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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Striking Hezbollah is a very low-risk proposition compared to striking targets in Gaza or Iran.
Every single Gaza strike brought the possibility of mass casualties, but in Gaza, this was a feature, not a bug for HAMAS. HAMAS needs civilian casualties because they cannot win a fight against Israel. The world must be so horrified that they end the conflict with a cease-fire and a cease-fire means a HAMAS win.
However, civilians in southern Lebanon can flee north, which is something that cannot be done by residents of Gaza. This makes Hezbollah a much more attractive target and reduces the amount of propaganda that can be released by Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is in a bad situation and they are starting to realize that Iran is not coming to help them.
– Ryan McBeth
Victims are blamed, pressured into keeping quiet, and whistleblowers are pursued. In short, after an initial flurry of activity, we have taken the Rotherham vaccine and become inured to the plight of our young girls, who are foolishly looking to us in hope of salvation, imploring us for help and daily praying for justice – a vain yearning in today’s Britain.
Mentioning the scandal carries a “branding” sentence, which an increasing number of people feel unable to bear, preferring to throttle the source of the sound of suffering than to deal with the root of the problem.
One thing is for sure: it is for us, not the authorities, to judge them on their record.
The mother in Wakefield lived through two-tier policing, as have many thousands of other desperate souls. That is a fact.
– Alex Story
Media reaction to the National Wealth Fund has, in general, been positive, though (predictably) The Economist was critical. Interestingly, The Guardian did not appreciate the fund’s misleading name. Probably the most glowing responses came from the Financial Times. Many might think that this, as well as the various big names involved in the formulation of the policy — including former Bank of England governor Mark Carney and the Chief Executives of Aviva, NatWest, and Barclays — reflects the fact that this policy is well-formulated and fundamentally sensible. They would be wrong. As we have seen, there is nothing sensible about the majority of the ‘preliminary’ sectors chosen.
– Pimlico Journal
I commend this article in Pimlico Journal for its unflinching analysis of where we find ourselves in the UK. Follow the link and read the whole thing, which is a grim tale I wish I could convince myself is excessively bleak.
The Narcissistic State represents a reversal of the key principal of the British social contract as outlined by Bishop Gilbert Burnett in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688: that ‘government is for those who are to be government’. As the state starts once again to exist for its own sake, its priorities diverge from those of its citizens, and it increasingly starts to fail them.
Yet, like individual narcissists, the Narcissistic State demands praise even in failure, as encapsulated in the language adopted by the NHS ‘heroes’ or the ‘painstaking’ work the Metropolitan Police put into failed investigations. Here we recall the citizens of the Eastern Bloc who were not only expected to endure cold, fear, and hunger, but also to applaud those who kept them in such a condition. It never accepts blame or criticism, and reacts sclerotically when confronted with either. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner himself physically lashed out at a reporter for asking him the question which is pressing most heavily on the mind of the public. Instead of looking to itself for answers, British law enforcement is going to the four corners of the earth to seek extrinsic causes for very civil unrest it has seeded. The Director of Public Prosecutions has suggested that foreign states might wish to extradite their citizens to Britain for departing from our state-sanctioned political narratives. Yet the same cohort will segue in the next breath to discussing the danger of Britain being affected by the authoritarianism of other governments; self-knowledge never being the forte of narcissists.
– Pimlico Journal
Earlier this month, the Met Office claimed that climate change was causing a “dramatic increase in the frequency of temperature extremes and number of temperature records in the U.K.”. Given what we now know from recent freedom of information (FOI) revelations about the state of its ‘junk’ nationwide temperature measuring network, it is difficult to see how the Met Office can publish such a statement and keep a straight face.
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It’s almost as if the Met Office is actively seeking higher readings to feed into its constant catastrophisation of weather in the interests of Net Zero promotion. Whatever the reason – incompetence or political messaging – serious science would appear to be the loser. As currently set up, the Met Office network is incapable of providing a realistic guide to natural air temperatures across the U.K. Using the data to help calculate global temperatures is equally problematic.
– Chris Morrison
My lack of current knowledge on the area means I felt no need to weigh in, but it seems astonishing how little reportage there is regarding what’s been happening in Bangladesh for the last few weeks, very much a side issue it seems.
There is a fairly interesting article in Unherd about the current disturbances in UK, but the missing elephant in the room, a very large Halal elephant, is that after Oct 7th 2023, UK streets have been choked with large numbers of marches by Islamic folk & their secular green-haired Gays-For-Gaza supporters, deeply invested in a war in which UK has little to no geopolitical stake. These marches drove British Jews off streets as genocidal slogans were chanted in Arabic (من المية للمية / فلسطين عربية) & the flags of proscribed organisations were flown times beyond counting a few feet away from lines of indifferent policemen, over and over and over again.
