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.
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When U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in a predawn raid on Saturday, it should have been a moment of triumph for Venezuela’s democratic opposition. But rather than endorsing the leadership of Edmundo González, whose victory in July’s 2024 election was stolen by Maduro, President Donald Trump announced he’d work with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president for the past six years. After Trump called her “gracious” and claimed she was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” the Maduro-controlled Supreme Court swiftly appointed her as acting president on Saturday, once again sidelining the elected opposition.
Rodríguez is neither gracious nor a reformer. She’s a self-identified communist who has held key positions under both former dictator Hugo Chávez and Maduro, Venezuelan political writer Paola Bautista de Alemán tells Reason. In 2017, Maduro tapped Rodríguez to be president of the illegitimate constituent assembly that usurped the powers of the elected National Assembly to silence the opposition. Later that year, Maduro appointed her to the “Anti-Coup Command,” tasked with taking measures against alleged coup plotters and terrorists, labels routinely applied to peaceful opposition figures.
The US Congress is to all intents and purposes dead. It cannot function with the filibuster rule and an evenly balanced country with the two sides highly belligerent. Now the question we want to ask is: is this a good thing or a bad thing? One the negative side it means that the government can’t get anything done, but on the positive side it means the government can’t get anything done.
I saw this on Fraser Nelson’s Substack (it seems everyone has a Substack these days). The British journalist has been to Thailand with his wife, and noted this positive healthcare outcome in Thailand:
Thai private hospitals are a phenomenon. I had a foot complaint that had me hobbling around London for months, wearing trainers into the office. My local GP was of no use; I wasted money on private MRI scans and consultants trying to diagnose the problem. Nothing worked. But when I went into Wattanapat hospital in Aonang the problem was diagnosed, surgery carried out and completed all within 90 minutes. I felt like Lazarus for the rest of the holiday. In Bangkok, one of my friends had a trapped nerve in her leg – which was diagnosed and treated in two hours. She walked in without an appointment and was never unattended for more than a few minutes. Blood tests, x-rays, intravenous painkillers, specialist diagnosis, treatment pathway for when she returned home: all for 7,500 bhat (~£175). I was operated on by the same doctor who diagnosed me: they don’t seem to fragment it into specialities. I paid about £400. The UK has a good private health sector, but money cannot buy the integration or speed that Thai hospitals offer.
I found out later that people now travel to Thailand to bypass European hospital logjams. Most Thai private hospitals hold Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation, a gold standard for global healthcare quality with ~350 standards for things like surgical hygiene, anaesthesia protocols, medical personnel qualifications and patient safety. I suspect most NHS trusts would fail to meet this standard, even though they cost far more money. UK private healthcare is more a premium-priced overlay on NHS infrastructure rather than a reimagined delivery model. Thailand shows what proper integration achieves: clinical outcomes Western healthcare once promised but increasingly fails to deliver.
I had the same frustrating experience in dealing with my own ankle/knee pain issues about six years ago, but unlike Nelson, I did not fly thousands of miles to get treated (which clearly has to be factored in for the health tourist equation to work. But then Fraser Nelson was in the country anyway on holiday.) I have private medical cover, but did not use it on this occasion, and got sorted with specially made insoles, and did physio and various exercises – including barbell lifts such as the deadlift – to strengthen my knees, and so forth. I am a lot better and feel fitter than when I was a decade younger.
Whatever the specifics, the example given from Thailand shows that the UK’s free-at-the-point-of-use system has major faults, because there’s less of a price incentive to focus on what people are looking for, and therefore fresh sources of supply aren’t drawn in. Prices are information carriers, and like a clogged artery, a healthcare system run on socialist lines can produce the national equivalent of a stroke. (This in some ways describes the economy of the UK.)
Healthcare needs a sharp dose of capitalism along with green veggies and a daily walk. Think of how under free market healthcare, technologies such as 3-D printing/processing scale up production, in a customised way, of items such as hip replacement parts, knee replacement parts, insoles, and other things. This tech already is being used, but under a more market-based UK system, this will accelerate. The toolkit that is promised by AI could really drive change in a positive way (and I am not as starry eyed about AI as some might be). Healthcare needs its Jobs, Dyson and Rockefeller.
Anyway , thoughts about health and wellbeing often crop up in the cold, post-Christmas days of January, so it is time for me to hit the weights. Wishing everyone here a happy 2026.
So soon into 2026, I am delighted Maduro is gone… just as I was delighted when Saddam Hussain was overthrown in 2003. Yet in retrospect, I had no idea how unwise successive US governments would be when it came to handling the aftermath in Iraq.
Trump says what will follow in Venezuela will not be ‘nation building’ so much as literal direct rule by the USA “until a proper and judicious transition” (whatever that means).
