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
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
All things grow, bacteria, blue whales, businesses and bureaucracies. The difference for the latter is, that the first three must wrench a living from a cold, uncaring world, whereas the latter merely needs to increase taxes.
The bureaucracy grows like a cancer, stealing resources and threatening the viability of its host. Eventually the host, us, starts to ask whether it shouldn’t be reduced to something taxpayers can actually afford. The bureaucracy responds by doing everything in its power to prevent its dismemberment. Join the EU, there’s safety in numbers, import millions of voters to block the right, all while continuing to drain the lifeblood from the economy. It can’t win, of course, either it gets dismantled or the economy collapses. It’s just a matter of what is left afterwards.
– Roué le Jour
There is a Crowdfunder live at the moment which tells you everything you need to know about the government of this country. The Centre for Migration Control asked the Ministry of Justice a simple question. How many migrants have been convicted of murder, rape and the supply of weapons? Not opinion. Not spin. A number. The government collects it, sits on it, and refuses to publish it.
The CMC took the case to the Information Commissioner and won. The ICO ruled that the MoJ must publish the data for 2018 to 2024. And what did our Labour government do, faced with a lawful ruling that the public should be told the truth? It lawyered up. It is going to court, at your expense, to prevent you from knowing what it already knows. It is meanwhile withholding the 2025 figures too, presumably on the basis that if a cover-up is worth doing it is worth doing thoroughly.
– Gawain Towler
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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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