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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“Spanish is clearly now the world’s coolest language. So why do we push children to learn French?”, asks Gary Nunn in the Guardian.
His argument for pushing children to learn Spanish rather than French is something about Bad Bunny, whoever that is, singing at the Superbowl, whatever that is, plus a slightly less childish argument about how more people worldwide speak Spanish than French. So they do, but that does not rescue the entire article from having the air of being written by una rata en un saco. Mr Nunn may well get his wish that Spanish should dislodge French as the main language taught in British schools, but the triumph will be spoilt by whispers that there is increasingly little practical point in teaching any foreign language to children who already speak English, the language the whole world wants to learn. Mr Nunn says that his Spanish has allowed him to “remote-work my way across Latin America and learn to salsa with guapo men in nightclubs” which is nice for him, but the number of current pupils likely to dance in his footsteps is low.
Fate played a cruel trick on British teachers of modern languages. When I was a girl, they had just fought a successful campaign to dethrone Latin and Greek. In vain did the teachers of dead languages bleat about widening cultural perspectives and indefinable cognitive benefits. Teachers of French and German and Spanish talked better, stronger, more manly talk about how many tens of millions of living humans spoke their favoured languages; about exports and global relevance and earning potential. They quoted Willy Brandt, “You may buy from me in your own language, but sell to me in mine”, and they won.
But now the German for “job” is “der job” and the Spanish for “marketing” is “el marketing” and it turns out that Germans and Spaniards will not just buy in English but conduct their international business in it. And the teachers and enthusiasts for modern languages are reduced to fighting over which of them will grab the largest share of the shrinking number of English-speaking pupils willing to put the effort in to learn any of them, while dredging up from memory all that benthic detritus about “seeing the world in with different eyes” that they mocked so mercilessly when it came out of the mouths of the classicists half a century ago.
[Added later in response to comments: I do not mock it. To me, the ability to see the world with different eyes; to see how thought itself can be differently arranged, is a huge benefit. Just not the sort of benefit that gets you a better job, not if you are a native English speaker. As translation software improves, even the payoff from all those years of study of being able to find your way around a foreign city disappears. The emotional benefit of being able to make a friendly connection with people you meet abroad by speaking their language will never die, unless brain augmentation makes us into a new sort of human, but that is almost the only advantage left that a living language has over a dead one. In terms of widening your understanding of how varied human cultures can be, dead languages win.]
As I have been saying for more than a decade, my feelings about the triumph of English are not particularly triumphant. Not only do I mourn the beigificiation of the world, I fear that when we are down to just Mandarin, English and Spanish the state will find it even easier to control us than it does now. There have been many times in history when minority languages served as a literal speakeasy for minority opinions and where dead languages helped keep free thought alive.
“The auto industry’s gamble on electric cars has turned into a catastrophe”, reports the Telegraph.
The gamble on electric cars has turned into a catastrophe and it will be many years before the industry recovers.
With less than four years remaining until the original target date for banning the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars, the giants of the industry were meant to be riding a boom in sales of battery-powered vehicles by now.
Sleek new models would be rolling off the production lines, new battery plants would be creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, while the billions poured into investment would be the catalyst for reindustrialising both Europe and the United States.
“We’re going to need 70,000 skilled people just to make batteries across this country,” announced Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, back in 2021. He promised unlimited government support for British EV production.
Over in France, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was pouring billions into making his country a force in battery and EV production.
So we are starting to see the results of all that investment, right? Sales are booming, profits are rising and new jobs are being created? Well, not exactly.
The article goes on to mention EV-related losses and potential losses incurred by Stellantis, General Motors, Ford, Porsche and even Tesla.
Antonio Filosa, the chief executive of Stellantis, conceded that the company had overestimated “the pace of the energy transition that distanced us from many car buyers’ real-world needs, means and desires”.
It is a painful admission but one that is at least honest. One point is surely clear. We are not hearing very much about how the transition to EVs would lead to an industrial renaissance any more.
There have been two major problems. First, EVs may only be a niche product.
