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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The sad reality here is that virgin steel production in the rich countries is a dying technology. We just don’t need it any more. Pretty much every steel we do want can be made from scrap in an electric arc furnace. And those few – very few – steels that cannot be won’t cover the costs of running our own blast furnace. It’s over, like hydraulic power companies and thorium lamp mantles. This is, of course, what happens with every company, every technology, eventually. It stops being worth doing so people stop doing it.
The only thing of value here is what lefties and socialists put on manly men doing manly things, buffly. And while that’s a perfectly acceptable, even sensible, kink there’s no reason why the rest of us have to pay for that. But there we are, nothing so conservative as a socialist or lefty. Nothing can ever be allowed to die off, all must be preserved.
And, you know, wouldn’t it be nice if they’d thought through what their plan was going to be before they spent the half billion? With that more – ooooh, much more – to come?
– Tim Worstall
The economist who says a policy will probably raise employment, other things being equal, is telling the truth as far as it goes. The one who says employment will rise by exactly 2.3% has mistaken a guess for a measurement, and dressed the guess up in a suit it did not earn.
Markets do not work because they are mathematically optimal but because they let millions of separate judgments, made by people with knowledge no central model could ever gather, correct each other in real time. That is not a formula. It is closer to a conversation, conducted in prices instead of words, and no economist has yet written an equation that listens as well as a market does.
– Madsen Pirie
Months before Starmer’s departure, Dominic Cummings appeared on Michael Gove and Madeline Grant’s Quite Right podcast and issued Nigel Farage with an extraordinary warning. Cummings predicted that senior figures around Whitehall would conclude that they had made a historic mistake by allowing Brexit to happen and would not repeat it with Reform. In the imagined voice of this establishment, he said: “Let’s smash the absolute living shit out of Farage and make sure that he doesn’t win it by fair means and foul.”
Cummings went further. He predicted leaks of medical records and tax records, phone bugging and the disclosure of private information.
– John Hardy (£)
The charge that followed was not that I phrased it badly. It was that my position was racist.
I have two children. Both were born in England to British parents who each came here from somewhere else. They are not English either. They’re British. I said this in the very same podcast Sunak pulls quotes from in his article.
My kids also happen to be whiter than a Michael Buble Christmas album. So either I’m a racist against my own white children, or this isn’t an argument about race.
Suella Braverman, Sunak’s own former Home Secretary, responded to the row about my comments by penning an article in which she argued that as a proud British Asian she herself is not English. Is she racist against herself or is there perhaps more of a substantive discussion being had than people would like to pretend?
– Konstantin Kisin, responding to Rishi Sunak
Yet when it comes to AI, I have found the evolution of this carefully staged exercise in scaremongering different in some respects. For a start, this is clearly a top-down campaign, orchestrated by industry insiders. Indeed, as far back as 12 years ago, those in the know began to raise the alarm about AI. In 2014, Elon Musk told his followers on Twitter that AI is potentially ‘more dangerous than nukes’. Bill Gates informed millions of his followers on Reddit that ‘I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned’. Needless to say, these fears did not stop either of them from pursuing the development of AI.
– Frank Furedi
Why do the unions fund Labour? Because it works for them. The Employment Rights Act is very close to a straight transfer of TUC conference policy into the statute book, and nobody involved is embarrassed about it, nor should they be, since that is what affiliation has meant since 1900.
Sharon Graham has been admirably plain about this. Standing for the general secretaryship she told Keir Starmer there would be no more blank cheques. She has put Unite’s funding under review when Labour councils have crossed her. She treats the money as leverage because it is leverage, openly, on the record, in the Sunday papers. Then she stands up and objects to donations from men who want nothing.
Because that’s the difference, and it’s the bit her argument cannot survive. Harborne and Delo aren’t buying policy. There’s nothing to buy. We were low tax, pro-enterprise, anti-quango and hostile to the regulatory state before either of them wrote us a cheque, and we’d be all of those things tomorrow if both of them stopped. You cannot purchase a conviction from someone who already has one. All you can do is pay for the envelopes.