Contrast that with the heavy handed treatment of the small sporadic counter-protests which flew Union flags or (gasp) Cross of St. George, things that only cause dyspepsia to those infused with high-status Guardian reading opinions.
However, the war in Ukraine, where the UK geopolitical interest is manifest to anyone not a fan of Putin & Imperial Russia’s Z-fascism, did not produce constant street level responses beyond some shouting at the Russian Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. Why? It’s not a divisive issue, so Ukraine’s supporters didn’t really feel the need to. Few in UK want to see Europe to be destabilised by allowing Russia to once again bordering with Romania & Slovakia with interior supply lines.
So, Ukraine’s fight for survival has not induced British Ukrainians to run for office in Westminster or (more bizarrely) local councils based entirely on their views about a foreign war & appealing to a sectarian/ethnic vote.
Yet that is exactly what has happened since Oct 7th on the issue of Gaza. To understand the pent-up resentment without looking at that is to miss a huge element of how we ended up where we are.
The Labour Government (nor indeed the entirely pointless Tories) do not even understand the problem let alone have a solution, well, other than to just dial up the repression against online words and to dish out more riot gear to hammer some gammon. Instead of actually thinking about this, we saw assorted MPs & various worthies muttering darkly about the “EDL”, an organisation that doesn’t even exist anymore, making this a bit like when Royalists dug up Oliver Cromwell after the Restoration to “execute” him post-mortem.
… hope and prayers for the freedom fighters in Venezuela. Hoping for a Nicolae Ceaușescu style exit for Nicolas Maduro.
The foreign ministers of Australia, Japan, India and the US issued a joint statement after the massacre, saying ‘We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating’. Likewise, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said ‘we are deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation’. These are warnings to Israel, aren’t they? These powerhouses of Western diplomacy, with their noisy teeth-gnashing over ‘escalation’, are essentially telling Israel to chill out. Indeed, one US security analyst told the Guardian that ‘the most pressing task for US officials’ is to ‘delay any Israeli retaliation’ in order that we might ‘achieve de-escalation’. Relax, Israel – it’s only 12 kids.
– Brendan O’Neill
As I keep saying jobs are a cost not a benefit. We do not want to go around the world – or even our own country – creating costs now, do we?
No, no, jobs really are a cost, they are not a benefit. Think on it. We have some amount of human labour available to us. So, if we use that labour to do this thing here then we cannot use it to do this other thing over there. The cost to us of using the labour to do this thing is therefore losing the opportunity to do that other thing over there.
Yes, I know, people like to be able to consume. For most of us that means having an income with which we can purchase our consumption. But even to us that job is a cost. The work we’ve got to do is the cost of gaining the income. And, obviously, a job is a cost to the employer – the production is what they desire, the job is a cost of gaining it.
It’s entirely true that renewables require more human labour than other forms of energy collection and or generation. But that means they make us *poorer*.
– Tim Worstall
Ivory Coast and Ghana provide the bulk of the world’s cocoa crop. They’re getting richer, substantially so. Cocoa is a crop usually farmed by an old bloke and his machete, the plants spread through a few acres of forest. It’s labour intensive – which means that as the countries get richer they hit that servants/peasant problem. If it’s possible to make much more than being a cocoa farmer then why would people be cocoa farmers?
The answer, obviously, is as with everything else – mechanise it. Ah, but no one’s really worked out how to grow cocoa at scale, in the sort of plantations that are suitable for that sort of large scale mechanisation. As far as technology is concerned it’s still, really, a peasant crop. A peasant crop in places rapidly getting much richer.
In the long run choccies are going to get very much more expensive unless someone does work out that mechanised farming method. For the joyous and lovely reason that people are getting too rich to want to live like peasants any more.
– Tim Worstall
Today, however, free speech and politics are under concerted assault in the liberal democracies of the West. The public-private consortia directing that campaign—what has been called the Censorship Industrial Complex—was the topic of a conference at the end of June in London.
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The war against free speech is being fought with treaties and official agreements with wording as broad as a shotgun’s blast. One of many examples is the OAS’s 2013 Inter-American Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance. Article 1 of the Convention includes in its definition of intolerance “disrespect, rejection, or contempt . . . [for the] opinions” of others, while Article 4 states that the “duties of the [35 signatory] states” include “ [to] prevent, eliminate, prohibit, and punish, in accordance with their constitutional norms . . . all acts and manifestations of discrimination and intolerance.” But what is “disrespect”? What constitutes “rejection” of an opinion? Is, say, discussion of the connection between Islam and violence punishable intolerance? There are no clear answers to these questions, because the censors never define their terms. The vagueness deliberately encourages self-censorship by communicating an implicit warning: caveat loquens, let the speaker beware.
– Jacob Howland
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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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