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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This one’s fairly simple. Some communities are more cohesive than others. You’d be surprised how much a prosperous suburb with engaged residents has in common with an inner-city estate with a dominant (often minority ethnic) community. Sure, there are points of tension, but local officers at least know who to speak to. In places where there’s actually a community to begin with, a neighbourhood policing team can make a difference.
On the other hand, some ‘communities’ are chaotic, transient and divided. They’re riven by gangs and organised criminals. As tactics like stop and search and use of force become hotly contested, these communities become abandoned by police officers worried about losing their jobs. The community leaders who do exist are often hostile. A neighbourhood policing team’s at an immediate disadvantage – their role becomes more like counterinsurgency than policing. George Dixon wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. Well, he would, until the IOPC had him up for assault.
These are places which, unfortunately, politicians like to ignore. They pretend they’re policed by consent. It’s easier to blame the police for societal problems law enforcement can never, and will never, solve.
– Dominic Alder
If you are interested in policing in the UK and all things Plod, I recommend Dominic Alder.
Seventy-five men fly into Britain each spring with a handpiece in a canvas bag, and between them they take the wool off something between one and a half and two million sheep. They arrive after the first of April. They are gone by September, most of them long before. They claim nothing, bring nobody, occupy no housing list, no school place, no waiting room. They work at a speed almost no one in this country can currently match, and then they go home to shear in their own summer.
In January the Home Office announced that they were no longer welcome.
– Gawain Towler
“We now know U.S. scientists collaborated with their Chinese counterparts on controversial gain-of-function experiments and that grants from NIAID flowed to the Wuhan lab through various channels. It’s highly likely that U.S. researchers provided the skills and our government offered some funding that allowed Chinese researchers to continue independently tinkering with deadly viruses until one accidentally escaped the lab. From the start, the NIAID head used his enormous bureaucratic clout to make sure no one explored that relationship. While Dr. Fauci repeatedly told the media that the Covid lab-leak scenario was “just conspiracy theories,” he was conspiring to quash questions about his agency’s possible role.”
– James B. Meigs, in the Wall St Journal ($)
Here are a couple more paragraphs for those of you unable or unwilling to get past the paywall. I think it is notable that a bastion of free market, centre-right opinion, the Wall Street effing Journal no less, is letting rip in this vein:
How did Dr. Fauci enforce public unanimity, despite these scientists’ private doubts? Power and money, for one thing. As the head of the NIAID, he operated with minimal political oversight and supervised a $6 billion research budget. Politics also played a role. Once President Trump mentioned the possibility of a lab leak in April 2020, few scientists or media figures wanted to be seen as carrying water for the White House. For science reporters, the question of Covid’s origin should have been the story of a lifetime. But almost no one touched the topic for the first year of the pandemic. When a few later did, a New York Times reporter said, “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.”
This is not the way a healthy democracy responds to a disaster. After the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986, President Reagan appointed a blue-ribbon commission to investigate. NASA opened its books and answered every question. When a mysterious virus began killing thousands of Americans a week, Dr. Fauci and other public-health leaders did the opposite. They gaslit reporters, stonewalled congressional inquiries and evaded Freedom of Information Act requests. In two recently released emails, another Dr. Fauci ally urged the Wuhan lab’s Dr. Shi not to share information with a respected American virus researcher. Talk about a coverup.
A reason why this matters as much as it does in my view is that it shows the extent of the intellectual and moral corruption of parts of the scientific/public health/media/public policy community, and that corruption is a major reason for loss of trust, a loss that alas extends to those who don’t deserve it. And it also shows how people are more willing to give cover to the likes of a brutal regime – China – than they are to be open about the causes of this pandemic. It raises questions about the merits or otherwise of “gain of function” research and why countries should engage in it, given that on a risk-reward tradeoff, chances of catastrophe, even if small, are enough to get people to press the “no” button. For that matter, I wonder what happens when such research intersects with AI, but that’s a topic for another time.
This is not good enough, says Ofcom. It wants, it seems, pre-emptive powers to block access to sites operating anywhere in the world, should they be deemed harmful to people in the UK.
This is authoritarian nonsense on any number of levels. For one thing, it moves noticeably towards a Great British Firewall, like that used in China. We should also worry that an unelected agency is spending its time digging around the internet looking for material it would like to stop us seeing. Admittedly, we are told that the issue here is material that’s harmful to children and sites such as suicide forums. But it is a racing certainty that any such powers, if given, will be invoked to go well beyond suicide forums.
