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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“I hate this framing because the “freedom” vs “order” tradeoff is not real. Russia has a higher homicide rate than the US. life there is shorter and more violent. if you’re choosing between freedom and order autocracy will get you neither”
Seva Gunitsky is referring to Jon Stewart telling Tucker Carlson that the reason why the US ‘can’t have clean functioning subways or cheap grocery prices like they do in Moscow is “the literal price of freedom”‘.
I am sure Jon Stewart would decline with horror an offer to work as one of Putin’s worldwide army of propagandists. But Putin does not need to make the offer when Stewart and many others are spreading his message for free.
Many working people who currently have no choice but to endure the aggressive begging, foul smells, and frequent violence in the subway systems in New York and other U.S. cities run by progressive democrats would count freedom (a political abstraction that they are constantly being told is an outdated white patriarchal construct) as an acceptable price to exchange for getting to go to work in something more like the gleaming Moscow Metro.
Sure, they would eventually realise that they made a poor bargain. A Professor Gunitsky says, the cleanliness and order of the Moscow subway is like one room of a generally filthy house that is obsessively kept clean in order to impress visitors. → Continue reading: The condition of New York’s subway system is not the price of freedom, it is the price of voting for left wing Democrats
The Guardian reports that
A senior official in Pakistan has admitted to election rigging amid protests breaking out across the country over claims that its general election results were unfair.
The confessional statement throws further questions over the legitimacy of the 8 February elections, which were marred by controversies and allegations of rigging in Pakistan.
Commissioner Rawalpindi Liaqat Ali Chatta told reporters that authorities in Rawalpindi, Punjab province, changed the results of independent candidates – referring to candidates backed by the former prime minister Imran Khan’s party – who were leading with a margin of more than 70,000 votes.
Chatta said there was so much “pressure” on him that he contemplated suicide, but that he then decided to make a public confession. “I take responsibility for the wrong in Rawalpindi. I should be punished for my crimes and other people involved in this crime should be punished.”
He also accused the chief election commissioner and the chief justice of Pakistan for their roles in the rigging. Chatta was arrested by police after the statement.
For those unfamiliar with Imran Khan, the currently jailed former prime minister and leader of the party against which Mr Chatta says the vote-rigging was directed, in the 1970s, 80s and 90s he had fans worldwide as one of the best all-rounders in cricket history. During this period he was “known as a hedonistic bachelor and a playboy who was active on the London nightclub circuit” as Wikipedia puts it. Then he went home to Pakistan and binned his previous liberalism like a used condom. He encouraged the strict enforcement of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, and has pushed for insulting Muhammad to be made a crime all over the world. He is a hypocrite and a jerk. But those things do not change the fact that there is a strong prima facie case that his party should rightfully form Pakistan’s next government. His being in jail on an obviously trumped-up charge strengthens not weakens that argument.
The Guardian article was light on detail about how Commissioner Chatta (also spelled Chattha and Chatha, and I think the Guardian article is mistaken when it says his first name is Rawalpindi – it looks as if they have mixed up his name with his job title) says that the vote-rigging in which he participated was done. This article from Arab News gives more detail. It quotes him as saying,
“The wrongful act I have committed in this election [is that] we have made people, who had lost [the election], win 13 MNA (member of the National Assembly) seats from Rawalpindi. We have turned up to 70,000[-vote] lead of individuals into their defeat,” Chattha said.
“Even today, our people are putting fake stamps [on ballot papers]. I apologize to all my returning officers who were working under my supervision, who were crying when I was asking them to commit this wrongful act, and they were not willing to do it.”
I toyed with the idea of just posting about Pakistan, and leaving it up to the commenters to make the obvious parallels with the United States, but decided that would be a cop-out. → Continue reading: Senior election official admits vote-rigging
Are you ever tempted to give the mainstream media the benefit of the doubt? After all, in many areas of life cockup is more probable than conspiracy. I can sympathise with a journalist who is told to get 500 words out about an unfamiliar subject in twenty minutes and then gets it wrong or omits important details. One must also bear in mind that many Guardian journalists, for instance, still get their news from the Guardian. Similar naivety famously led the Independent and many other newspapers worldwide to claim on the day that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted that the three men he shot were black. As pointed out by Glenn Greenwald in that tweet, all these people had “reporting on current events” in their job description, but had evidently never even glanced at the TV footage of a trial watched by millions. However they were almost certainly deceived rather than deceiving. They would not have chosen to look so stupid.