Drivers are worried about the range, it is far from clear they are better for the environment once the impact of all the raw materials in the manufacturing process is taken into account, the charging infrastructure is not in place and we don’t generate the electricity to power them all at a price cheap enough to make EVs cost-effective.
Next, where there is a market, the new breed of Chinese brands led by BYD is walking away with it.
But fear not, our forward-thinking and tech-savvy government is on the case. Er…
Even worse, under the direction of Ed Miliband, the fanatical Energy Secretary, Britain is pressing on blindly with the 2030 target for phasing out sales of new petrol cars even as the rest of the world recognises that it is complete madness.
In January, the government’s Gambling Commission introduced yet another set of restrictions on gambling advertisements to stop people being enticed into making wagers they cannot afford. In most cases, I’m all for people – and industries – taking responsibility for their own choices, including the choice to gamble. But given that the government’s view is that gambling promotions that are too tempting should be banned, maybe it should refer itself to its own commission. In fact, the pressure placed on auto makers to switch to electric by both this and previous governments went well beyond high-pressure advertising and into coercion.
In times past, people in these islands went to great lengths to conceal that their ancestors were “lowborn”, or non-prestigious foreign, or, worse yet, unknown. Social climbers would frequently change their names to something more aristocratic and perhaps pay some impoverished scholar to fake them up a coat of arms and insert a fictional ancestor or two into the historical record. Then along came steam engines and trousers and we moved to saying that a man or woman should be judged on their own deeds, never mind who their ancestors were. I thought we all agreed this was a good change.
So why have we gone back to acting as if having upper class ancestors who lived here is an important component of a modern British person’s status if that person happens to be black – so important that it needs to be lied about?
BBC Told To Avoid “Clunky” Color-Blind Casting & “Preachy” Anti-Colonial Storylines In Drama Series
The BBC has been urged to rethink color-blind casting “tokenism” and “preachy” storylines about the UK’s colonial history in scripted series, according to a major study commissioned by the broadcaster.
Conducted by former BAFTA chair Anne Morrison and ex-Ofcom executive Chris Banatvala, the thematic review of “portrayal and representation” across BBC output found that “clunky” depictions of race can cause more harm than good.
The 80-page report revealed audience complaints about Doctor Who casting Nathaniel Curtis as Sir Isaac Newton in the 60th anniversary special “Wild Blue Yonder,” as well as the 2023 Agatha Christie series Murder Is Easy, which featured an allegory on colonialism.
The review noted that color-blind casting was a matter of controversy for commentators and some viewers. Urging commissioners to “consider their choices carefully,” the report said that good intentions to increase diversity can lead to inauthentic outcomes — outcomes that can sometimes be damaging to the communities they are attempting to serve.
“In depicting an anachronistic historical world in which people of colour are able to rise to the top of society as scientists, artists, courtiers and Lords of the Realm, there may be the unintended consequence of erasing the past exclusion and oppression of ethnic minorities and breeding complacency about their former opportunities,” the review said.
“What needs to be avoided is ethnic diversity which looks forced and tick box, and we found our interviewees of colour as emphatic on this point as those who were white.”
Good.
However, the writers of this review made an argument in defence of the black Newton that shows they don’t understand science fiction:
Though Doctor Who was referenced, the report raised an eyebrow about the specific concerns regarding Curtis, saying that a mixed-race Newton “seems much less of a stretch” in a universe in which the central character is a time-travelling extra-terrestrial, who regenerates into different actors.
It doesn’t work that way. In a genre such as opera that makes no attempt at realism (read a plot summary of The Love of Three Oranges sometime), or in much of Shakespeare, the extra degree of divergence from reality involved in having the passionate soliloquy in which a nominally European character pours out his heart in rhyming couplets be delivered by a black performer really is trivial, but the whole point of science fiction is that the premise can be as wacky as you like, but the consequences of that premise are worked through with rigour.
OK, maybe not with rigour in the case of Dr Who, but certainly with an attempt at naturalism.
