Twitter competitor Parler is back after having been de-hosted by Amazon, a salutary lesson om how unwise it is to make your business dependent on people who hate you.
Seems a good time to introduce a new Samizdata category: culture wars
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Brian Micklethwait has long observed that a company building a large new vanity HQ is highly corelated with the long march into decline 😀 That said, they have the world’s governments slaughtering their competition, so maybe wait a few years to go short. Stop press: Continental Telegraph seems to be making the same observation. February 4th, 2021 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A couple days ago, Russian internet caught on fire, and it is still ablaze. Although Alexei Navalny was already under arrest, instantly judged by the ad-hoc court assembled right in the police department, his team published a 2-hour investigation into Putin’s past, present, connections and all his assets. Here it is with good English subtitles. As of the time of writing, it racked up just under 40 millions views and 2.5 million ‘likes’. No wonder the powers that be everywhere, and not just in overtly repressive places like Russia, want to control what can be said on the internet. January 21st, 2021 | 68 comments - (Comments are closed)
Which WordPress plugins are recommended for adding posts to Parler (which will be back) & Gab? I have axed the previous buttons for linking to Twitter & Facebook (basically fuck ’em). January 11th, 2021 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you do not hold the ‘correct views’, the time is rapidly approaching that you need to find alternative venues for expressing those views. So set up your own blog (& do NOT host it with a company owned by Big Tech) and/or set up accounts on alternative platforms that do not depend on the very worst of Big Tech. It is only a matter of time before Twitter, Google & Amazon makes the decision for you, either kicking you off platforms they own directly or taking down other platforms they disapprove off by denying them hosting. Gab and Parler can be accessed via the web, and the Parler app can still be installed on Android devices. It’s a quick and easy process. And if you are still using an iPhone and want the app… consider making your current iPhone your final iPhone. Dissenting views are under attack and the people doing the attacks do not even need to hide the fact anymore.  January 10th, 2021 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
January 1st, 2021 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
How can you continue to treat every British citizen as though they face a very high risk of being hospitalised or even dying as a result of exposure to Covid, when this patently is not true? And why pretend the NHS is overwhelmed when the Nightingale hospitals lie empty? And how, this weekend, could you have bought into and sold the public such a dodgy Covid deaths dossier, your so-called ‘realistic worst case’ scenarios that lack any credibility an excuse for lockdown? How can you justify failing to subject lockdown to a detailed cost benefits exercise? And yet you are going down the same un-costed route again. How can you justify outsourcing the entire educational, economic, mental and social wellbeing of the nation to ever more secretive and unaccountable NHS quangos with their own political and vested interests all supposedly under the control of Matt Hancock at the Department of Health? Lastly, how can you, an economic liberal, be part of a government which has needlessly wrecked Britain’s economy? You and colleagues may be shielded from the onslaught that the nation is about to experience thanks to your publicly-funded salary and pension, but most others – particularly the self-employed, the sole traders and those who run small businesses – face a very different future, one that is genuinely frightening. Irresponsible doesn’t begin to describe the national economic and political catastrophe your latest lockdown decision is leading us to. December 23rd, 2020 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I do not know a single family who have adjusted or in anyways changed their Christmas plans in the last week or two due to changes in the state’s latest whims regarding Covid-19. Question: I am a lockdown sceptic but outside my bubble, are there people willingly rearraigning their lives when the state issues new edicts? December 17th, 2020 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
‘Lockdowns’ work very well if what you want to do is to destroy a happy and prosperous society and replace it with a desert. It will cost much more as the measureless debt incurred by Rishi Sunak begins to bite in the form of taxes, inflation, shrinking real wages and ravaged pensions and social services. No wonder they dare not announce an actual Budget. It would be the most horrifying public experience since The Exorcist. So the thing to do is to win back what we lost in March. This requires determination, ruthlessness and large numbers. But it is very easy. Parliament, very slowly waking from its long, induced coma, discusses the latest prison rules on Tuesday. Before then, I beg and urge you to write to your MP, and to get your friends, neighbours, colleagues and family to join you. Numbers are crucial, as you will see. On your computer, please find writetothem.com. This will direct your letter to your MP in easy steps. Then write, briefly, politely, acidly. Say only this: ‘If on Tuesday you vote to destroy the jobs and livelihoods of others, do not expect to keep your own. When the reckoning comes for this, there will be no such thing as a safe seat. Scottish Labour MPs once thought their seats were safe. Look what happened to them.’ Do not worry about any reply you receive or do not receive. These boobies mostly cannot reason. But they can count. And if enough such emails arrive, they will at last grasp what they have done, and fear for their majorities as they should. This is pretty much the only lawful means of resistance we still have. If you do not use it now, to the full, when are you going to do so? And if lawful protest is ignored, what do people think is going to happen when the P45s and the bankruptcies spread like a great puce blot across the country through the miserable winter months, and next spring brings no real release? November 29th, 2020 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday in Fulham, I observed a group of ten or so men and woman striding purposefully down North End Road. They were dressed in black uniforms, with ‘tactical’ vests displaying FF Force on one side and ‘Forever Family’ on the other… and they are a Marxist militia adjunct of BLM UK. This is entirely illegal. Upon encountering a long line of schoolchildren lined up outside a MacDonald’s, they started doing down the line chatting with the more ethnically diverse children (which was more than half of them given the area). Interestingly, the 100% English barrow boys (and girls) ignored them (they were all busy selling things at the street market) but I observed several middle eastern passers-by glaring at the militia as they interacted with the children. 2020 is starting to have a rather 1930s feel about it. The pressure cooker is starting to shake.
November 21st, 2020 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
The current government, aided & abetted fulsomely by the current opposition, are by far the greater and more extraordinary threat to our county’s health & prosperity than this very selective virus.
Oh for the good old days when treason and plot were hatched elsewhere rather than within the structure Mr. Fawkes tried to blow up. November 5th, 2020 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
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