy of autarky that the Greens then recommended for the UK was equivalent to the sanctions on Iraq that they were denouncing, and said so in public. Unfortunately, as it did for a lot of people, the Covid-19 pandemic de-magnetised his moral compass and in 2021 he came out in favour of censorship, writing an article called “Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them”.
Censorship and seeking to listen “without arguing or judging” are matter and anti-matter; they cannot coexist. To censor is to judge certain opinions as so pernicious that they must be suppressed. In the world that Mr Monbiot has said he wants, if one of the people “exhausted with politics” to whom he is listening were to express the anti-vax views that a lot of such people hold, his next action would be to report them to the police. In our world – in our Britain – there are plenty of opinions about migrants and transgender people that are widespread among the alienated masses that when expressed have resulted in state punishment, ranging from sending the police round to issue a “friendly warning” (for most of my life I thought that sort of thing only happened in dictatorships), through people being forbidden to access social media without the permission of their police minder and having their devices seized, up to arrest and jail. Even if Mr Monbiot were to bind himself during his radical listening sessions by something like the seal of the confessional, the mind that holds it to be desirable to legally suppress certain bad opinions cannot hear expressions of those opinions without categorising them as crimes that it is not convenient to punish right now.
Three quarters of a century ago in 1956, Chairman Mao Zedong – whose name was then usually romanised as Mao Tse-Tung – launched the “Hundred Flowers campaign”. Under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”, the communist authorities proclaimed that from now on they would no longer punish critics. All would be free to speak, the better to promote new ideas to improve China.
Tentatively at first, some did offer their criticisms. When nothing bad happened, the trickle became a flood. Then, having established who their critics were, the communists arrested them and sent them to labour camps.
The Crime and Policing Bill, currently completing its passage through Parliament, represents the most comprehensive assault on the traditional liberties of the freeborn Englishman since the Stuart kings. It is more dangerous than those royal provocations, because it comes dressed in the language of safety, of community, of respect, and because it is only part of a wider pattern that, when you step back and see it whole, should stop the blood.
Let me begin with a man most people have never heard of. Giles Udy is one of Britain’s finest historians of Soviet Communism. His book Labour and the Gulag is a work of meticulous, uncomfortable scholarship, tracing the seduction of the British left by the Bolshevik experiment. He has spent twenty years studying what it actually looks like when a state decides that its ideological certainty entitles it to total control over those who do not share its worldview.
Udy has recently made a statement that I suspect cost him some effort to compose. He is not a man given to hyperbole. But writing about Soviet repression, he finds it, as he puts it, “really hard to bring a similar accusation against the Labour government and Keir Starmer.” Hard, but he reaches it nonetheless. “What Labour and the old Soviet regime do have in common,“ he concludes, “is the arrogant belief that they alone hold the moral high ground and that this entitles them to total control over all those who do not share their worldview.“
He is careful to note we have no Gulag, no death penalty. So am I. But his observation about the tools of control is what should make us stop. Legislation, and courts co-opted to apply it. The policing of dissent, hate crime orders, arrests, the long-term seizure of electronic appliances to intimidate those against whom no charges are ever brought. Twelve thousand arrests annually for social media posts. The framing of dissent as fascism, a habit, Udy notes, with deep roots in the Labour movement’s Stalinist period, when ‘fascist‘ became the approved term for anyone who inconveniently noticed what was happening in Moscow. Orwell’s thought crime, he argues, has become a reality. It is 2026, and he cannot believe what he is seeing. Nor can I.
What is still so lacking in these arguments [about Brexit] is even a smattering of emotional intelligence. No one fully understood the implications of Brexit but when so much of the establishment, the great and the good, the entire culture industry, told everyone to vote Remain then it was obvious that many would stick two fingers up.
This was described as a monumental act of self-harm, but I always understood the Leave impulse as coming from an England that would not do as it was told.
That England never went away. That England is still continually being ticked off for expressing its identity incorrectly. Yet, as we have just seen in the local elections, both the Scots and the Welsh have voted for their own nationalist politicians. The Leave vote was an expression of cultural identity.
“The richest person in the world in the 1830s was Nathan Rothschild, whose personal net worth was around 0.6 per cent of national income. Despite this vast fortune, Rothschild died at age 58 in 1836 of an infection that $10 of antibiotics could likely cure today. Similarly, the richest people in the world today, such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, presumably have a marginal utility from additional consumption spending that is zero. Nevertheless, their utility still increases when new goods (smartphones or LLMs) are invented. These examples suggest that more consumption of a fixed set of goods eventually hits a marginal utility of zero while the invention of new goods or higher quality goods continues to increase wellbeing.”
As seen on a Students For Liberty comment on a Facebook page I follow. The quote was cited by this chap: Karthik Tadepalli, of the Becker Friedman Institute For Economics, University of Chicago. I don’t have the original link. There are some super-smart young classical liberals out there, and many seem to be coming from places such as Eastern Europe, India, etc.
The point about marginal utility reminds me of a comment from Perry Metzger on this blog on 2014, debunking the Thomas Piketty book that purported to claim that wealth rises faster than the overall economy and that the “rich” will eventually swallow up the world unless restrained by wealth taxes and so on. Perry M got in a reference to Douglas Adams, which is always the mark of a good article, IMHO.
Police are appealing for information about a racially-motivated attack on a taxi driver in Belfast.
Two men and a woman approached the taxi driver on Talbot Street at about 23:10 BST on Saturday and, after being refused a lift, they became aggressive and used racial slurs.
The taxi driver, who is in his 30s, was spat at and struck by one of the men and he hit the ground and lost consciousness. As he got back up, he was hit by a second man.
The three people then made off on foot in the direction of the city centre.
‘Unprovoked attack’
Inspt Moutray from the Police Service of Northern Ireland ( PSNI) described it as an “unprovoked attack, which is being treated as a racially-motivated hate crime”.
“There is no place for hate, racism or violence in our communities, and everyone has the right to feel safe and treated with dignity and respect,” the officer said.
“The area was fairly busy at the time, as would be expected for a Saturday evening, and we’d ask anyone who witnessed this assault to get in touch.
“The woman is described as wearing a black dress, while both men are described as being of muscular build and were wearing a white shirt and red T-shirt.”
I do not know if the decision to hide the race of the victim and the suspects was taken by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the BBC, or both. Whoever it was, they cannot care very much about actually catching the perpetrators. Do they seriously think that someone reading the above who was in the area at the relevant time would have their memory jogged by mention of the colour of the woman’s dress or the men’s shirts? For any crime at all, giving a description of a suspect that leaves out their skin colour is unlikely to be productive in prompting witnesses to come forward. When the crime is a a racial attack such playacting becomes even more outrageous.
I’ve finally figured out why I find Wes Streeting so grating. It’s because he bigs up his working-class origins even as he shits all over working-class Britain. ‘I’m from Stepney’, he chirps, like a camp Dick van Dyke, before looking down his Cambridge-educated nose at his fellow oiks who voted for Brexit. He wears his humble roots like fancy dress to disguise his lofty indifference to the populist beliefs of those who don’t only come from working-class Britain but still live there. ‘I’m one of you’, he says, when every Brit with a brain knows he’s one of Them.
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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