See, I am capable of sympathy. Then along comes something to remind me that though many in the MSM are merely gullible and lazy, many others put a lot of conscious, careful effort into what they do.
Here is a Guardian report by Gloria Oladipo about a church shooting in the US: “Shooter at Joel Osteen church bought weapon legally despite history of mental illness”
→ Continue reading: Suppressing inconvenient facts requires skill and hard work
“Jailed Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny dead, says prison service”, reports the BBC.
August 2023 – Navalny’s sentence is increased to nine years after a conviction on new charges of embezzlement and contempt of court. An additional 19 years at a “special regime” facility are added on charges of extremism.
December 2023 – After going missing for two weeks, the opposition leader is located in a penal colony in the North Arctic.
February 2024 – Alexei Navalny dies in prison.
That is how Vladimir Putin treats his own people. It is a safe prediction that he will be as or more cruel to those Ukrainians who fall into his power. If he gets the chance, I would not put it past him to do as his exemplar Stalin did to the captured Poles at Katyn.
I have seen some strange commentary from both the left and the right regarding Tucker Carlson’s visit to Russia to interview Putin. For instance Mehdi Hasan and James Lindsay both seemed to think there was something wrong with Carlson observing that the Moscow subway is clean, orderly and free of aggressive drug addicts. The historian and journalist William Dalrymple reposted a tweet from Edward Luce of the Financial Times that blasted Carlton for interviewing Putin, but I remember Dalrymple gushing over the valuable insights gained by those who interviewed Osama Bin Laden:
Writers such as Robert Fisk and the former CNN journalist Peter Bergen, both of whom have interviewed Osama bin Laden, and scholars such as Gilles Kepel, Malise Ruthven and John L Esposito, have proved to be more reliable guides to what is going on in al-Qaeda than any number of Downing Streets dossiers or CIA briefing papers.
To that list should now be added the name of The Observer’s Middle East expert, Jason Burke. His new study, Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror is possibly the most reliable and perceptive guide yet published to the rise of militant Islam, the threat it poses and the best way to tackle it.
The more we know about how Putin thinks, the better the chances of defeating him and saving many lives, both Ukrainian and Russian.
This is, well, epic: Every Epic Quest.
As you know, the lore demands that every Samizdata post has a political point hidden in it somewhere.
Your quest is to find it.
Three days ago the Muslim media outlet 5Pillars expressed doubts about the Labour candidate for the forthcoming by-election in Rochdale: “The troubling backstory of Labour Rochdale candidate Azhar Ali”
What was it about Mr Ali that troubled them? The fact that he advised the government on counter-terrorism during the premiership of the hated Tony Blair. The fact that he has been involved with the government’s “PREVENT” strategy. Perhaps the fact that he is a Sufi Muslim did not go down too well with other sorts of Muslim. Above all, the writers at 5Pillars think Azhar Ali is… I was going to say “too pro-Israel”, then I corrected it to “pro-Israel”, then to “not as vehemently anti-Israel as they think he ought to be.”
They are not the only Muslims who think this. Four days ago Mr Ali was aggressively accosted in a local restaurant by people shouting “Free, free Palestine” and “Fuck Labour”.
However 5Pillars and the people in the restaurant may have softened towards Mr Ali since last night, when the Mail published this story:
“Outrage after Labour candidate claims Israel deliberately allowed 1,400 of its citizens to be massacred on October 7 in order to give it the ‘green light’ to invade Gaza”.
Israel deliberately allowed 1,400 of its citizens to be massacred on October 7 in order to give it the ‘green light’ to invade Gaza, a Labour by-election candidate has claimed.
Azhar Ali, who is defending a Labour majority of more than 9,000 in Rochdale on February 29, also claimed that Sir Keir Starmer had ‘lost the confidence’ of his MPs over his stance on the conflict.
The bombshell remarks – contained in a secret recording obtained by The Mail on Sunday – will intensify the row within the Labour Party over Sir Keir’s refusal to condemn Israel’s right to besiege Gaza in the wake of the attacks.
I must stress that I strongly support Mr Ali’s right to believe and propagate whatever theories he wants. However, a Labour candidate with these views (which were clearly only recanted under pressure) tarnishes Labour’s reputation, so in normal circumstances I would have expected Labour to deselect him and look for a more moderate candidate – probably another Muslim, given the demographics of the seat. Unfortunately for Labour, nominations have closed. And unfortunately for all of us, Mr Azhar Ali OBE – adviser to governments, director of the Sufi Muslim Council, champion of the “Preventing Extremism Together” programme – almost certainly is the most moderate Muslim candidate they can find in Rochdale.
