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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Samizdata quote of the day – whatever happened to the Guardian? edition In the course of a fairly long working life I have seen the newspaper as an institution grow from small things to very great things. It has grown with the growth of popular government in the country. I don’t think that is a mere coincidence. The one can hardly exist without the other. A free Press is essential to the working of the modern democratic State. A democracy uninformed is a blind giant, who may destroy the very things which he ought most to value, and who may end by destroying himself. The first act of a tyranny is to suppress or shackle the Press. Let us never forget that the liberty of unlicensed printing is the foundation of all our liberties.
– C. P. Scott on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1926.
Scott was celebrating 55 years of editing the then Manchester Guardian. One can only wonder what he would think of Ofcom etc let alone the modern-day Guardian’s support for it.
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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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Whatever happened to the Guardian? Katherine Viner became editor. On 22nd April 2016, as part of the Guardian’s “The Web We Want Project” (who was meant by “we” was left undefined) she wrote an article called “How do we make the Guardian a better place for conversation?” in which she said,
Previous to the publication of this article, all opinion articles and most news articles in the Guardian had allowed comments. After it, most opinion articles and all news articles no longer allowed comments. I assume most of the moderators were dismissed. Censorship, much of it automated, increased on those few articles that did still allow comments. As I said in this post, for four years any mention of “Hunter Biden’s laptop” was deleted within seconds. When I made that post I naively thought that they had finally decided to let their readers hear about the laptop of doom – but they hadn’t, it was just that one comment that slipped through somehow.
It wasn’t that Hunter Biden’s laptop was so massively important in itself; it was that it was symbolic of the way that there was and is a badly programmed robot guarding the Guardian comments that auto-deletes any mention of certain topics. The deletion orders stay in place years after they ceased to be relevant. Another thing that is automatically deleted is mentioning that the person who murdered Charlie Kirk had a transgender girlfriend. There are presumably many other topics subject to a “kill on sight” order, I just have not happened to find out about them through my own comments being deleted. I, like most of the other oppositional commenters, have largely stopped bothering to comment at all.
I hasten to add that the Guardian has the right to censor its comments in any way it wants. But since they started doing it, the paper has lost a major way for its writers and readers to learn about why people oppose them.
In 1926 this may have been true, but today? I think newspapers are verging on the irrelevant. The large majority of people, especially young people, get their news from social media. And so I’d say that the rule he says here applies there too. The way the government in the United States and in other countries too, censored and manipulated social media was no less scandalous than had they directly controlled the front page of the New York Times. You can see this also with TV news where YouTube channels doing news commentary can often have vastly larger audiences than broadcast or cable news.
I guess what I am saying is: who cares about the newspapers or TV news channels? Most people just don’t even watch or read them.
I think perhaps the prime example of this is X, formally known as Twitter. Since Musk took over, released the Twitter files, stripped down the content moderation, kicked out the government snoops and open sourced their feed algorithm, the platform has radically changed, much for the better. When he first started it was getting crushed by the left and by advertiser boycotts. However it is interesting to see how Musk reacted to this. He did not genuflect to the advertising bullies, in fact at one point he told them to go fuck yourself. Instead he build a different revenue model. For sure they still get a lot of advertising revenue, but they have two other streams of income: a very large subscription base (after all, subscribing the X is a lot cheaper than subscribing to the Gruniard) and something that is entirely new, namely the massive amount of data it receives is being monetized by feeding it into AI training models. And so by diversifying income he has dramatically reduced the power of the would be censors. I don’t think the world knows what a debt of gratitude we owe to this man for effectively saving free speech in the west. It was headed in a very bad direction, but he, one man, put his money where his mouth is and saved free speech for the rest of us. And, directly as a result of his actions, many other SM platforms also backed off the censorship and rejected government control.
