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]
Will Self manages the same trick, in his own register. He recently published a piece he had the nerve to call JâAccuse, in which he put the invented term âgender criticalityâ in scare quotes, for fear that the rest of his prose might touch against it, and treated a position that would have been unremarkable a decade ago as self-evidently disreputable now.
Self doesnât do Jonâs soft, sorrowful faux-concern. He does something closer to sneering, the confident dismissal of a man whoâs decided which side sounds cleverer and doesnât need to check. But itâs the same cowardice wearing a better jacket. Neither of them will say whether a man belongs in a womanâs changing room. But both of them will happily write thousands of words about those of us who simply say no.
Rather than relying on apps to police harmful content, governments now want to intervene at the operating system level, so guardrails can get ahead of whichever app breaks on to the scene.Â
That is why Keir Starmer in June presented an ultimatum to tech companies: install child nudity-blocking software in devices by September or face legislation and fines.
And there is no excuse for dithering, the governmentâs announcement implied. It said this tech had already been achieved by the British company SafeToNet. Ministers held up SafeToNet as proof point for the proposition that child safety can be built into phones universally and block nudity in real time.
But what appeared to the government to be an âoven-readyâ fix is now running into difficulty, after the first smartphone to integrate SafeToNet technology was removed from sale following an investigation into the deviceâs safety risks. The HMD Fuse, sold by Vodafone, was launched last year as the âfirst smartphone that protects a childâs innocence by stopping nude content from being filmed, seen, shared and storedâ. In January of this year, former ministers Peter Kyle and Jess Phillips starred in a video promoting the phone. Six months later, sales have been suspended.
Why? The answer is alarming:
Then, in July 2026, Moore discovered what he described as a different, serious flaw: an unauthorised person could potentially register as the guardian of another childâs handset and access its live location. According to Moore, the problem was that the pairing relied on the IMEI number, the unique serial code that identifies each handset. He said this number was predictable: part of the number was fixed and the rest could be systematically enumerated and plugged in. He said that meant he could âbecome the guardian of every child on the platform, which meant I basically had a live map of every child on the system at the timeâ.Â
But here is the point, and it is the point Krugerâs ÂŁ200 million should open rather than close. It is not just the unions. The unions are the visible tithe. The larger sum flows outward, to the charities, the NGOs and the grant-fed campaign groups that the state funds to lobby the state, and on this the indispensable work has been done by Charlotte Gill (go subscribe), who has spent years doing alone, unpaid and frequently abused what an entire national press corps could not be bothered to do. Her Woke Waste files are a public service. By her count the government handed ÂŁ1.73 billion in grants to the charities she has analysed over five years, and ÂŁ222 million of it went to twenty organisations working on asylum and migration, with ÂŁ153 million to Migrant Help alone. These are not food banks. Many of them campaign, litigate and brief against the elected governmentâs stated policy, and then invoice it. The Home Office funds the bodies that sue the Home Office. The taxpayer pays for both sets of lawyers and is then told the resulting paralysis proves the system needs more money.
Put Gillâs ledger beside Krugerâs and the shape of the throne becomes visible. A permanent, salaried, pensioned class of activists, some inside the departments with union lanyards, some outside with charity numbers, all funded by the people whose votes they exist to frustrate. ÂŁ200 million is the entry in the accounts. The true cost is every policy smothered, every removal blocked, every reform âreviewedâ into dust.
The Tories knew all of it. Fourteen years, and the grants rolled out and the facility time rolled on, because the truth is they preferred a subsidised opposition to a fight. Kruger sat among them and watched, steam gently raising from his ears, which is precisely why his defection mattered and why his papers read like a man emptying his notebooks at last.
The issue here is that taxes upon employment income end up being paid by the workers, not the employer. Itâs wholly standard analysis that this is so, that the incidence of things like national insurance, social security, is on wages, not upon corporate profits.
Thus that entire ÂŁ3.5 billion is a rise in taxation upon the wages of the workers. Thatâs just the way it works out.
If our rulers knew this and decided to do it anyway then Iâd at least admire their sneakiness. But what worries me rather more is that peeps like Our Ange will be believing that the ÂŁ3 billion does in fact come from the employers. You know, that theyâre simply ignorant.
“In the current Russian leadershipâs rather 19th â though increasingly 21st â century view of how the world works, lesser powers must defer to great ones or pay the price. The UK, a country in a category all of its own when it comes to Kremlin resentments, has just been warned that itâs inline for such a punishment and Iâm not sure thatâs being taken seriously enough.”
Reformâs lack of history is what its enemies most enjoy pointing at, and theyâre half right. We have no Butskellite settlement to draw on, no Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlets from 1978 with our name on the cover, no forty-year archive of Fabian tracts to be mined and misremembered. We have a party that is, in policy terms, seven years old and in serious policy terms about two.