UPDATE, 19:50 12/02/24. The Sun‘s political correspondent, Noa Hoffman, tweets that “Following new information about further comments made by Azhar Ali coming to light today, the Labour party has withdrawn its support for Azhar Ali as our candidate in the Rochdale by-election.”
That could mean George Galloway gets back into Parliament.
This catchy Chinese-language song “People of the Dragon” by Malaysian filmmaker and recording artist Namewee has had 7.5 million views since it was posted two weeks ago. For centuries the Chinese have used puns and wordplay to poke fun at the powerful, and it seems Namewee’s song is so full of coded uncomplimentary references to Xi Jinping and the CCP – in addition to completely uncoded ones – that there are whole videos devoted to explaining them all, many of which have received tens or hundreds of thousands of views in their own right.
I think I might just possibly have guessed that it was being a bit rude about Xi Jinping, and a bit rude full stop, from the number of references to long thin intermittently rigid things, one of which forms the title of this post.
The fun begins in the very first second. Up pops a green screen with official-looking writing on it, which I gather resembles the CCP censor’s certificate that is shown before every film. Look hard at the head of the dragon. Look, too, at the number 8964 which seems to be the number given to this particular film. 89-6-4, the fourth of June 1989. A day in Chinese history when, famously, nothing happened. Fourteen seconds later, the ugly splotch that appears at the top left of the first Chinese character in the video’s title seems to let down the fine calligraphy of the rest. One would have expected someone to catch something looking like that before it all went viral… oh, wait.
I first heard of this song from this post by Victor Mair at “Language Log”, who says that the AI replication of Xi Jinping’s voice at the beginning and the end of the video is uncannily good.
I felt old reading this article by Adam Morgan of Esquire magazine. For a while some thirty years ago, the terms “Worldcon” and “Hugo” were part of my daily life. What happened to them?
Inside the Censorship Scandal That Rocked Sci-Fi and Fantasy’s Biggest Awards
That evening in Chengdu, in a massive auditorium shaped like the belly of a whale, Dave McCarty—a middle-aged software engineer for an Illinois trucking company and lifelong sci-fi fan who was chosen by the convention’s leaders to oversee last year’s Hugo Awards—walked onstage to thundering applause. Within the WorldCon community, he’s nicknamed the “Hugo Pope” for serving on so many awards committees over the years.
“With the help of fans from all over the world, including many fans here in China participating for the very first time, we identified a ballot of 114 deserving finalists,” McCarty said behind a podium, wearing a black tux over a white waistcoat and bow tie. “We then asked the community to rank those choices as they saw fit.”
But that’s not what happened. Something had gone horribly wrong.
Three months later, the truth came out when McCarty shared the Hugo nominating statistics on Facebook: Someone had stolen nominations from The Sandman legend Neil Gaiman, Babel author R. F. Kuang, Iron Widow novelist Xiran Jay Zhao, and fan writer Paul Weimer. All four of them earned enough votes to be finalists—and therefore eventually winners—but for unknown reasons, someone had secretly marked their works as “ineligible” after the first rounds of voting.
Among sci-fi and fantasy fans, the uproar was immediate and intense. Had government officials in the host country censored the finalists? Did the awards committee make a colossal mistake when tallying the votes, then try to cover it up? Or did something even stranger occur?
“The feminist double standard was born. Women could invade men’s spaces, but men could not do the reverse. Girls could play for the boys’ high school soccer team if they were good enough, but boys could not play on the girls.’”
Wanjiru Njoya is correct, and the point is general. Defend the rights of others as you would defend your own rights. Because you are defending your own rights.
“BBC ‘misrepresented’ Covid risk to boost lockdown support, inquiry told”, the Telegraph reports.
Note that the person doing the telling is not some random conspiracist but Sir Mark Woolhouse, OBE FRSE FMedSci, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Woolhouse was an adviser to the Scottish government during the pandemic, although he says it did not often take the advice he offered. He also sat on the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, a sub-group of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, usually known by its acronym “SAGE”. The Telegraph report by Scottish political editor Simon Johnson says,
The BBC was allowed to “misrepresent” the risk posed by Covid to most people to boost public support for lockdown, the UK Covid Inquiry has heard.
Prof Mark Woolhouse, an eminent epidemiologist and government adviser, lambasted the corporation for having “repeatedly reported rare deaths or illnesses among healthy adults as if they were the norm”.