I have no complaints about the acknowledged alternative universe of Bridgerton. (“The series is set during the early 19th century in an alternative London Regency era, in which George III established racial equality and granted aristocratic titles to people of color due to the African heritage of his wife, Queen Charlotte.”) With all the dystopian alternate timelines out there, it makes a nice change. In a similar way, the Doctor meeting the black Newton of a Bridgertonesque timeline wouldn’t have bothered anyone. Five seconds of script and the word “quantum” would have been enough to avoid the collective national wince when viewers realised they were having that line of false history pushed at them again.
Sometimes the Twitter and YouTube algorithms send me grainy film clips of life in Britain many decades ago; street scenes with policemen directing traffic, workers leaving factories, and the like. One notices several differences from the present. Working class women are wrapped in shawls. Every adult male, however poor, is wearing a hat. And, of course, everyone in sight is white. There is no logical reason why knowledge of this obvious historical truth – the fact that the vast majority of British people were white as late at the 1960s – should cause hostility to present-day black British people, but these days the comments to those historical clips quickly fill up with variations on the words “Notice anything?” I notice that human beings dislike being lied to.
As I said in a post called The Great Retcon,
This desperate retconning of the odd Phoenician, Libyan or Egyptian who turned up in British history as “black”, and the whole trend to exaggerate the number of black people in British history, has two effects, both of which increase racism. White people from the majority population resent seeing the history of their ancestors falsified and even erased, as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, did when he said that “This city was built by migrants.” For black people, and indeed anyone of any colour whose ancestors did not come from these islands, it cements the idea that a person cannot truly be Welsh or British unless they can point to examples of people with enough genes in common with them having lived in those places centuries ago.
Nick Timothy writes in the Telegraph:
It was last summer when Aston Villa drew Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League. Immediately, the local, “Gaza Independent” MP Ayoub Khan launched a campaign to cancel the match. His petition demanded the match be cancelled because Aston is, in his words, a “predominantly Muslim community”.
After police planning started for the match, due to be played on November 6, officers met Birmingham councillors and officials at the Safety Advisory Group meeting on October 7. Two local councillors present said the “community want it stopped”. They met behind closed doors, but the minutes now show the truth. Even in the “absence of intelligence” the “planning assumption” of the police was that no away fans would attend the match.
The chairman of the Safety Advisory Group contacted the police two days later asking for a “more clear rationale”. A position had been reached, but the police were asked retrospectively to drum up a justification. The chairman warned the police to make sure the decision did not look like “anti-Jewish sentiment”.
When the committee met again on October 16, the police magicked their “significant intelligence” about the supposed violence of the Maccabi fans.
The police thought they could get away with it. Instead, their case has utterly collapsed. The “intelligence”, which the Chief Constable said had “changed the assessment”, focused on disorder in Amsterdam in 2024. It said the Maccabi fans were “linked to the Israel Defence Force” and targeted Muslim areas, throwing people into the river. Their report claimed the Dutch police sent 5,000 officers to tackle the violence. But none of it was true.
The fabricated “intelligence” supposedly came from an unminuted meeting between West Midlands Police and Dutch commanders on 1 October. This meeting was held six days before the meeting when the police said there was an “absence of intelligence”.
Amsterdam’s mayor, local police chief, and chief public prosecutor have all contradicted the “intelligence” – even calling it “nonsensical”. The disorder in Amsterdam was in fact violence against the Maccabi fans, which was described as a “Jew hunt”. It was an Israeli who was pushed into the river. Only 1,200 officers were deployed.
And it gets worse. West Midlands Police received intelligence on September 5, before the Safety Advisory Group meetings, saying local Islamists planned to “arm themselves” and attack Maccabi fans. But this information was suppressed, seemingly because the police did not want to admit that the true source of the threat lay closer to home. Instead of confronting the mob, the police gave in and banned the Israelis.
In modern times, the British social contract was meant to be that we, the people, give up the right to use force to protect ourselves in exchange for the police protecting us. Cue Libertarian grumbling “I do not recall signing this contract”, but that is the Britain we used to live in. It wasn’t ideal but it wasn’t bad either. It was one of the better societies that have ever existed.
The social contract relied on the idea that the only people permitted to arm themselves were servants of the state such as police officers or soldiers. If the state got wind that members of any other group – a white nationalist militia for example – were preparing to arm themselves in order to attack their enemies, an armed response unit would be kicking down their doors faster than you can say “Terrorism Act 2000”.