Many years ago I used to work for a company that produced computer software for laying out newspaper, which was used by some very large newspapers, like the Boston Globe and the LA Times. So I am familiar with how they think. In the layout software we had this term called the “news hole”. This is the space in the newspaper left for putting news when they had filled the rest of it up with advertising. So, newspapers are just as subject to the threat of advertisers and the boycott mafia. But Musk has found a model to circumvent this risk and provide an amazing product.
It is why, if you care about free speech, I’d encourage you to subscribe to X and use Grok for your AI needs. These are the guys on our side, the guys who are trying to achieve the world we all believe in. (I promise you, I don’t get any referral fees… except I do own some SpaceX stock, so maybe your subscription will make me a bit richer 😉)
Something else I wanted to say about this I think is hard to explain, is that SM, because it has so much higher bandwidth, allows us to escape from the capture of politics.
The most toxic part of politics is how important it is or wants to be. Politics should be a tiny part of our lives, affecting small corners and specific interactions. But politicians and the civil service want to grow and grow into more areas of our lives, take over more things, and consequently grow in power and riches as a result. The worst thing for a politician is not that you disagree with them, not that you hate them, but that you ignore them.
We live in a world where everything, EVERYTHING is seen through the lens of politics, and that is so destructive. I’m an engineer and I try to see things through the lens of technology because the only thing that makes the world better is technology. Government, politics, just makes everything worse. Technology makes things better, often dramatically so. We all need to stop thinking about politics as much as we do, and think of all the other ways that our lives can be improved, hopefully putting these loathsome politicians back into a box, labeled “a necessary evil — open only as a last resort.”
And so with tools like X and other SM platforms there is space to discuss this and disseminate that sort of information. Of course there is a lot of politics too, but there is room for more than that for people who want to get past it.
I recently saw a post on X, sorry, couldn’t find it, but it said something like “how come not one of these billionaires thought about using their billions to solve world hunger?”. The ignorance of this comment is hard to describe. It is technology, and the billionaires that it creates that has reduced world hunger from common to rare, that has created technologies that lift people up and free them and allow them to live lives that are more than scrabbling to survive. For example, in the past 150 years the percentage of people suffering from malnutrition has gone down from about 60% to maybe 10% today. Governments didn’t do that, billionaires and the companies they created did that.
And today we are on the propinquity of a technological transformation that will make abundance commonplace, and yet we are at risk from these awful politicians putting endless barriers in the way. The story of history is the struggle between technology making all our lives better and politics stopping it or stealing the wealth for themselves. I just hope these sleazy politicians do not steal from us all the riches that these billionaires and their companies are about to release on all of us.
While social media is perhaps the main way news is distributed, much of what is distributed on social media is still news from traditional media sources, and even a lot of what isn’t is still heavily reliant on traditional media for the news. So many podcasts, twitter posters etc are largely just commenting and reacting on what traditional media are reporting.
Most people would do better consuming less news of all kinds and focusing on what is more in their sphere of control. I wouldn’t advocate burying one’s head in the sand but most people would have better mental health, productivity and family life by keeping engagement with news relatively low. I have zero media subscriptions now and spend maybe 10 minutes a week on twitter now and I don’t miss reading all the slop media and the pathetic social media dramas
@Martin
Most people would do better consuming less news of all kinds and focusing on what is more in their sphere of control.
In my own life I have observed that my happiness is usually inversely proportional to the amount of news I consume.
Thought that is mainly true of political news, optimistic technology news is, for me anyway, quite uplifting.
I spent many years living and working in way out back Australia, in communities whose main economic concern was where the next kangaroo was coming from, and I subscribed to the Guardian weekly international edition printed on paper so thin that it was a wonder it could support the ink. I don’t remember any bias or agenda at all- just each story typically covered thrice, by the Guardian, Le Monde and the Washington Post. A wonderful resource.
What a shame to just let it go to waste.