He said this created the “misleading impression” among BBC News viewers at the start of the pandemic that “we are all at risk” and “the virus does not discriminate”.
In reality, he said it was known at the time that the risk of dying from Covid was 10,000 times higher in the over-75s than the under-15s.
But Prof Woolhouse told the inquiry the BBC did not correct its reporting, saying: “I suspect this misinformation was allowed to stand throughout 2020 because it provided a justification for locking down the entire population.”
It looks like we all missed a major story:
After tense and protracted negotiations, delegates at the United Nations climate conference COP28 have agreed on a deal that calls on countries to transition away from fossil fuels. It is the first time that nations have agreed to such a transition, and marks a major step forward in climate ambitions.
–Wired magazine, referring to the 28th UN climate conference, held in Dubai in December 2023. These conferences are officially known as the “Conference of the Parties”, hence the abbreviation “COP”. COP28 was also the subject of this BBC story:
Once the gavel came down in Dubai, the warm words flowed – but will it really have an impact on climate change?
The agreement reached in this glitzy metropolis for the first time nails the role of fossil fuel emissions in driving up temperatures and outlines a future decline for coal, oil and gas.
In UN terms that is historic, and the biggest step forward on climate since the Paris agreement in 2015.
This comment came from someone calling themselves “D1703020689244”:
It’s the same recipe every time.
Argument, confected fury, conference schedule delayed for last minute negotiations, text issued at midnight, gavel comes down, handshakes and cheers.
Who are they fooling other than themselves.
They have a point. The gavel does not always come down literally at midnight, but a pattern can be observed. Who could forget that nailbiter of a finish in Glasgow for COP26 in 2021:
The deal was reached with nearly 200 countries at 7.40pm – more than 24 hours after the two-week summit was scheduled to finish.
It was rivalled in drama only by the the Paris climate change talks of 2015:
In the final meeting of the Paris talks on climate change on Saturday night, the debating chamber was full and the atmosphere tense. Ministers from 196 countries sat behind their country nameplates, aides flocking them, with observers packed into the overflowing hall.
(Spoiler: there was a deal. Not just “a” deal but the world’s greatest diplomatic success. Ever.)
That last-minute deal was rivalled in drama only by – wait, am I allowed two “rivalled onlies”? Probably not. OK, Paris was non-rivalrously rivalled in drama by the “last-minute deal” that saved COP15 in 2009:
The United Nations climate talks that seemed headed for sure disaster were saved from utter collapse late Friday night in Copenhagen, after leaders from the U.S., India, Brazil, South Africa and China came to an agreement to combat global warming.
COP13, Bali, 2007:
Late-night drama pushes US into climate deal
The conference had overrun by a day, despite several night-time sessions. As the wrangling continued, and with no palpable signs of progress, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who had already left Bali for East Timor, was forced to return to rescue the deal from disaster. In a tearful address to delegates, he pleaded: ‘The hour is late. It’s time to make a decision. You have in your hands the ability to deliver to the people of the world a successful outcome to this conference.’
COP11, Montreal 2005:
Weary negotiators finally agreed the revised statement as the talks dragged on into the small hours. They also agreed an action plan among Kyoto members to extend the protocol when its first phase expires in 2012.
COP7, Marrakech, 2001:
They negotiated the terms of a new climate change agreement through the night, and at dawn the exhausted delegates achieved success.
COP3, Kyoto, 1997:
The Kyoto Climate Change Conference has just ended in agreement. Industrialised nations have agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by a total of 5.2% under a differentiated target scheme. This has been one of the most complex international negotiations that has taken place and the governments of the world took it down to the wire.
Kyoto was another all-nighter, apparently. I tried to find some equivalent drama about COP2 (Geneva) and COP1 (Berlin), but that was before they were famous.
And now it’s after they were famous. The plots got too samey. Not even the magnificent opening speech to the COP26 delegates in Glasgow given by Boris Johnson (as documented by the late Niall Kilmartin) was enough to revive interest.
P.S. My apologies to any readers misled by the title of this post. If you want to know where you can be sure of experiencing a satisfying climax, try Azerbaijan.
Or maybe you, and I, will eventually wince, sigh, and add one more entry to the list that contains the Fleishman-Pons announcement of cold fusion in 1989 and the 2011 OPERA faster-than-light neutrino anomaly.
I followed a link in this tweet by Matt Ridley, and found this article by Sean Thomas in the Spectator:
“Have we just discovered aliens?”
It seems to be serious.
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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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