Now that some sections of the police have acquiesced in other groups taking the right to arm themselves, and, worse yet, have covered up their shame by portraying the aggressors as victims and vice versa, what reason do we have to continue to grant them special status as the sole holders of the right and responsibility to bear arms? Without the majestic aura of the law around them, the police are just another gang. They are not even the dominant gang.
“Aborting baby girls proves Britain’s multiculturalism experiment has failed”, writes ex-Guardian writer Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:
“…there are those who so value sons over daughters that they pressurise the women in their communities to abort female foetuses. This grim practice is called sex-selective abortion, and while most might assume that it only happens in the likes of China and India, it is in fact taking place in Britain too, among both first and second-generation immigrants whose roots lie in the Indian subcontinent.
It is rarely spoken about, but has come to light of late after the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), which provides abortions to more than 100,000 women across the UK annually, was criticised for suggesting that termination on the grounds of “foetal sex” was not illegal.
Official advice, however, begs to differ. “This Government’s position is unequivocal: sex-selective abortion is illegal in England and Wales and will not be tolerated,” the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said this week. “Sex is not a lawful ground for termination of pregnancy, and it is a criminal offence for any practitioner to carry out an abortion for that reason alone.”
Later in the article she gives her own view:
I may believe in a woman’s right to choose but this is not about choice. This is about maintaining “traditions” which dictate that sons are prized breadwinners and girls are to be married off.
I do not see any good reason for the scare quotes Suzanne Moore put around the word “tradition”. A tradition of which Suzanne Moore disapproves is still a tradition. Nor do I see any good reason for her saying “this is not about choice”. It quite obviously is about choice. Unlike Ms Moore, I am closer to being “pro-life” than “pro-choice”. Here’s an old post of mine that talks about that. I do not agree with the view that the question is simply one of a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body; there is another life involved. The exact weight to give the competing rights of the foetus depend on a lot of factors, primarily how developed – how far from being a clump of cells and how near to being unquestionably a baby – the foetus is, but also including other factors such as the risk to the mother and whether the foetus is developing normally. However if one grants that a woman’s right to choose abortion does override the foetus’s right to life in particular circumstances, then the nature of a right to do something is that the person with that right does not need the approval of others to do that thing.
Putting it another way, how can it be justified that a female foetus that is solemnly decreed not to have a right to life suddenly gains that right if the woman wants to abort because of sexist tradition? Does that still work if the foetus is male and the woman wants to abort it because she’s a radical feminist?
This is a real tweet from the European Commission:
https://x.com/EU_Commission/status/2004462313508950137f
One port, one cable, one Europe.
This holiday, unwrap the power of one: USB-C for all.
Yes, not just phones, tablets, and laptops. In three years, every charger will be under the same tree.
Because less waste, smarter choices, mean more for everyone, all year long.
https://link.europa.eu/QDMFTh
This is an excerpt from a scholarly article about the history of Islam:
By the beginning of the fourth century of the hijra (about A.D. 900), however, the point had been reached when scholars of all schools felt that all essential questions had been thoroughly discussed and finally settled, and a consensus gradually established itself to the effect that from that time onwards no one might be deemed to have the necessary qualifications for independent reasoning in law, and that all future activity would have to be confined to the explanation, application, and, at the most, interpretation of the doctrine as it had been laid down once and for all. This ‘closing of the door of ijtihad‘, as it was called, amounted to the demand for taklid, a term which had originally denoted the kind of reference to Companions of the Prophet that had been customary in the ancient schools of law, and which now came to mean the unquestioning acceptance of the doctrines of established schools and authorities.
– Joseph Schacht, quoted by Wael B. Hallaq in Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?
If you think that the ability of the European Commission to recognise when something has reached a point where no improvement is possible is good enough to allow it to safely close the door of ijtihad on charger cable design, consider the evident fact that none of the multiple people in the Berlaymont building over whose desks the draft of that tweet must have passed knew enough history to veto that title.
