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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These two things were separate items in the Spectator newsletter.
A wave of directors have left the UK since Labour abolished favourable tax treatment for non-domiciled residents. Some 3,790 company directors left, compared with 2,712 in the same period a year earlier, the Financial Times reports.
… and…
The number of civil servants earning between £150,000 and £200,000, putting them in the same pay bracket as the Prime Minister, has increased 114% since March 2023, according to Cabinet Office data.
But of course these are not separate at all. This only ends if the UK gets a factory reset, a literal non-figurative revolution. I really hope we can vote our way out of this, but with the rise of sectarian politics inexorably turning the UK into something akin to Ulster writ large, I am by no means confident that is going to be the case. If so, I wonder what will kick off the 1642 moment? What will the sides even be?
It comes after Mrs Badenoch wrote in The Telegraph that Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were making “even bigger mistakes” than Ms Truss and had not learnt the lessons of her mini-budget.
Responding, Ms Truss says: “It is disappointing that instead of serious thinking like this, Kemi Badenoch is instead repeating spurious narratives. I suspect she is doing this to divert from the real failures of 14 years of Conservative government in which her supporters are particularly implicated. It was a fatal mistake not to repeal Labour legislation like the Human Rights Act because the modernisers wanted to be the ‘heirs to Blair’. Huge damage was done to our liberties through draconian lockdowns and enforcement championed by Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings.”
– Liz Truss as quoted in an article by Daniel Martin (£)
My drug of choice, however, is X—though using it doesn’t really feel like much of a choice. I’m the editor of a daily politics-focused newsletter, where my duty is to provide readers with a more or less comprehensive digest of everything they need to know from the day’s news. On a normal day, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is check X. The last thing I do before going to bed is check X. I browse X while I sip my morning coffee. Throughout the day, I take breaks from writing to see if anything new has hit X that I might need to incorporate into my writing. After I’m done for the day, I keep monitoring X throughout the evening to get ahead of the next day’s stories. When I try to ignore X and source my writing from the “mainstream” press, I inevitably find that The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal has omitted some critical piece of context without which it is impossible to truly understand the story. If I take too much time away from X—on weekends, for instance—I inevitably find I lose the thread of the news, and have to work doubly hard on Monday to catch up.
– Park MacDougald (£) in an article about actual drugs of the performance enhancing kind.
War Footing Latest, against you that is, not the Russians
– Think Defence
The BBC says “According to Ofcom, platforms must not host, share or permit content encouraging use of VPNs to get around age checks.”
I encourage the use a VPN to get around all state abridgement of people’s right to access the internet, including age checks. Say no to police state Britain, not to mention a VPN enhances your security online.
The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK. Since Friday, anyone in Britain logging on to social media will have been presented with a censored, restricted version – a ‘safe’ internet, to borrow the UK government’s language. Vast swathes of even anodyne posts are now blocked for the overwhelming majority of users.
The Online Safety Act was passed by the last Conservative government and backed enthusiastically by Labour. Both parties insisted it is necessary to protect children. Supposedly, its aim is to shield them from pornography, violence, terrorist material and content promoting self-harm. Age-verification checks, we were assured, would ensure that children would not be exposed to inappropriate content, but adults could continue using the internet as they please. Yet as we have seen over the past few days, on many major tech platforms, UK-based adults are being treated as children by default, with supposedly ‘sensitive’ content filtered from everyone’s view.
– Fraser Myers
Police state Britain needs nothing less than a revolution.
Remember, when the grooming gangs hit the news again in January, after decades of these gangs operating, the official line from No10, repeated by the regime media, remained that ‘the real story here is the tech oligarchs spreading disinformation and the spread of the Islamophobic far right’.
They briefed fake news to the media that ‘Cummings is writing Elon’s tweets’. The PM gave a speech about it. Useless regime hacks like Lewis Goodall called it ‘his best speech’. Goodall explained that the ‘real story’ is the influence of Elon, social media radicalising the right, ‘the emergence of a common UK/US online right … making extremist, until recently fringe politics mainstream in British conservatism… Far right thinking … has become mainstream. Remember that the notion of ubiquitous Muslim grooming gangs has long been a trope of extremism, despite little evidence’ — and the idea that there’s been a national conspiracy to deny victims justice ‘is dangerous nonsense’ (Goodall, Jan 2025).
