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]
« Newer Entries  
  Older Entries »

“Israel cannot destroy Hezbollah, Iran’s supreme leader says from hiding”

· Media & Journalism · Middle East & Islamic · Military affairs

OK, that headline from 11:45am has been superseded by Hezbollah’s admission that Nasrallah is indeed dead, but props to the Telegraph‘s headline-writer.

September 28th, 2024 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)

Sue Gray’s salary is an entirely legitimate subject of political debate

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Historical views · UK affairs

“And when Sue Gray, the former civil service head of “Propriety and Ethics”, having improperly and unethically defected to be his chief of staff, demands a salary larger than his own, Sir Keir gets furious with the journalists who ask him about it. “I don’t believe my staff should be the subject of political debate like this,” he told the BBC.

Though Prime Minister, he seems not to know that it is the first duty of our elected Parliament to question how and why public money is spent.”

– Charles Moore in the Telegraph.

Sue Gray was the civil servant, at the time much lauded for her impartiality, who wrote the “Partygate” report that brought down Boris Johnson. If she had then retired, or stayed in the civil service, or got any other private sector job than the one she did, her place in history as a minor avenging angel would have been secure. But what she actually did was leave the civil service to become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Her failure to declare that she had been in communication with Labour over this job offer while still a civil servant was a breach of civil service rules. Even if it had been within the letter of the rules, it was an obvious breach of their spirit, as more than one angry civil servant has said to me. Of course her salary is up for debate. She did not pass out of politics by going to work for the Labour Party, she passed into it. And her salary in her current position of Downing Street Chief of Staff is paid by the taxpayer.

September 28th, 2024 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

There will be no “truth and reconciliation” if an inconvenient truth is made illegal

· Historical views · North American affairs · Totalitarianism

“When in a hole, stop digging,” the saying goes. They dug a lot of holes at Kamloops Indian Residential school but, as described in 2022 by Professor Jacques Rouillard, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, they have not found a single one of the 215 bodies allegedly buried there. Nor have they found any since.

They did not stop digging, though. They simply announced that “their investigation was proceeding but would remain confidential to preserve its integrity.”

(That Wikipedia article is quite something. In its current form it is full of talk about “denialists”. Wikipedia was not always like this.)

Some people might be glad to discover that, despite extensive investigation, there is no evidence to support rumours of the secret mass burial of hundreds of children. Not Leah Gazan, an MP with the New Democratic Party, though. As reported by the National Post:

NDP MP tables bill seeking to criminalize residential school ‘denialism’

OTTAWA — An NDP MP tabled a bill Thursday seeking to change the Criminal Code to criminalize downplaying, denying or condoning the harms of residential schools in Canada.

Leah Gazan, who represents Winnipeg Centre, presented her private member’s bill on Monday, a few days before the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

September 26th, 2024 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)

His Imperial Highness also vowed to reduce his air miles

· Arts & Entertainment · Environment · UK affairs

The wedding scene from Flash Gordon:

Celebrant: “Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this Earthling, Dale Arden, to be your empress of the hour?”
Ming: “Of the hour, yes.”
Celebrant: “Do you promise to use her as you will?”
Ming: “Certainly.”
Celebrant: “Not to blast her into space…” [Ming gives him a warning look] “…until such time as you grow weary of her?”

–

Sadiq Khan’s deputy mayor for environment pledges to curb plane trips after clocking up 40,000 air miles, the Standard reports.

Mete Coban, a 32-year-old former Hackney councillor, was appointed to the £147,769-a-year City Hall role in July that involves him leading efforts to make London “net zero” in terms of carbon emissions by 2030.

While Hackney’s cabinet member for the environment, Mr Coban was revealed to have clocked up 40,000 air miles in two years.

I didn’t know that the London Borough of Hackney had a cabinet, let alone a cabinet member for the environment with worldwide responsibilities.

He said the “majority” of trips related to his job at an organisation, My Life My Say, that aims to get young people interested in politics and democracy.

But asked by Tory assembly member Thomas Turrell at a City Hall meeting about his travel habits, Mr Coban pledged to avoid “unnecessary” flights and to “lead by example”.

He told the London Assembly’s environment comittee: “I’m very clear that the majority of those flights relate to my previous role as chief executive of My Life My Say, where we are standing up for young people across the country, but also globally, to stand up for democracy.

“I don’t make any apology for making sure I am banging the drum for young people at some of the highest institutions, including the United Nations.

The need to make speeches at “the highest institutions” located in Miami, Dubai, Guatemala, Istanbul, Washington DC and Malta allowed “High Carbon Coban”, a member of the political class, to have 40,000 unapologetic air miles before he felt obliged to say that he would “avoid” flying while in his present role. Except when flights are absolutely necessary for his work as Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy, obviously.