Yet is there any indication the US actually has control of Venezuela? To what extent has Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela been dismantled, if at all? One night of air strikes will not have eliminated the regime’s security apparatus. Will there be a Marine Expeditionary Force in Caracas in the next few days?
And I hope when I next check the news, I discover that we’ve put a missile down Khamenei’s smokestack, and that Putin and his entourage have perished mysteriously in an accident involving an exploding tractor or something. Wouldn’t that make for a great news day. (Given how surprising the news has been so far in 2026, who would be such a fool as to blithely rule that out?)
The establishment never sleeps, does it? At the beginning of last year Channel 4, came up with a glossy report dressed up as concern for the youth. “Gen Z: Trends, Truth and Trust,” they called it, a title that drips with the sort of paternalistic sanctimony you’d expect from a broadcaster that’s long been the darling of the liberal elite. Delivered in a keynote speech that was part TED Talk, part sermon, then CEO, and recently gonged Alex Mahon CBE painted a picture of Britain’s young people as lost souls adrift in a sea of misinformation, desperately in need of rescue by surprise, surprise. the very institutions that have spent decades alienating them. What is concerning is that some of her predictions are coming to pass.
But let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t a fair-minded attempt to help Gen Z navigate the news. It’s a brazen power grab, a sly manoeuvre by the modern establishment to control what young people read, watch, and believe. Through a highly sceptical lens, one that sees through the veneer of altruism, this report reeks of desperation. The old guard is panicking because Gen Z isn’t buying their narrative anymore. And why should they? These kids have grown up in a world stacked against them, jobs vanishing to AI, a housing market that’s a sick joke, student debts piled high by a system that promises opportunity but delivers chains. They’re not falling for “fake news”; they’re spotting the real biases in the so-called trusted sources. Mahon’s call? Rein in the wild west of the internet, slap labels on “reliable” content, and let the state play gatekeeper.
I do not have a good enough grasp of Iran’s internal political and social dynamics to know if this wave of resistance has an real prospect of unseating the ghastly Islamic regime… but that would indeed be a truly wonderous start to 2026 if it was to happen.
“…there are those who so value sons over daughters that they pressurise the women in their communities to abort female foetuses. This grim practice is called sex-selective abortion, and while most might assume that it only happens in the likes of China and India, it is in fact taking place in Britain too, among both first and second-generation immigrants whose roots lie in the Indian subcontinent.
It is rarely spoken about, but has come to light of late after the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which provides abortions to more than 100,000 women across the UK annually, was criticised for suggesting that termination on the grounds of “foetal sex” was not illegal.
Official advice, however, begs to differ. “This Government’s position is unequivocal: sex-selective abortion is illegal in England and Wales and will not be tolerated,” the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said this week. “Sex is not a lawful ground for termination of pregnancy, and it is a criminal offence for any practitioner to carry out an abortion for that reason alone.”
Later in the article she gives her own view:
I may believe in a woman’s right to choose but this is not about choice. This is about maintaining “traditions” which dictate that sons are prized breadwinners and girls are to be married off.
I do not see any good reason for the scare quotes Suzanne Moore put around the word “tradition”. A tradition of which Suzanne Moore disapproves is still a tradition. Nor do I see any good reason for her saying “this is not about choice”. It quite obviously is about choice. Unlike Ms Moore, I am closer to being “pro-life” than “pro-choice”. Here’s an old post of mine that talks about that. I do not agree with the view that the question is simply one of a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body; there is another life involved. The exact weight to give the competing rights of the foetus depend on a lot of factors, primarily how developed – how far from being a clump of cells and how near to being unquestionably a baby – the foetus is, but also including other factors such as the risk to the mother and whether the foetus is developing normally. However if one grants that a woman’s right to choose abortion does override the foetus’s right to life in particular circumstances, then the nature of a right to do something is that the person with that right does not need the approval of others to do that thing.
Putting it another way, how can it be justified that a female foetus that is solemnly decreed not to have a right to life suddenly gains that right if the woman wants to abort because of sexist tradition? Does that still work if the foetus is male and the woman wants to abort it because she’s a radical feminist?
There have been so many criticisms of Mearsheimer that I doubt anyone cares at this point. But I wanted to raise something rarely mentioned: M. is not actually making a realist argument. Which is ironic given how much damage he has done to the realist brand.
I’m going to share a secret only political scientists know about. There are actually two John J. Mearsheimers. The first one wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001) and says powerful states are dissatisfied by nature, and will go to war whenever they can. The second one, born in 2014, disagrees. Yes, states go to war because it’s the central feature of political life — except Russia, who goes to war because of American liberals. The first Mearsheimer is a theorist of international anarchy. The second is a moralist of American sin. The two have never met, but if they did they would hate each other.
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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