This was ‘the mainstream’ pundit view in SW1-media-land only 6 months ago. Being pathological and pathologically incompetent, the regime then tried to organise another layer of coverup with a report but this went wrong because the scale of evidence is so vast the author rebelled and told enough of the truth to make the No10 line untenable. Narrative Whiplash kicked in: suddenly the gangs were no longer ‘far right disinformation’, they’re real, there’ll be an Inquiry, though of course the core Insider belief hasn’t changed — the purpose of the Inquiry (from Whitehall’s perspective) is to control the story and suppress as much as possible voters connecting the collapse of border control and the systematic rape/abuse/killing of English children.
– Dominic Cummings
When Israel struck Iranian targets on June 13th, something strange happened four days later—thousands of Twitter accounts tweeting about Scottish independence just… stopped.
That silence? It wasn’t just suspicious. It was evidence.
In this video, I walk you through how a digital blackout in Iran exposed one of the largest Iranian disinformation operations targeting the West. Working with Cyabra, we tracked over 1,300 fake accounts—AI-generated personas pushing division in the UK, attacking the BBC, and praising Iran. And when the lights went out in Tehran, those bots vanished too.
Then they came back… parroting entirely new propaganda.
This is a masterclass in how modern influence warfare works—how state-sponsored actors weaponize your feed and how even silence can be a signal.
– Ryan McBeth
Got that? Britain is a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and the government has to show it has a plan to address people’s concerns and provide opportunties for everyone to flourish. And, er, there is a link between concerns people have about (checks notes) ‘where the government is acting on their behalf and on their interests with a range of factors’.
You have to laugh, even through the tears: these are the people who are in charge. Britain is a successful country? And this government has a…plan? But the important point to emphasise here is that Rayner, and the people around her, are simply constitutionally incapable of recognising the problem itself, or the solution. They actually think that ‘immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services’ is just one of a ‘range of factors’ destabilising society, alongside ‘economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, technological change and the amount of time people were spending alone online, and declining trust in institutions’. And they actually think that the remedy for this is just ‘investment’ in ‘deprived areas’ so as to allow people to ‘flourish’.
British readers are familiar with this mindset: typically what it means is that money gets funnelled into regeneration schemes that kit out otherwise forgotten places like Newport, Dundee or Middlesborough with nice new shopping precincts and art galleries nobody visits. The idea, more or less, is that opposition to uncontrolled immigration is really just a feature of economic insecurity and, perhaps, a lack of civic pride. And if government can therefore just press the ‘grow’ button a bit harder, people will feel better off and pride will re-emerge, and our ‘successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country’ will simply become more successful yet.
– David McGrogan
The result of [Argentina’s] shock therapy has been a stunning recovery. Milei has brought monthly inflation down from 13 percent to 2 percent. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7 percent. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks—indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42 percent, when Milei was elected, to 31 percent. There is much work still to be done, but a new program from the IMF will provide $12 billion of new lending upfront and potentially another $2 billion, which should enable Milei to remove the remaining capital and exchange controls without reigniting inflation.
Most governments that cut their fiscal deficit by five percentage points of GDP pay a heavy political price for the resulting pain. Margaret Thatcher took nearly all her years in office to get the British public sector borrowing requirement down from 4.5 percent of GDP when she was elected in 1979 to −1.1 percent 10 years later.
– Niall Ferguson
Now the thing is:
You can gatekeep in Europe
You can gatekeep in the United States
You can gatekeep in every single economy of the West
But you absolutely cannot gatekeep in China, for there are no tools at all, that would allow you to do that
Like what would you even do to restrict the new entrees?
Intellectual property? lmao
Some other lawfare? Again, just like the enforcement of intellectual property rights, that would ultimately rely upon the cooperation of state, and the state in China – unlike in the West – just would not cooperate.
High profit margins in the West are ultimately based upon the artificial restraints upon the new entrees, and upon the state-sponsored gatekeeping. You keep your prices high, because any new entree on the market will be scared away by the force of the state machine. And in China, the state machine just wouldn’t do that. That is why Chinese competition is getting so close to perfect, and that is why prices (and profits margins) in China, can be getting so low.
– Kamil Galeev
… no, of course not. It isn’t the IDF doing it so who cares?
However, I fully expect to read criticism in the MSM of IDF airstrikes aimed at mitigating Islamist attack on the Druze.
The only place the Druze are safe is… Israel.
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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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