“Childhood criminal records to be wiped by David Lammy”, reports the Telegraph.
Childhood criminal records for thousands of people will be wiped under plans being considered by David Lammy.
The Justice Secretary is to review the current system in order to prevent people’s childhood convictions from blighting their future job prospects.
Mr Lammy is considering “simplifying” the system to ensure that checks are “proportionate” to their crime after evidence that people in their 50s, 60s and even 70s found that childhood offences such as stealing a bicycle or fighting in the street were still being disclosed to potential employers.
However, Mr Lammy’s plans have faced criticism over how far any changes would wipe potentially more serious offences, such as drug dealing or harassment, from childhood criminal records.
My first thought was the same as that of David Fairey, the writer of the top comment to the Telegraph story:
Ah! So this from a government that wants Farage to explain a comment he allegedly made aged 13?
Taking the breathtaking hypocrisy of the “liberal” establishment as a given, is this a good idea?
Penelope Gibbs, the director of Transform Justice and part of the FairChecks campaign, said: “Our criminal records system is unfair and holds people back from getting work. Childhood offences committed decades ago are disclosed on DBS checks even if the person has led a crime-free life for years.
“David Lammy is a long-standing supporter of the FairChecks campaign for reform, and has now committed to implementing positive change.”
There have been changes since Mr Lammy’s review in 2017, but campaigners said they fell short of his original proposal to wipe the slate clean for childhood offences except for the most serious.
He highlighted then how 22,000 black, Asian and ethnic minority children had their names added to the police national database, including for minor offences such as a police reprimand. Any police record can be taken into account in DBS checks if a constabulary decides it is relevant to a standard or enhanced job.
I would have to see what Mr Lammy’s exact words in 2017 were to see whether I was going to be as irritated by his “highlighting” the black and ethnic minority children in particular as the Telegraph writer wants me to be.
Mr Lammy said: “The result in adulthood is that their names could show up on criminal record checks for careers ranging from accountancy and financial services to plumbing, window cleaning and driving a taxi.
“I believe that once childhood cautions and convictions have become spent, they should very quickly become non-disclosable, even on standard and enhanced DBS checks. In my view, the system should provide for all childhood offending (with the exception of the most serious offences) to become non-disclosable after a period of time.”
If someone other than Lammy said it, would you agree?
To my surprise, Rachel de Souza, holder of the quintessentially Blairite office of Children’s Commissioner for England, is quoted in the Telegraph article and elsewhere as saying that children involved in the Southport riots should have their criminal records wiped.
I support the jury system as I support democracy: it is the worst system of justice around, except for all the others. My own experience of serving on a jury was inspiring in some ways, frustrating in others. The current Labour government wants to abolish them for all but the most serious cases. Assuming Sir Keir Starmer and Mr David Lammy MP are sincere in their claim that all they want to do is speed up justice, are there any better ways to do that than denying the accused their ancient right to a jury of their peers?
David Friedman was recently summoned to present himself for jury service in the US. He seems to have been sent home without ever reaching the jury-box. I have the impression that the the American courts turn away a higher percentage of those called to jury service than the UK courts do, and also that they make much more of a fuss about excluding jurors who might be biased, which over there often seems to mean in effect excluding jurors who might be intelligent. Despite this and many other differences between the two systems, not all of which favour the UK, I think that Professor Friedman’s observations on the careless way in which jurors’ time was wasted might be relevant to us here. The underlying reason Friedman and his fellow jurors (or whatever the word is for people who are called to be jurors but are not chosen) got to know every crack in the courthouse wall was that the people who have power to speed up or slow down cases pay next to nothing for the jurors’ time. Friedman writes:
What most struck me, as an economist, about the process was the implication of its having access to nearly free labor — there was no payment for the first day, fifteen dollars a day thereafter. The courthouse was towards the south end of the county, about half an hour’s drive from me, forty-five minutes from the north end. We were told that the jurors were selected at random, with no attempt to select jurors for cases in the south courthouse from the south end of the county — because doing that would have biased the selection, how was not explained.