Even in the time of C.P. Scott, Collectivist “New Liberals” were starting to gain influence in the then Manchester Guardian – its transformation from a pro liberty publication (which it was in the 19th century) was already underway – and only a few years later it was covering up for the murder of millions of human beings in the Soviet Union – and supporting every bigger and more interventionist government in Britain itself.
Perhaps the most serious problem is that the socialists called themselves “liberals” – even Bertand Russell (someone who wanted to steal all the means of production – and created “the 100” a group that actively helped the totalitarians during the Cold War – for example in the escape of the traitor George Blake from prison – getting him to the Soviets) called himself a “liberal” or even a “Whig” – never admitting to his totalitarianism. As some reference works repeat his lie (or joke – some defenders of his claim his self descriptions were “just a joke”).
The left did not, and does not, admit to wishing to exterminate liberty – on the contrary they proclaim they support liberty, that they love freedom – but the mean the freedom to steal everything and rule by terror.
Another disturbing thing is that the rest of the press follows the lead of evil (and they are evil) publications such as the Guardian – and its de facto sister publication the “New York Times” (another utterly sickening publication – which covered up for the murder of millions, and wants the same thing in the United States and other Western nations) – for example on “Trump”.
False stories on President Trump (and others – NOT just him) start in the New York Times – they are then repeated (sometimes word for word) by most of the rest of the American media (including in supposedly anti leftist publications such as “Reason” magazine) – and by the Guardian in Britain, which is then followed by other British publications – including the conservative Mail and Telegraph.
There are no newspapers in Britain who cover the United States fairly (and this is “par for the course” in Western countries – the international media is generally vile – print journalism or television, it is all the same lies and wild distortions – often inverting the truth) – they are all, basically, agitprop (agitation propaganda).
As with the education system – the ideological capture of the media (on key matters – such as American politics) is, basically, complete – even with publications that present themselves as conservative.
Fraser Orr – in the United States a lot of the internet still follows the agenda of the New York Times – a newspaper.
It is much the same in the United Kingdom – the same lies and wild distortions one finds in the Guardian and the BBC (basically one enity) appear, a bit later, in many parts of the internet.
What is depressing is that supposedly “right wing” publications offer tag-a-long behind with the same agenda (the agenda of the left) – hence, for example, my anger at “Reason” magazine for pushing the same propaganda line as the NYT (and the rest of the left) – with the same agenda, the end of what little is left of elected control of the government (control by the elected President) – with, instead, all power being in the hands of officials, “experts”, and judges – the same agenda is being pushed in the United Kingdom and other Western nations.
For example, the Leader of the North Northamptonshire Unitary Authority and his Reform Party colleagues hate the idea of charging for parking, they also hate the idea of the little plastic boxes that people are now supposed to put “food waste” in (on top of the three bins that already exist) – with the main bin to be collected every three weeks not every week (as has been the case since 1875). But these are the poilicies that North Northamptonshire Unitary Authority looks like to follow – with elected councillors having to rubber stamp them.
Should not such decisions be made, if they are government decisions at all, by elected people – not imposed on elected people as “Policy” (capital P) that they have to rubber stamp?
This is the sort of thing that “Reason” (as well as the Guardian or the NYT) now supports – and I detest.
Although at national level it hardly matters now – as the elected government (“Andy” Burnham and co) are very much on the same page as the officials, “experts”, and judges.
@Natalie Solent
In March 2015, Viner won a majority in the ballot of Guardian and Observer editorial staff as the favoured successor of Alan Rusbridger as The Guardian’s editor-in-chief.
The Brexit referendum took place on Thursday 23 June 2016.
A Progressive’s Progress perhaps?
