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]
The huge influxes of research funding for compliant scientists have made it difficult to oppose the fable of a threatened planet. Any scientist who speaks up against the cacophony of nonsense about a climate threat is treated like Dr Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People. Rather than being thanked for discovering that the water of his town’s popular spa is contaminated with deadly disease organisms, Dr Stockman and his family are viciously ostracised by most of the town’s citizens, who are making a good living by promoting the supposed health benefits of the spa.
Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history where it belongs. But the longer the cult goes on, the more damage is done. We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.
I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, But it rests on three factual errors, and it’s worth looking at them calmly.
Error 1: Elon’s fortune isn’t a pile of cash. It’s ownership of factories, rockets, and satellites. “Taking half his money,” in concrete terms, means forcing the sale of half of SpaceX and Tesla. The money doesn’t come out of a safe; it comes from the companies themselves, which fall under the control of foreign funds or states. You’re not redistributing cash; you’re dismantling a tool of production. It’s the difference between harvesting apples and chopping down the apple tree.
M. Le Pogam goes on to politely describe two other errors that his interlocutor is making regarding how the richest person in the world got that rich, and how an astonishing percentage of the the poorest people in the world have been lifted out of absolute poverty in my lifetime.
His post is well worth reading for the eloquence of his arguments. But there is another, quite separate reason to give it your attention. You see, Brivael Le Pogam never actually wrote “I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it.” He wrote, “Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent.” The thought behind them was in French, but the English words I read and admired for their eloquence were written by a computer program. Over the last couple of years we have quietly reached and passed the point where automatic translation is, for most practical purposes, invisible.
But let us take the question seriously, because it deserves to be. What does it actually mean, to be fit to govern?
It is not, I think, what the managerial mind supposes. It is not a glossy CV, nor a safe pair of hands, nor a tidy communications grid. Strip away the cant and ask the question the common Englishman (and our Scots, our Welsh, our Ulstermen will forgive me the shorthand, for the inheritance is theirs every bit as much as ours) has always put, plainly, to anyone who would rule him: what is government actually for?
The answer is older than any party in this room, older than this Union itself, this Union, our great Union. It is this. Defend the realm. Keep the peace. Hold the law level over the head of the richest man and the poorest alike. And then, having done those few hard things well, leave us our liberty and our property, and get out of the way. That is the whole of it. That is the inheritance of the common law, the law that stood here before Parliament and will stand here after it, the law that William Blackstone, Oxford’s own, took down out of the air and set in order so that every man and woman in these islands might know their rights. Measured against that standard, fitness to govern is not a question of experience. It is a question of spine.
And that is precisely where the parties opposite fail, and Reform does not. For fitness, properly understood, is the willingness to say what you want and to mean it, and to bring with you a team ready to put its shoulder to the national wheel and push.
– Gawain Towler giving an absolutely stonking speech.
The technological reality of Sir Keir Starmer’s demand is extraordinary: that every smartphone in Britain must be child-locked. That means two enormous changes for every one of us: first, our phones will restrict our internet access to child-friendly content only, and second, government-mandated AI software will constantly monitor our messages, video calls and photo albums for verboten activity.
The only way to escape Starmer’s Great British Firewall and get regular internet access is to undergo a digital ID check on the device to register yourself as an adult user.
Convenient, perhaps, for a Prime Minister who has failed to get a digital ID system through the front door.
This is a total reshaping of modern civil liberty – a remodelling of internet access, a strangulation of freedom of information, and a death sentence for online anonymity and privacy. That such extreme, illiberal measures could be more appealing to our politicians than the more natural and effective solution of parental responsibility reveals a deeper malaise in British culture.
The uncomfortable truth is that many parents no longer want the burden of supervising their children in the digital playground. Too many, stretched by work and time pressures, would rather outsource that responsibility – first to big tech as both the playmate and the nanny, and ultimately to the state to act as Big Brother.
and
But the price that the rest of the country will pay for the slide towards infantilising control of the internet is significant. In every other democracy, smartphones are portals to the largest library in human history. In Starmer’s Britain, those same devices are being devalued to become, in effect, state-controlled spyware in our pockets.
Our leaders usually condemn the disorder and violence that follows, but will refuse to discuss the triggers in any depth. Anyone who asks what can be done about horrors like that inflicted on Stephen Ogilvie will be accused of stoking division, exploiting a tragedy and courting the far right.
But something can and must be done. It is simply no longer sustainable to force working-class communities to endure such levels of terror, to bear the brunt of the elites’ open-door experiment – to pay the ‘blood price’, as Brendan O’Neill describes it, of the establishment’s virtue-signalling. Practically every day brings new horrors that ordinary folk are simply expected to put up with. On the very same day as the Sudanese suspect was charged with attempted murder, four Afghan nationals appeared in court, all charged with the alleged rape of a Bristol schoolgirl. From gang rapes in Brighton and grooming gangs in Norwich to child rape in Warwickshire, countless British citizens continue to suffer at the hands of men who shouldn’t be here. Yet this barely seems to trouble our cloistered political class.
