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]
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.
Can someone explain to me why the Tories opened negotiations with Mauritius over the control of Chagos, which was never part of Mauritius and whose inhabitants have never wanted to be part of Mauritius? And can someone explain why Labour wants to pay Mauritius to take over territory it never previously owned at any point in history?
Since Israel’s military response to the October 7th massacre by Hamas, news organisation of the world could not get reporters into Gaza. And yet, we have seen a constant stream of reportage and commentary.
But since the outbreak of mass civil resistance resistance to Iran’s repressive Islamic regime, we have seen an order of magnitude less in the media about the ongoing horrors there. News organisations have often stated this was due to their inability to get reporters into Iran. Strange that.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
For what it is worth, here is an interesting conversation between ChatGPT & my inimitable Misses on the topic of revolutions, Czechoslovak & Iranian… Presented “as is” simply because I think it is fascinating & worth pondering.
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.
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?
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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