The thing that really narks me about the Guardian (and the BBC) is they keep on hammering on about how “independent” and “fearless” they are. I hate that. Compare to the Samizdata “mission statement” (top right – “Who Are We?”). That’s honest. Everyone has a point of view and it is utterly dishonest to claim one’s own point of view is omniscience*. I think some of the stuff here I disagree with (especially in the comments) but… at least Samizdata says what it is on the tin. I like that. I do not like media organisations claiming divine authority over the nature of reality. Whilst the Guardian is bad on this the BBC is shocking. It presents itself as Moses descending from the Mountain. They now even have “BBC Verify”, they increasingly show adverts saying how brilliant they are due to the unique way they are funded. They don’t say they are funded the same way as the Mafia. But they are.
*Unless you’re God, obviously 😇
Amen to that, Fraser. His Majesty’s Government has a Department of Culture, Media, and Sport, for pity’s sake. This is madness. It’s one thing for the Prime Minister to pose as a Man of the People by expressing an opinion on the Cup Final, but quite another for the Government to believe that, beyond basic lawfulness, the running of the game is any of its damned business. And quite another again for ordinary people to agree.
I think we Brits should pay less attention to US political news, at least the stuff that doesn’t directly affect Britain ,and should especially avoid too much emotional investment in it. We have next to no influence over what goes on there after all.
Martin – you may indeed have a point, but remember we have no influence over what happens here in Britain either. It is not just the little example I gave – the people who voted Reform Party and the Reform Party Councillors themselves NOT wanting the little boxes for “food waste” and NOT wanting to charge for parking and NOT wanting Council Tax to be increased the maximum every year – but all-these things-are-likely-to-happen (they are POLICY you see), sadly it is just-about-everything. Even voting for independence from the European Union did not mean that we stopped following international “Policy” (capital P), although (and this is a point in your support Martin – and AGAINST what I have typed before) I am no longer convinced that people such as Jacob Rees-Mogg really wanted to break with international Policy – his recent podcasts have been rather eye-opening (in a bad way).
NickM – they mean “independent” in the sense that the “Student’s List” in Serbia means “independent”.
Public bodies to no longer be controlled by political appointees – but to be controlled by “independent experts” (loyal to the International Community – and not giving a damn about Serbians).
“Media Freedom” which turns out to mean, once one reads the small print, even more “Hate Speech” regulations, and more power for the “Press Council” to crush dissenting opinions.
And, of course, more government spending for XYZ (education, health – and so on) – to be paid for by “crackdowns on corruption” – anyone who the International Community does not like will be convicted of “corruption” even if they have lived like a monk. Certainly there is corruption in Serbia (lots and lots of it) – but now there will be MORE corruption (and it will be impossible to do anything about – because the international Corporate State will be backing it).
The international media is celebrating both the victory of the “Student’s List” (anyone who expresses any doubts at all will be denounced as an “agent of Putin”) and the victory of “Lula” in Brazil (who is pro Putin – but he is allowed to be because he is a leftist).
The plan of the International Community proceeds – with “students” (and other “useful idiots”) playing their part to hand over all power to offcials, “experts” and judges.
“But America still stands against this” – wait till next Tuesday and the “Democrat” victory – a “Democratic” victory that will, eventually, hand all power to officials, “experts”, and judges.
Yes the Brazilian election was rigged – but the Brazilian courts (like the American courts) do not care about election rigging (indeed the Brazilian courts support it – and are actively involved in it) so there is no much hope of the result being overturned.
In a way it is a compliment when an election is rigged – it means the result mattered.
Sadly, tragically, there is little point in rigging elections in Britain.
Yes the Labour Party, led by the puppet (puppet of the national and international establishment) “Andy” Burnham, is “ahead in the polls” – but if they were not, indeed if a “right wing” government was elected right now – would they be allowed to do anything?
Reductions in tax rates led to the Bank of Engald operation to remove Liz Truss – and it was a deliberate operation, “the markets” had ignored half a TRILLION Pounds of Covid spending – because “the markets” are not free markets, “the markets” are dominated by Corporate bodies who depend on the slush fund of endless Credit Money – “the markets” do what they are told to do.