In hundreds of studies that [Sholto] David looked at, scientists claimed to have found an effect on a tumour-suppressing gene called p16-INK4a, but had instead ordered the wrong antibody from commercial suppliers. They had bought an antibody that detects the activity of a different and irrelevant gene called p16-ARC, probably because it’s listed alphabetically first in the online catalogue.
As a result, teams of scientists from Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and even Wuhan have published results – often in high-impact journals – that make no sense. Yet the experts involved often claimed to have validated their hypotheses anyway.
As David put it: “What are we to make of cases like this where the wrong antibody was used but the authors still manage to rustle up interpretable results?” He blames “a mixture of outright fabrication, selective reporting, writing errors, and some teams blindly publishing contradictory findings without further questioning or curiosity”.
For too long, many people held back from denouncing these perversions of the scientific method for fear of “damaging public trust in science”. This, of course, allowed the bad practices to continue and spread. I trust science as much as ever, but as Musa al-Gharbi pointed out in his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production”, what is often labelled as the loss of public trust in science is more accurately described as a loss of public trust in scientists. If you, reader, are an honest scientist who wants to regain that trust, then you need to be less collegiate.
Matt Ridley continues,
Scientists, like all of us, are prone to confirmation bias, where they look for evidence to support their hunches and prejudices rather than to challenge them. What kept them honest in the past was that they relished the chance to challenge each other.
Now, with the insistence on “consensus” – another word for groupthink – and a monopoly of funding channels, dogma has been increasingly allowed to stifle debate. It does not help that science reporters, unlike those who tackle politics, the arts or business, often have a culture of deference rather than critique.
The self-correction mechanisms of scientific debate are no longer working well. Yet instead of tackling the problem with humility and reformation, the scientific establishment is inclined to lecture the public for our irrationality. Perhaps it should take a look in the mirror.
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.
Reform UK is destabilising British democracy by spreading divisive material that is being amplified by bots and troll farms, Labour’s deputy leader has said.
Lucy Powell called for tighter laws on social media giants to tackle misinformation, arguing the online space was “open to wealthy individuals, and bad state actors”.
It’s open to everybody, even bad state actors like the UK.
She also highlighted the multimillion-pound donations that have bolstered Reform’s election war chest and “fund their powerful online campaigns”.
Reform UK should put that acknowledgement that they are running a powerful online campaign in their next ad.
Arguing Nigel Farage and his party posed a threat to democracy, she said the law should be strengthened to “tackle the scourge of dis- and misinformation which is ripping communities apart and undermining us all”.
She said Reform’s “exploitation of online algorithms on social media sites is well documented”, as was the way the party had benefited from “bots and troll farms to amplify support”.
A Reform spokesperson said Powell’s claims that its messages were spread by bots and troll farms was “completely untrue” and called her a “conspiracy theorist desperately trying to distract from a failing Labour government”.
“Rather than smearing voters and demanding more state censorship, Labour should be focused on fixing the messes they’ve created,” the spokesperson said.
The poll also found that China is viewed less negatively than the US. Between 40% and 44% of respondents described China as an adversary. However, very few Belgians consider China an ally, with many respondents choosing the option “neither ally nor adversary”.
Despite that, concerns about Beijing remain. Nearly 60% of respondents said they believe a Chinese military attack on Taiwan is likely in the near future, reflecting continued unease about China’s growing military influence.
The survey also suggests that Belgians generally feel secure within their own country. Only a small minority believe Belgium itself could face a direct military attack, with 12% of respondents in Flanders and 21% in Wallonia expressing that concern.
At the same time, respondents supported greater European independence in both defence and economic policy. More than 80% said Europe should become militarily self-sufficient, while a majority backed stronger European responses to US trade measures and tariffs.
The poll also found strong support for limiting foreign influence in Belgian affairs. Nearly 90% of respondents said Belgium should not allow the US to interfere in its domestic matters, reflecting recent controversy surrounding comments made by the US ambassador to Belgium.
Despite growing scepticism towards Washington, Belgians remain broadly supportive of Western institutions. Around 80% said Belgium should remain a member of NATO under all circumstances. Many respondents view the alliance as a collective European security shield rather than an instrument of US influence.
Like it or not, the opinion of an increasing proportion of Belgians as revealed in this survey is shared by other European countries. Like it or not, the corresponding opinion of an increasing proportion of Americans is “Okay, bye”.
Quite possibly, this is all just a spat that brought on by the fact that, to use Scott Alexander’s formulation, Xi’s China is the “fargroup” you hardly ever think about, whereas Trump’s America is the “outgroup” whose antics irritate you every day.
But if these attitudes are real, the Belgians and other Europeans need to get equally real about the cost of the changes they say they want. “More than 80% said Europe should become militarily self-sufficient”. Europe being militarily self-sufficient would make Belgium safer, but also poorer. It would require more Belgians to be ready to fight and die for their country at a moment’s notice. I am not sure they even realise that that is what Trump has been asking them to do for years.
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.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
Recent Comments