September 25th, 2024 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)

If you want to destroy confidence in UK elections, censor stuff like this

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Deleted by the Woke Media · Historical views · Media & Journalism · North American affairs · Self defence & Security · Sui generis · UK affairs

I did not expect to see anything like this on a fairly mainstream site like “Conservative Woman”: “Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes” (Via Sara Hoyt on Instapundit.) Andrew Bridgen, for those not familiar with him, is the former MP for North West Leicestershire. He has had a chequered career. He was expelled from the Conservative Party after criticising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He then joined the Reclaim Party but resigned from it a few months later. He then lost his seat in the 2024 election – which in itself was no surprise, but the spectacular scale of his loss, dropping from 63% of the vote to 3.2%, was unusual.

I said I did not expect to see this piece on the CW website. I would not be entirely surprised if I am soon unable to see it anywhere but Twitter/X. After the US election of 2020, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (before it was owned by Elon Musk) had a policy of deleting any discussion whatsoever of the possibility of electoral fraud. Even arguments that fraud had not been significant were censored. Most of the UK media followed suit, as it usually does.

If anyone reading this has power or influence over the censorship policies of British media organisations, I humbly beg you not to repeat that mistake. My argument does not depend on taking any view on how many votes Andrew Bridgen got in the UK election of 2024.

When “Stop the Steal” and similar Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were deleted overnight after the American election of 2020, what effect do you think it had on the beliefs of members of those groups? Do you think they concluded that since they could no longer discuss their suspicions, those suspicions must be groundless?

Of course it had the opposite effect. A majority of US voters think it is “likely” that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election. That includes 45% of Democrats. The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and of the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory (the first of which is no longer contested and the second of which is accepted as a probable hypothesis by the US and UK governments) only reinforced this.

Censorship destroys trust, and the loss of trust is not limited to the subject being censored. Once people know they are being censored in one thing, they inevitably ask, “What else aren’t they telling us?”

And they can work out that if all accusations of a particular crime are censored, it makes it more likely that that crime will be committed in future.

Related posts here, here and here. In fact, that entire category of “Deleted by the Woke Media” is related.

Edit 25th September: The man who replaced Andrew Bridgen as Conservative candidate in North West Leicestershire, Craig Smith, has responded strongly to the Conservative Woman piece:

Mr Bridgen seems to overestimate the weight of any candidate’s personal vote. In elections most people vote for the party with a personal vote of – somewhere around – a couple of thousand votes for the candidate themselves. It’s arguably why I did marginally better than Conservative candidates in demographically similar constituencies elsewhere, because I had something of a personal vote as a truly local candidate. A personal vote is why Mr Bridgen received around 1,500 votes. To provide Mr Bridgen with a similar example to his own in 2015 Rochdale’s MP, Simon Danczuk, then standing for Labour received 20,961 votes. In 2017, expelled from Labour and and standing as an independent he received 883 votes. Using Mr Danczuk as a base Mr Bridgen could argue that he outstripped expectations!

Mr Smith goes on to say that of course he was not happy with the result – he lost to Labour – but he is convinced it was fair. He then makes some quite detailed observations about electoral procedures, both in general and specifically for that constituency. I thought he came across well. His use of Simon Danczuk in Rochdale as a comparator for assessing whether it is credible for an MP expelled from their party to have such a large drop in votes was reasonable.

That is how it should be done. That is how it should have been done in the US. Don’t forbid discussion, contribute to it. I repeat my plea for there to be no censorship of the claim that the election was rigged against Mr Bridgen.

September 24th, 2024 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)

Why was the Irish president’s first reaction to blame Israel for the actions of Iran?

· Irish affairs · Media & Journalism · Middle East & Islamic

On August 11, the Sunday Times reported that the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, was under fire for a ‘fawning’ letter to Iran’s new president:

Irish president sent his ‘best wishes’ and congratulations to Masuoud Pezeshkian in a communique that has drawn criticism from Fine Gael.

If the story had ended there, I would have been on the Irish President’s side. Diplomacy inevitably involves sending polite greetings to despots. Though looking at a screenshot of the letter, I do think that President Higgins was a little more oleaginous than he needed to be. Perhaps he felt it would protect the staff of Ireland’s new embassy in Tehran from being taken hostage.

The story did not end there. Yesterday, 22 September, TheJournal.ie reported that, “Michael D Higgins has accused Israel of leaking his letter of congratulations to President of Iran”.

Higgins was asked by a member of the press today about the criticism he received for the letter to which he responded: “Yes, why don’t you ask where it came from?”

The President then accused the Israeli embassy in Ireland of circulating the letter.

When asked how he thought the embassy obtained the letter he said he had “no idea”.

Fortunately the rest of the world does have an idea. The whole controversy started when a woman called Karen Ievers saw the letter and and commented unfavourably about it in this tweet on 28th July. And if you are wondering by what dark arts she saw it, the Iranian embassy in Dublin put their nice letter from President Higgins on their website.