Out of more than eighty of us called in only about twenty-one were put through the voir dire process. The rest were presumably there in case more were eliminated, but it is hard to see how that could justify calling in that many. A jury system that took the value of our time seriously could have called in half as many, perhaps fewer, and, if that occasionally turned out not to be sufficient, additional candidates the next day. By the end of the first day they knew that they had most of the jurors they needed, could have saved most of the rest of us the time and the trip.
Further evidence is how our time in the courthouse was used. We arrived the first day by nine, were sent home at four, a total of seven hours on site. Of those seven hours we spent most of an hour waiting to be told what room we were to go to, an hour and a half for lunch, two hour long breaks. We were actually involved in the jury selection process for less than three hours out of seven.
That again looks like a result of treating our time as a free good, but I do not know enough about what else was happening to be certain. Running a trial, even the preliminaries to a trial, involves coordinating the activity of multiple people: juror candidates, the judge, the attorneys, perhaps others. My guess is that if the county had to pay a market rate for our time they would have found a schedule that used it more efficiently but I could be wrong.
I have so far interpreted what I observed as evidence that the people responsible did not care how much of our time was spent in the process, since our attendance was compulsory and the price paid for it low, on the first day zero, but there is another possible interpretation of the evidence.
→ Continue reading: Want to save money on jury trials? Try paying jurors!
“Live facial recognition cameras planned for every town centre”, reports today’s Telegraph.
Police could be given access to Britain’s passport database to catch criminals under an expansion of facial recognition technology that could be deployed in every city, town and village.
Labour is proposing that police be allowed to compare photos of crime suspects from CCTV, doorbells and dashcams against facial images on government databases, including the passports of 45 million Britons, and immigration records.
The plans are part of a Home Office consultation launched on Thursday to establish a legal framework for all police forces to use facial recognition technology to catch wanted criminals and crime suspects.
As a commenter on the UK Politics subreddit called Eldritch_Lemonade observes,
Oh look, it’s taken 3 months to go from rolling out 10 vans with facial recognition to be used in specific and targeted ways to every town in the country scanning your face constantly
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/live-facial-recognition-technology-to-catch-high-harm-offenders
That Home Office “news story” with the title “Live Facial Recognition technology to catch high-harm offenders” to which Eldritch_Lemonade linked was issued on 13 August 2025. Naughty Eldritch was exaggerating with the “three months”; it’s nearer four. A whole three months and three weeks ago the Home Office reassured us that…
The new vans will operate according to strict rules, which ensure they are only deployed when there is specific intelligence. The College of Policing has clear guidance on how the technology should be used.
These vehicles enable law enforcement to target and locate wanted criminals and suspects for the most serious crimes including sex offences, violent assaults, homicide and serious and organised crime. Forces already using LFR have used it to arrest rape, domestic abuse, knife crime and robbery suspects as well as sex offenders breaching their conditions. The technology has also been used to maintain safety at big public events.
Existing safeguards require checks only to be done against police watchlists of wanted criminals, suspects and those subject to bail or court order conditions like sex offenders. Watchlists are bespoke to every deployment, with officers following strict guidance from the College of Policing guidance when composing a list.
My computer is evil, so this will be brief.
“Justice secretary wants jury trials scrapped except in most serious cases”, the BBC reports:
Justice Secretary David Lammy is proposing to massively restrict the ancient right to a jury trial by only guaranteeing it for defendants facing rape, murder, manslaughter or other cases passing a public interest test.
An internal government briefing, produced by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for all other Whitehall departments, confirms plans to create a new tier of jury-less courts in England and Wales.
The new courts would deal with most crimes currently considered by juries in Crown Court.
But the MoJ said no final decision had been taken by the government.
The plans, obtained by BBC News, show that Lammy, who is also deputy prime minister, wants to ask Parliament to end jury trials for defendants who would be jailed for up to five years.
The proposals are an attempt to end unprecedented delays and backlogs in courts, and do not apply to Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Here is what David Lammy said about juries in 2020:
David Lammy
@DavidLammy
Jury trials are a fundamental part of our democratic settlement. Criminal trials without juries are a bad idea.
The Government need to pull their finger out and acquire empty public buildings across the country to make sure these can happen in a way that is safe.