Equally, it’s not clear whether Ofcom wants these powers to extend to blocking sites to users across the globe. A recent Ofcom update on a suicide site clearly suggests it sees a UK geoblock as insufficient. This really would bring us into cloud-cuckoo-land. No national regulator, whether it comes from the UK, China or Burkina Faso, has any business censoring the global internet.
– Andrew Tettenborn
Power, which used to be the responsibility of Cabinet, has now been diffused away to quangos, devolved governments, NGOs, and judges. Like La Serenissima before us, it seems impossible for the government of the day to do anything meaningful about the structural problems facing us. As the world changes around us still, Britain is currently powerless to act domestically or internationally. This was the tragedy of Venice. She had not forgotten how to be grand nor rich nor even how to administer — only how to act. Venice did not collapse overnight. She became a museum slowly, then all at once.
Britain need not follow the Serene Republic. But to do so, we must give up the pretence that politics as usual will get us out of this. Winning an election is not the same thing as possessing power. We must have politicians who are willing to understand how the existing system functions so they can begin to cut the Gordian knots of the restraints that bind us to managed decline. As this will necessarily involve wresting power back from the endless sea of quangos, NGOs, and other veto players which have enjoyed a comfortable existence under this new settlement, a plan for institutional resistance must be prepared. All the things that have been quietly removed from the political arena must be put back into play. Our own version of The Myth no longer serves us — and so it must be discarded. We are not favoured by the divine, nor do any of the quasi-religious mantras of the legalistic class provide us any fortune.
– Pimlico Journal
“Most people still think SpaceX is ‘just’ a rocket company. But it’s actually a machine for producing world-class talent. A talented engineer takes a job at SpaceX, learns the Elon Musk ‘way’ of solving impossible problems, then graduates as a force of nature ready to transform other industries.”
– Stephen McBridge, at The Rational Optimist Substack.
Xerox PARC invented the graphical interface, the mouse, and networked computing, and gave the ideas away almost by accident to visitors from Apple and Microsoft who knew what to do with them. Blockbuster was offered the chance to buy Netflix for fifty million dollars and turned it down. None of this was written into the nature of the ideas themselves. It was written into who happened to be in the room.
– Madsen Pirie
You’d need a heart of stone not to Laffer
– Sunday Sport in response to A Serious Newspaper…
Scottish tax hike for high earners backfires with loss of £22m
In the Telegraph today:
The messages that show Covid scientists secretly suspected a lab leak
Scientists who were instrumental in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory admitted in private “we can’t rule it out”, newly released messages show.
In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.
The article, known as “The Proximal Origins of Covid” [Link to the paper here. In fact its title refers to “Origin” in the singular- NS] concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.
But messages obtained and published by US senator Rand Paul show that behind the scenes the scientists voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out experiments on coronaviruses at insufficient biosecurity levels.
The virus emerged eight miles from WIV laboratories and was seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans
and
The messages also reveal that authors were aware that Dr Shi – the lead bat virus scientist at WIV – was herself worried that Covid had been caused by a lab accident.
In September 2021, it emerged that before the pandemic Dr Shi had applied for a grant to insert a furin cleavage site (FCS) into bat coronaviruses – the very addition that made Covid-19 so infectious to humans.
Although the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency dismissed the grant because it was too dangerous, Slack messages showed that scientists feared the work had gone ahead anyway.
Prof Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University wrote that “it isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff”, adding, “We just need to re-convince ourself it is coincidence.”
You may be saying, “I’ve read Viral. This is not news to me”. The news is that it is being reported in a major “quality” British newspaper.
Here is what the Telegraph was saying about the “Proximal Origin” paper on 1st May 2020:
The study that proves conspiracy theorists wrong – coronavirus came from nature
Covid-19 is not a “laboratory construct” but emerged as a result of natural evolution, according to a report which demolishes conspiracy theories about the origins of the disease.
The virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of December and has since spread rapidly across the globe, with more than three million people worldwide now infected.
But fear and misinformation have escalated alongside the pandemic, with the World Health Organization warning that the globe is fighting an “infodemic” as well as an epidemic.