What they’re buying, as far as I can see, is a fair fight. The most conventional British appetite there is, the one that makes a crowd turn on a man who kicks somebody off the ball, and the one thing the modern establishment has decided it cannot afford to concede.
Nobody woke up. That’s the insult, and it isn’t aimed at two crypto billionaires who can look after themselves. It’s aimed at you, and it always was.
– Gawain Towler
Do we have any historical data on what happens when a German Chancellor abolishes the concept of free speech? I’m assuming it goes really well.
– Wings over Scotland
The recent news about a Ukrainian counteroffensive liberating several hundred square kilometres of territory around Lyman in eastern Ukraine has come as a pleasant surprise in the midst of the ongoing Russian missile barrages against Ukrainian cities, and the appalling spectacle of American negotiators discussing good memories with the Russian president in Moscow. The Ukrainian gains have been documented by a variety of sources, including drone videos, soldier accounts and media organisations that have held off reporting the operation. The Institute for the Study of War has stated in its latest update that “ISW’s mapping methodology is likely underestimating the extent of Ukrainian gains in the ongoing counterattacks in the Lyman direction.”
[…]
Thus, over the space of two months, Ukraine has executed two quiet yet successful counteroffensive operations in different parts of the country. Not only does this challenge the popular (and lazy) narrative of a stalemate along the frontline, but it also means that the Ukrainians have been investing in the hard intellectual work of finding new methods of conducting successful offensive action at the tactical and operational levels.
– Mick Ryan
Regarding the “appalling spectacle of American negotiators” remark… having businessmen do diplomacy is a bit like having a heart surgeon fix your roof. Even if he is a great surgeon, he is going to fuck up your roof.
Oddly enough, Labour governments understand incentives perfectly well when trying to make us stop smoking, or encouraging us to buy electric cars and install heat pumps. But suggest that incentives might also influence migration, however, and the concept suddenly becomes bafflingly controversial.
– Neil Davenport
Police professional standards departments, detecting the mood music, react accordingly. The Police Federation has pointed out how, from 2022-2025, 100 police officers and staff died of suicide — partly attributable to heavy-handed internal investigations. Then there’s the roll-call of officers thrown under the bus for political expediency — like Pc Lorne Castle, who had the temerity to call a knife-wielding male suspect “a bitch”, Sergeant Rhodri Davies, accused of using disproportionate force against a 6’7” prisoner in custody, or Pc Matthew Pike, charged with causing death by dangerous driving (it was the suspect he was chasing who was driving dangerously, as a jury later found).
Then, if criminal “remedies” fail, the Independent Office for Police Conduct gets a second bite of the cherry by pursuing officers for professional misconduct. Compare such cases with that of the former West Midlands Police chief, Craig Guildford — found to have not only constructed a bogus intelligence case against Israeli football fans, but misled Parliament too. Operational officers go under the prosecutorial bus. Senior cops have “teachable moments”, after which they quietly retire.
– Dominic Adler
Covering your face is clearly an affront to trust, openness and civility. Progressives know this, of course – although they only say so when it suits them. And their double standards aren’t only on show when it comes to the burqa.
The recent anti-immigration protests in Dover and Portsmouth were condemned as ‘thuggish’ by Labour’s crime and policing minister, Sarah Jones, who admonished the protesters for being ‘dressed in all black and wearing face masks’. But when hundreds of Islamic sectarians – dressed in all black and wearing face masks – marched through Whitechapel in east London last year, there were no such complaints from the left. Nor has there been much criticism of the thousands of protesters who have covered their faces with keffiyehs while calling for the destruction of Israel on pro-Palestine marches over the past few years. It seems it’s only when white working-class men start masking up that we hear all the talk about law and order, and the importance of seeing each other’s faces.
– Hugo Timms
The HOMEFRONT Act is a GRANITE-style foreign censorship shield bill, the seventh such GRANITE-architecture bill or model policy to be advanced by American legislators in the last seven months, and the third such bill to be advanced in the last ten days. I anticipate there will be even more GRANITE-style bills, both state and federal, in the next several months.
– Preston Byrne
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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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