12:20 pm · 20 Jun 2020
Kudos to the Guardian for not soft-pedalling this:
Chomsky had deeper ties with Epstein than previously known, documents reveal
The philosopher and the sex trafficker were in contact long after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, documents reveal
The prominent linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky called it a “most valuable experience” to have maintained “regular contact” with Jeffrey Epstein, who by then had long been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, according to emails released earlier in November by US lawmakers.
Such comments from Chomsky, or attributed to him, suggest his association with Epstein – who officials concluded killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges – went deeper than the occasional political and academic discussions the former had previously claimed to have with the latter.
Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages, though the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor has insisted not “one penny” came directly from the infamous financier.
That is not much of a defence. Money is fungible.
Later, the article quotes from a letter written by Chomsky praising Epstein:
“The impact of Jeffrey’s limitless curiosity, extensive knowledge, penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals is only heightened by his easy informality, without a trace of pretentiousness. He quickly became a highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.”
In fairness, all that stuff about penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals was probably true. Epstein would not have been able to rise as high – or sink as low – as he did without being able to read people. Epstein’s forte was befriending famous people, introducing them to each other, being at the centre of the networks of the global elite. My guess is that of the pleasures this position brought him, the status ranked higher in his mind than the money or the sex.
Added 23rd November: I am going to take the liberty of promoting a slightly edited version of something I wrote in the comments in reply to this excellent comment by Fraser Orr to the main post.
Fraser Orr writes, “FWIW, I find it a bit disturbing that mere association with this loathsome man (Epstein that is) that somehow convicts the associate”. I quite agree. Apart from the importance of the presumption of innocence in all circumstances, i.e. criminal or near-criminal wrongdoing needs to be proved, it should be obvious that a big part of the appeal of the sexual services that Epstein was offering was exclusivity. It wouldn’t have worked if everyone was invited. But I don’t think there’s any suggestion that Chomsky was involved in the sex stuff at all. My guess is what Epstein got out of associating with Chomsky was the feeling that he was an intellectual too, and one of the things Chomsky got out of associating with Epstein was a frisson of transgressiveness. He was above such bourgeois conventions as refusing to talk to someone who had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. But it looks very much as if the other thing Noam Chomsky got from his association with Jeffrey Epstein was money. “Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages” This sounds evasive. What does the thing about “sorting the disbursement of common funds” even mean? It sounds like something to do with calculating how the money should be split between him and his first wife. I can see how working out how to divide joint earnings after a marriage ends might be complicated, but why did Noam Chomsky doing whatever he was doing regarding money from his first marriage require Jeffrey Epstein to send him more than quarter of a million dollars? For an intellectual to take money from a disreputable but very rich patron is not a crime, but all those who laud Chomsky as a fearless social justice advocate and opponent of abusive power might like to reconsider their tributes.
The Telegraph reports,
The United States has threatened to cut off weapons and intelligence to Ukraine unless it signs Donald Trump’s peace deal by next Thursday.
Sources said Ukraine was under greater pressure from Washington to bow to the US president’s demands than in previous negotiation efforts.
“They want to stop the war and want Ukraine to pay the price,” one of the sources told Reuters.
Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday he would use the plan as the basis for negotiations with Russia but Kyiv has warned its red lines must not be crossed in any peace deal.
The Ukrainian leader spoke to his European allies on Friday, including Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, who “welcomed efforts of the US” but called for a “just and lasting peace” for Ukraine.
Mr Trump’s 28-point peace plan is largely favourable to Russia, giving Moscow more Ukrainian territory than it currently possesses and readmission to the G7.
On Friday, the Kremlin maintained that it had not received Mr Trump’s peace plan but warned Mr Zelensky must negotiate “now” or risk losing more territory.
The part I have put in bold type looks alarming. On the other hand, the British press, most definitely including the Telegraph, continually tries to make Trump look as bad as possible. In the first few months after Putin invaded, Ukraine’s resolute defence against the odds saved the country from annihilation – but as the war drags on its position seems to be gradually weakening. What do you think? Is this the best deal Ukraine is likely to get?
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