The page is blank, which is a double edged sword. A blank page has one great advantage. It owes nothing. There is no wing of the party that owns an economic orthodoxy and will sulk if it is departed from, no shadow of a previous government to be apologised for. Reform can walk down the corridor of every other partyâs lockers and take whatever fits. Right to Buy was Margaret Thatcherâs. The two-child cap was George Osborneâs. The suitability test is older than either. A Conservative research department canât do this. Every idea on its shelf has an owner objecting to its being moved. We have no shelf, so we have the run of everyone elseâs, and the only question any idea has to answer is whether it will work, and whether it cleaves to our spine.
The other edge of the blade is that it has all had to be done at once, and at pace, with no institutional memory to fall back on. There is no cupboard of half-finished papers to raid. Every document has to be started from nothing, argued through, costed, tested and released, while the same people fight a by-election in Clacton, run a few dozen councils and answer the phone to the Times.
I can answer this simply. William Shakespeare doesnât send me a monthly letter threatening to send the boys round if I donât give him money for something I donât want, donât need and donât use.
However, less flippantly, the BBCâs bias is blindingly obvious to anyone who takes even a passing look. The most egregious recent example being the Trump edit. But even before that, we have a flat refusal to engage with anyone who dares to disagree with the climate hysteria. Their COVID coverage was not only dire; it was blatantly untrue and hysterical. At no point did they do any journalism and question the inflated death figures coming out of Downing Street via Half-Whitty.
The N-word is very much the ultimate trigger-word right now. Despite this being a full article about this precise epithet, I am unable to easily use it. Just to be safe from malicious prosecution or algorithmic suppression, even free speech websites like the Daily Sceptic will generally use asterisks to obscure it as ân****râ, even though you all know perfectly well what full word the typography indicates. Itâs not ânumberâ or ânectarâ (âneuterâ might be quite appropriate, though).
– Steven Tucker, writing In Minnesota, words matter more than rape.
Words of Power lose their impact when overused or habitually misused, which is why “fascist” and “racist”, once useful categoric descriptions with specific meanings, now mean almost nothing beyond “someone I do not like and wish to place beyond the pale”.
However “nigger”, absolutely a word of power in a strangely inverted way, is just a crass insult. Yet it is so powerful we’re required to render it as “the N-word”, akin to saying “Adonai” rather than the true name of God. Yet bizarrely in this two-tier civilization of ours, it becomes acceptable when used by melanin enhanced rappers, in which case it becomes something more akin to “geezer” or “my crew” or various other non-taboo things, depending on context.
Polling that projected a Democratic Socialist candidate had a commanding lead over her main rival was fake.
Progressive Francesca Hong was seen as a front-runner in the primary to be the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin governor, but went on to lose.
Median Strategies, which billed itself as a trustworthy, non-partisan polling company, projected that Ms Hong had a more than 20-point lead over moderate David Crowley.
However, on Aug 11, she narrowly lost to Mr Crowley, handing establishment Democrats a win following a wave of victories by Left-wing candidates.
Median Strategies has now admitted the polling data were faked and part of a âshort-term social experimentâ, following a report by The Los Angeles Times.
Note that, although in that primary Median Strategies falsely raised the hopes of the extreme Left, in another contest the company put out fake polling that exaggerated the lead of the establishment Democrat over the extreme leftist:
The company had also released incorrect data showing Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, had a double-digit lead over Nithya Raman, a city council member and Democratic Socialist, before the mayoral run-off in November.
I don’t know quite what to think of this. The Telegraph commenters, few of whom appear have read as far as the part about Bass vs Raman, think that this proves their long-held suspicion that all polls are lies put out by left wingers to artificially boost support for left wing ideas. This suspicion is not true. Polls are frequently wrong, they are sometimes skewed by the political biases of the people who set the questions and interpret the answers, but they are not generally made up. Reputable polling companies like YouGov and Ipsos scarcely make any profit from their political polls; their real business is market research. They do the voting intention polls to demonstrate their honesty, and to show that opinion polls can tease out meaningful information from the background noise. And I hate to say it, but millions upon millions of people truly support left wing ideas because it would be so nice if you really could make people rich and safe and good by decree.
Getting back to Median Strategies, I see that the US media fell for the hoax. For once, I do not blame them. It was a genuinely interesting experiment but it destroys trust. Perhaps that is a good thing in a world full of increasingly sophisticated lies, but, somehow, this obscure story about some fake polls in a foreign country disturbed me more than one would expect.
In 2011, with the glass barely swept up after the London riots, the think tank Demos measured Britainâs pride in itself and found it obstinately intact. A net 74% of us were proud to be British. Last week Demos ran the ruler over us again. The figure is 47%. Pride in Britainâs role in the world stands at 13%. The BBC, which fifteen years ago enjoyed a net pride score of 48%, now sits at minus 11, meaning more Britons are ashamed of the Corporation than proud of it. That last number is, I suppose, at least evidence that the public can still see straight.
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.
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