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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By her own account, she was in a party that she no longer trusted, had no faith in, and could not defend. “I looked around and realised I was politically isolated and alone.” The problem, as she sees it, is not circumstantial but structural – and insoluble. “Most of the people involved in the great betrayals are the same people running the party today.”
The central betrayal, the one she returns to again and again, is immigration. “The truth,” she warns, “is that half of Conservative MPs are dead against leaving the ECHR. I know it. I sit in the tea rooms. I hear what they say under their breath.”
[…]
Why, then, does she believe that Reform can succeed where the Tories repeatedly failed? Braverman says that, when she tried to persuade the party that Britain must leave the ECHR, to cut visas, to end what she calls two-tier policing, she was left exposed. “None of my Cabinet colleagues stood up for me. Not one.” The Conservatives might respond that recollections vary, but Braverman is insistent that there is a zeal in Reform which she is convinced the Tories still lack.
– Annabel Denham writing about Suella Braverman’s defection (£) to Reform
We are responsible for emissions, we consumers. For it is our consumption that creates the emissions.
And, of course, yes this is important. For by framing the problem as being that of the capitalist bastards it’s then possible to think that if we just eliminated the capitalist bastards then we would have solved the problem. Which does rather obscure the point that if the capitalist bastards did not sate our desires then we’d be nibbling our frozen turnips by moonlight in our winter shack.
That is, the placing of the responsibility upon the fossil fuel firms removes it from ourselves. Which is the lyin’ bastardry going on here. In order to beat climate change it is us that has to change our ways.
That’s also the reason why this lyin’ bastardry is attempted. Because when presented with the actual choice – either Greenland melts and the mangrove swamps flood or you get no hot food nor crib – the actual people, us out here, are going to say bugger Greenland and the swamps.
Which is why people lie about it.
– Tim Worstall
Although the pandemic response is much too late to fix the medieval plagues used to justify it, it remains of great relevance to Pharma investors who see unbeatable advantage in converting taxation dollars into rising share valuations. Governments supporting the CEPI 100-day vaccine initiative are giving public money to support the research and maintain manufacturing readiness of private companies who will then sell their products back to the very same taxpayers, ideally mandated by those governments. This will occur in response to disease surveillance that the same hapless taxpayers are funding. A whole army of global health bureaucrats is positioning to run this – these officials only need a theoretical risk to recommend lockdowns. The 100-day mRNA vaccines will return freedom. The business case here is simply irresistible.
– Dr. David Bell
The way to win the point is to flatly refuse to have anything to do with these parasites. One of the benefits of self-publishing is that you can bypass the publishing world and its hangers-on, such as sensitivity readers. In a few weeks, my latest novel, Railroad, will go live. It is set during the American Civil War, and it isn’t very sensitive. Okay, I did tone the language down a bit, but there is still language that would make sensitivity readers break out in a fit of the vapours. Too bad. It’s a historical novel, not modern-day. It is set during a period rife with violent racism, so the language and behaviours reflect that.
I would never let a sensitivity reader anywhere near my work. Ever. If readers are triggered, then they are probably reading the wrong author.
– Longrider
The UK’s electricity crisis is not caused by “System Failure”. It’s caused by Net Zero
– Tilak Doshi
“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.
“Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”
– Shabana Mahmood (£), Britain’s Home Secretary, explicitly states she wants to turn the country into a panopticon, quite literally a prison.
Jeremy Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher and social theorist, promoted the Panopticon as a circular prison with a central inspection tower from which a single guard could observe all inmates all the time while unseen.
I can’t kid myself any more. The party hasn’t changed… and it won’t. The bulk of the party don’t get it. Don’t have the stomach for the radical change this country needs. In opposition, it’s easy to paper over these cracks, but the divisions – the delusions – are still there. And if we don’t get the next Government right, Britain will likely slip beyond the point of repair. Everything is on this. I cannot, in good conscience, stick with a party that’s failed so badly, that isn’t sorry and hasn’t changed. That I know in my heart won’t… can’t… deliver what’s needed. That’s why I resolved to leave.
– Robert Jenrick
“So, where are the chants of ‘From The Gulf to the Caspian Sea, Iran will be free'”?
– Allister Heath, asking a question that sort of gets a natural, logical answer: because Iran’s regime is against Israel and Jews, and against the West more generally. And in the minds of those who used to protest about Israel’s attacks on Hamas/Hezbollah and others, that is what counts. A few thousand people dead in Iran is all about the smashing eggs/omelette equation according to this anti-West calculus. In a way, this plays to the whole “two-tier” issue of the thinking about much of today’s Left (and the barmier forms of it on the Right): If you are on the “right” side of a particular argument (say that you are against Israel’s existence, or at least ambivalent about it), then it creates moral “space” to be indulgent towards regimes that are against Israel, etc. We see this over and over.
(Daily Telegraph link behind paywall.)
As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, ‘is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.’
This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions.
When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of ‘democratic backsliding’ usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal ‘strongmen’ we read about, just not a very effective one.
– Ed West
It is not a victim of the collapse of the ‘rules-based order’, but of its own terrible decisions.
The cause of Europe’s shift into blandness and relative economic decline is not mysterious: it has developed into a top-down corporatist bureaucracy, where incumbents and well-connected lobbyists always push for ever more regulation until nimbler challengers do the rational thing and relocate to the United States. It is an awkward model for a continent whose historic edge was the opposite: dispersed power, fierce competition between jurisdictions, and constant pressure to innovate. Too often, the officials presiding over this drift are so far removed from the realities they regulate that, when growth stalls, they cannot talk intelligently about incentives, productivity, or risk-taking. So instead they reach for comforting abstractions about “values” and “leadership”.
– Mark Brolin (£)
Keir Starmer is mulling a ban on X, formerly Twitter. This would be a shocking, draconian move, bringing the UK into line with states as authoritarian as Russia, China and North Korea. Yet the only real surprise here is that he hasn’t tried it sooner. As I argue today on spiked, the PM’s claim that this is about protecting children from X-generated AI deepfakes is incredibly weak sauce. Every man and his AI companion knows that X and its owner, Elon Musk, have been a constant thorn in the side of this loathsome Labour government. Starmer holds X responsible for reviving interest in the grooming gangs and even stoking the Southport riots. We should take his threat to ban it incredibly seriously.
– Fraser Myers
The last 48 hours have witnessed a veritable epidemic of FDS, a collective meltdown that would be comical if it weren’t so pathetically predictable. It all stems from a recent poll by Merlin Strategy, a fresh-faced polling outfit helmed by Scarlet Maguire, a former BBC and ITV politics producer who’s built a reputation for sharp, no-nonsense analysis – most recently in a valuable piece in the New Statesman, looking at the way that young women are swinging leftwards.. Their latest survey, commissioned for The Telegraph and dated just before the new year, dropped a bombshell: on balance, Reform UK is more trusted than any other party to run the economy. Yes, you read that right. Not Labour’s hapless crew, still fumbling with their socialist spreadsheets. Not the Tories, whose economic stewardship resembles a drunkard at a casino. But Reform UK, the upstarts led by that perennial thorn in the establishment’s side, Nigel Farage. The numbers, buried in that Excel file of raw data, paint a picture of public disillusionment with the status quo, Reform edging out the competition in net trust scores on economic management.
For the FDS sufferers, this was intolerable. Their brains, already addled by years of wishing Farage into obscurity, short-circuited spectacularly.
– 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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