The “Supreme Court” would rule that any “right wing” action by new government was “against the principles of rule of law” (as the same sort of judges do in Israel and other countries) – and even the monarchy might suddenly dust down powers that have not been used in centuries.
Such policies as “remigration” would not be allowed.
If the establishment (national and international) will not allow lower tax rates (and they will not) – they are hardly going to allow government spending reductions or “remigration”.
Paul Marks writes, “There are no newspapers in Britain who cover the United States fairly” and Martin replies, “I think we Brits should pay less attention to US political news, at least the stuff that doesn’t directly affect Britain ,and should especially avoid too much emotional investment in it. We have next to no influence over what goes on there after all.”
There is a legal maxim that goes “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”, of which Wikipedia says,
I am British, but it was an example from American politics that finally tipped me over to reflexive distrust of the media. Specifically, the way that the entire U.S. and U.K. press reported that Trump saying “There were fine people on both sides” after the riot at Charlottesville was him covertly supporting Neo-Nazis, when in fact Trump said literally seconds later: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White Nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White Nationalists, OK? And the press has treated then absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also you had fine people, but you also had troublemakers.”
I had known for decades that the media were biased. For many years I was a moderator on the “Biased BBC” website and had posted about literally hundreds of examples of BBC bias. But the finding out, years after the event, what Trump actually said at Charlottesville demonstrated to me that something I had read about in hundreds or even thousands of news reports could be the opposite of the truth. That was new.
The obvious next question was “What other news stories that I have unquestioningly accepted are also false?”
The most I’ll say in the media’s defence is that most journalists live in a bubble of false information themselves.
By the way – has there really been a “closing of the Staits of Hormuz” with oil not coming through, or are “the markets” LYING – repeating what they are told (ordered) to say? Is, in reality, the hydro-carbon supply from the Middle East not much reduced at all?
The gap between free markets and “the markets” is vast.
High fuel costs help the agenda of the international establishment (in helping with the Midterm elections in the United States – but NOT just this, with many other aspects of their agenda as well) and “Trump” (like Liz Truss) is a useful scapegoat.
Certainly (yes – I do not deny it) the Ukrainian attacks on diesel and other fuel institutions are not helping – but there is not really an extreme shortage of fuel, not to the extent that would justify the inflated world prices.
Prices are high on “the markets” – but is that really justified by a terrible shortage of fuel? Or are wire pullers at work?
What happened to Liz Truss (“the markets” not really reacting to half a TRILLION Pounds of insane, and wildly counter productive, Covid spending under Mr Johnson – but going into a “meltdown” over talk, talk, of tax rate reductions – reductions in tax rates that never went into effect) shows just how corrupt (how far from free markets) “the markets” now are.
The one part of the “Truss Mini Budget” that really was bad, the fuel subsidies, was the one part that was KEPT by Mr Sunak – who had also been the Chancellor when half a Trillion Pounds was wasted and the economy destroyed by “Lockdowns”.
But “the markets” did not care.
Paul Marks writes, “There are no newspapers in Britain who cover the United States fairly”
Are there any newspapers in Britain that cover Britain fairly?
I have to say in fairness this is not as terrible as it might seem. In a rich competitive environment where you have newspapers each with their own point of view if you read enough you can get a balance, and “read enough” is a lot easier in a world of newsfeeds and aggregators. I have to say in Britain it has always had a rich ecosystem of newspapers from the Telegraph and Sun to the Guardian and the Mirror. What galls me is their self righteous proclamations of being unbiased seekers of truth when their partisanship is as plain as the nose on my face. The ecosystem of newspapers is much less diverse in the United States, especially so since the NYT seems to drive a huge amount of the coverage, but there are some decent papers on the other side such as the New York Post or the WSJ.
But, like I say before, newspapers, certainly as a portal to the news, are mostly irrelevant. People get their news from other sources. And although these sources can aggregate and so balance out bias, people generally speaking prefer that which it can also do — capture them in an echo chamber.