One common myth has been that the new virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was originally made in a laboratory. But in a study, published in Nature Medicine journal, researchers analysed the genome sequence of the coronavirus and found strong evidence it evolved naturally, probably from a bat or a pangolin.
Sarah Newey has more details on the evidence that debunks President Trump’s latest theory.
Nice touch in linking the thing you don’t want people to take seriously to Trump, though that trick no longer works as well as it once did.
There is no shame in having been wrong, so long as you then work sincerely to put things right. In today’s article the Telegraph goes some way to atone for its past errors. Let’s see how the rest of the British media covers this story. Let’s see if the rest of the British media covers this story.
A chap called John Russo, whose comments I follow on LinkedIn, takes aim at the recent pattern of well-off people joining “Patriotic Millionaire” calls for folk like them to be taxed a lot more. An obvious retort is that all they need to do is set up a direct debit with the relevant revenue body, and job done. Oddly, I rarely see such “Patriotic” rich folk saying “yes, of course, I will get that done immediately”. And I suspect a reason is that they want to sound good, and also like the idea of people being coerced. The coerced transfer in the name of “fairness” is the point. Voluntarily giving some of your money to the State is a bit, well, too voluntary.
Anyway, some paragraphs from Mr Russo:
I realised there’s a special kind of hypocrisy in preaching equality from the elevated comfort of elite media, elite networks, and elite platforms.
The idea of a wealth tax has been around for decades, but suddenly it’s being sold as the grand answer to Britain’s economic and social problems.
That’s the pitch. Simple. Catchy. Morally flattering. And, if you don’t look too closely, it’s vaguely heroic.
But the truth is less glamorous. A wealth tax isn’t a bold reform. It’s often a slogan in search of a serious policy, and a performance of fairness that doesn’t come close to fixing the machinery underneath.
Yes, Britain has inequality. Yes, too many people feel shut out while a narrow group sits on significant assets. But that does not make every proposal for taxing wealth a useful one. Britain isn’t America. We don’t have California-scale concentrations of extreme wealth, and we don’t have an economic structure that can pretend a wealth tax is some great fiscal breakthrough.
The sums being talked about sound large until you place them next to the scale of the state. Then they look less like transformation and more like loose change with a manifesto attached.
The hypocrisy is that some of the loudest advocates of wealth taxes talk as though they are speaking for the squeezed and the overlooked. In reality, they are often highly visible, highly connected, and very comfortable participants in the same media and political ecosystem they claim to be challenging. They denounce concentrated power while depending on the attention economy, elite networks and moral theatre to amplify their own status. It’s a neat trick. Condemn privilege from within a system that rewards you for sounding rebellious.
So let us name the principle actually in operation, because it is not sub judice. Sub judice is a rule, and rules apply evenly or they are not rules. The principle in operation is that speculation is dangerous when it is inconvenient and wholesome when it is useful. Ann’s case, where the early inferences pointed somewhere the official mind preferred not to look, attracted the full apparatus of hush. Suffolk, where the inference flattered the approved threat picture, was narrated by a Secretary of State before the evidence was in, and un-narrated by nobody when the evidence declined to appear. The Tates, indefensible in the court of public opinion, may be tried there nightly without a murmur. That is not the law of contempt. That is malinformation doctrine wearing the law of contempt as a disguise, truth and silence alike deployed by reference to harm as the managers define it.
– Gawain Towler, discussing a now debunked terrorism claim, the Tate brothers arrest, and Ann Widdicombe’s murder… and the very selective approach taken by the state in the pursuit of justice.
These cases might initially read as isolated absurdities: a pensioner’s raided home, a fine for a nickname, a meme investigated as though it were genuine Nazi propaganda. Taken together, they describe a pattern in which laws designed to protect democracy from its enemies are being turned against ordinary citizens engaged in perfectly legitimate political speech.
Germany’s experience should be a lesson for other countries and their respective governments. It is a reminder that speech laws drafted with the best of intentions — to prevent a return to fascism, to protect politicians from genuine harassment — can, without firm safeguards, be distorted and become instruments of routine political policing. As Dr Zitelmann’s case shows, even a historian who has devoted his career to studying the dangers of totalitarianism is not immune from being investigated under laws that increasingly resemble the very thing they were built to prevent.
– Max Thompson
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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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