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]

Samizdata quote of the day – Green Party are mad

The Green Party are calling the scarcity of resources into play as an argument against the efficient use of resources.

They’re mad. QED.

Tim Worstall

Samizdata quote of the day – Macron has declared war on free speech

Macron insists he’s defending democracy from manipulation and hate. But that’s the excuse. His vision is of a Europe where free speech is tolerated only when it is traceable, and where platforms pre-emptively silence anything that might draw a regulator’s glare. He calls it a ‘resurgence of democracy’. It’s nothing of the kind. It’s the bureaucratisation of thought, and the beginning of a continent where debate survives only on licence. If Macron has his way, Europe’s public square will not just be regulated, it will be licensed.

James Tidmarsh

Of course UK is no better.

Shocking revelation…

BREAKING: Greta Thunberg reveals horrible torture at the hands of Israeli captors.

“They harvested every single one of my organs” she now says. “Then they forced me to work in a plutonium mine and we weren’t give any kind of protective equipment.”

Samizdata quote of the day – When fascism comes to America…

When Fascism Comes To America, It Will Look Like Justin Trudeau’s Canada.

Trudeau’s dangerous not just because he’s abusing Canadians, but because he is providing the wish list for crackdowns by Democrats in the U.S.: “every single bank, credit union, investment broker and insurance provider in the country has been deputized to figure out if they have a blockader as a client, and to immediately freeze their accounts if so.”

William Jacobson

Samizdata quote of the day – Progressing back to the Middle Ages

I was baffled by my first exposure to antisemitism in Eastern Europe in 1992. I explained my confusion by saying it was ancient history in Britain. Our last pogrom was in the Middle Ages.

Since returning to England in 2011, I’ve had a nagging fear that this was not likely to remain true. The growth of Islam, antisemitic by its very nature, has been supported politically by the British Left. Socialists and Muslims have together revived an ancient evil.

Perhaps the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester is not a pogrom as it’s just one killer and not a mob? Either way, it’s a fall from grace. I am ashamed for my nation and furious that our “leaders” are still wittering on about “Islamophobia.” A phobia is an irrational fear. There is nothing more rational than fearing Islam — a religion conceived as if to justify the sins of its founder – one of the worst men who ever lived.

Tom Paine

Landeur

I have a feeling this Landeur chap on YouTube is rather capturing the UK zeitgeist right now. Here he is pointing out the dangers of ever increasing taxes.

Samizdata quote of the day – X is a latter-day Radio Free Europe

In the UK right now, @X is performing the same function that Radio Free Europe did in the Eastern Bloc. Without this site, or if it still remained Twitter under the control of the American left, our government would be much more able to hide things they don’t want to discuss.

– Peter Hague

Net Zero: this isn’t science, it’s ideology

From Kathryn Porter and the good lads at TRIGGERnometry. Highly recommended…

Samizdata quote of the day – We must hold Starmerism to account

It’s worth at this point reminding ourselves what Starmerism is. Those getting wrapped up in the rigmarole of bond markets and gilt yields, Rachel Reeves crying, and fiscal headroom miss the point. Keir Starmer has no real interest in the economy as a domain of production and trade, consumption of goods and services. The closest he comes to an interest in markets is likely that “the economy should provide for everyone”. Instead, as the devout Starmerologist J. Sorel puts it: “everything about Keir Starmer’s life so far has taught him that his project — the defence of British society as it existed from 1997-2016 — can be achieved by simply illegalising all opposition. He openly avows this idea, and has never strayed from it.” Everything that Keir Starmer has remained devoted to has been the rejection of grubby, noisy, and messy politics, and the pursuit of constitutional reforms that would make it difficult for his foes to come back from.

Craig Drake

Is Charlie Kirk’s murder a tipping point?

Samizdata quote of the day – Charlie Kirk

I find it personally deeply upsetting. Kirk was a very religious-y person and I’m an implacable atheist, so there there lots of things I disagreed with him on. But what he encapsulated to me is “free speech”. He debated with everyone, openly, without hostility, honestly, directly. He was without guile, laid it out on the table, kind to a fault, and, most dangerously of all to the left, extremely convincing. To me that makes him one of the greatest men of the 21st century. Free speech is, to me, probably the greatest virtue and basic foundation of all of society, and yesterday the men who couldn’t win the argument took out its greatest, happiest warrior.

Fraser Orr

Samizdata quote of the day – African countries demanding reparations are astonishingly hypocritical

David Eltis, described by Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University as “the world’s leading scholar of the slave trade”, reckons that nineteenth-century expenditure on slavery-suppression outstripped the eighteenth-century benefits. And the political scientists, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, have concluded that Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic slave trade alone in 1807–67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”.

The African Union’s demand for colonial reparations is an act of cynical opportunism. But unless our elites learn to care less about signalling their virtue and more about doing justice to their own country’s historical record, it will cost us all.

Nigel Biggar (£)