I’ve been using X a lot more lately and I like it, it is pretty good. But it has exposed me to some views that I think I find it hard to believe people can hold in their heads, views that are so uninformed and preposterous I despair of humanity. I keep bumping into Robert Reich a lot, a man who manages that rare combination of both stupid and ignorant, and it makes me a little horrified to think that such a uninformed ignoramus could have held a position of trust in the government. Though one should always recognize that the loudest voices often have to be loudest because, being so niche, they need to convince the largest number of people.
Fraser – newspapers in Britain do indeed offer a wide range of opinions on domestic matters. And they are most certainly NOT irrelevant – if they were then the left would win every constituency in Britain, as they control every television station (with the exception of GB News) and every radio station, and most internet sites – as well as controlling the schools (including the expensive private schools – yes the left controls them as well) and universities. The newspapers, at least SOME newspapers, are just about the only think the left does not control here in Britain.
But on overseas matters (and not just on the United States – although their treatment of the United States is extreme) they pull stories from the wire services or the Britsh newspaper people based in the United States just copy-and-paste establishment stories (from the New York Times and so on) sometimes word-for-word.
No one seems to do any serious fact checking (real fact checking – not the leftist parody of this) or suggest that the other half of the United States should have their opinions presented fairly.
Is there a market for such coverage in Britain? Yes there is. Is this market demand being satisfied? No it is not.
Markets are not perfect – they are, after all, in-the-end just human beings doing things. And endless regulation, and endless Credit Money slush fund activity radically distorts markets in Britain and other nations.
We have markets – but not free markets, and they are warped in the opposite way to the way that people such as Robert Reich claim – interventionists in government having been warping (twisting) markets for a very long time – in the United States going all the way back to the days of “Teddy” Roosevelt (indeed going back before him, to the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 – which did not “increase competition” it REDUCED competition – it enforced a de facto railroad cartel in most of the United States).
Far from helping people (as Mr Tucker Carlson and co falsely claim) “Teddy” Roosevelt’s interventions made things worse, in many fields, than they otherwise would be – and the twisting (corrupting) of markets has continued to get worse and worse over time.
Natalie Solent is quite correct – and I apologise for not reading and noting her comment before (I can be an old muddle head at times – as well as a hot tempered old man).
Yes – the media, in Britain and the United States and around the world, lied about President Trump’s comments. Indeed they often do – for example claiming President Trump is lying – because they edit out the words qualifying a statement, or even treat a joke as a serious statement (they even “fact check” the Babylon Bee – a comedy satire site). For example, President Trump would be horrified if Canada actually became the “51st State” – as that would mean the Democrats would win every United States election (must Canadians being on the left by American standards – which he knows very well) – it-was-a-joke you lunatics.
In the case of the “Trump – Nazi” stuff the media lies were particularly vicious – a total inversion of the truth, as President Trump has been a friend (a close friend) of the Jewish people all his life – even when he was young boy.
The media really are scum – I know that some people work in “mainstream” media outlets and NO I am NOT including you – but in general the media are scum, they lie and the twist – and they do it with vicious intent.
They do it about other nations as well – for example even Ben Shapiro (a moderate – and not given to flights of fancy) understands that the Brazilian election was rigged, but the “mainstream media” is all nothing-to-see-here-move-along.
Just yesterday a court in the United States, by two judges to one, de facto ruled that California can count votes from non-citizens indeed from illegal immigrants.
That is NOT how they put it – but that was the effect of the court’s ruling (which they know very well) – the judges are SCUM, and the media (for refusing to report this honestly) are also SCUM.
And the votes from non-citizens, including illegal immigrants are not even from them (although it is still illegal for them to vote – what ever the scum-judges rule) they are from Democratic Party Ballot Harvesters.
Activists who fill in the mail-in-ballots for the non-citizen voters (and for others).
And the mainstream media ignore all this – and have done for years, not just in California, but in many States.
And it is getting worse.