September 23rd, 2024 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)

The strange case of the gender-fluid dachshund

· Arts & Entertainment · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Culture Wars · Historical views · How very odd! · Mindless "Inequality" Blather · Sexuality · UK affairs

“Cambridgeshire council admits to discrimination after a woman was labelled transphobic for criticism of a ‘gender-fluid’ dachshund”, reports the Telegraph, with relish.

Tim Sigsworth’s report says that:

A lesbian social worker was harassed by her colleagues after making “non-inclusive and transphobic” comments about a co-worker’s “gender-neutral” dog, a tribunal ruled.

Elizabeth Pitt, who worked for Cambridgeshire county council, was awarded £63,000 after bosses reprimanded her for expressing gender-critical views at a meeting of the authority’s LGBT+ employee group.

She had disagreed with a male colleague who claimed his dachshund was “gender-fluid” and that he put a dress on the dog to provoke “debate about gender” in January 2023.

Ms Pitt, 62, was formally disciplined by management after complaints were made accusing her of making “non-inclusive and transphobic” remarks.

However, the council later admitted liability for direct discrimination on the grounds of her beliefs.

I am glad that Ms Pitt won her case, but how did we get to a state of affairs where a county council actually believed that one of their employees taking a less than respectful view of another employee putting a dress on his wee dog and declaring it to be “gender-fluid” had had a “detrimental impact on the mental health and well-being of the complainants”?

When I read this account, I was surprised to find out that it happened as late as January 2023. Poor old Cambridgeshire County Council, puffing to keep up with trends that more with-it London bodies like the Royal Academy of Arts dropped in 2021. But the greater question is how and why this particular form of absurdity swept round the developed world so quickly. The wave is receding now, less quickly than it arose, but still very fast in historical terms. The “dropped in 2021” link describes how the Royal Academy of Arts abruptly withdrew the work of the textile artist Jess de Wahls from sale in its gift shop because she said “humans can not change sex”. After bad publicity, it backtracked. There is a certain irony about the way that progressive artists such as Ms de Wahls (“Her work is part of a movement to depict vagina and vulva in art”) spent their whole lives changing cultural norms with such success that their vulva-themed embroideries ended up in the Royal Academy gift shop, a development which might have surprised Sir Joshua Reynolds, only to see the wind change against them in an instant. Why did that particular memo go around in 2020? It wasn’t directly related to Black Lives Matter, but maybe that movement had something to do with it.

September 18th, 2024 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)

Paging Hezbollah…

· Middle East & Islamic · Military affairs · Science & Technology · Self defence & Security

The Guardian reports,

Scores of Hezbollah members hurt in Lebanon after pagers explode

Scores of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, including fighters and medics,

Oh, the poor Hezbollah medics!

were seriously wounded on Tuesday when the pagers they use to communicate exploded, a security source told Reuters.

A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.

A Reuters journalist saw ambulances rushing through the southern suburbs of the capital, Beirut, amid widespread panic. People said explosions were taking place even 30 minutes after the initial blasts.

I feel that this development deserves to be commemorated in period style.

Edit: It is now being claimed that a ten year old girl, Fatima Jaafar Abdullah, was killed by one of the exploding pagers. If true (and despite Hezbollah, like Hamas, being inveterate liars who regularly fake the deaths of children, it might well be true that she was handling her Hezbollah father’s pager or something similar), that is tragic. But overall one of the things about this operation that fills me with admiration is that it must be one of the most precisely targeted military strikes in history. Targeted to the very hip pockets of individual terrorists. Oh, and it would have been nice if a few more of the people denouncing Israel for this had also denounced Hezbollah for firing rockets at Israel completely indiscriminately for years on end. Only a few weeks ago, twelve Israeli Druze children were “shredded to pieces” by a Hezbollah rocket while playing soccer.

September 17th, 2024 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)

Dutch job disease

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Economics, Business & Globalization · European affairs · Political Economy

Shocking news from today’s Sunday Telegraph:

Dutch job disease: how labour rights have undermined the Netherlands

Sacking an employee in the Netherlands is no easy feat.

Ask many managers and they will explain to you the nuisance of having to apply to the courts to obtain a “dismissal permit” for an underperforming employee.

Even if a worker has agreed to leave, they then have a two-week cooling-off period to possibly change their mind.

The process is so arduous that the Dutch are deemed by the OECD to have one of the strictest worker protection regimes in the developed world.

This might sound unambiguously progressive for the Netherlands, and a potential inspiration for Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner as she seeks to enhance workers’ rights in the UK.

However, for plenty of workers, the Dutch system has backfired.

Underpinning the problem is the fact that many bosses are increasingly reluctant to hire workers given the difficulties they later encounter when trying to sack them.

The result is that more than one quarter of Dutch workers are employed only on temporary contracts, far more than any other rich country.

September 15th, 2024 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)

The Guardian discovers the dead hand of the state

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Economics, Business & Globalization · Environment · Political Economy · Self ownership · UK affairs

‘The system is the problem, not people’: how a radical food group spread round the world

Incredible Edible’s guerrilla gardening movement encourages people to take food-growing – and more – into their own hands

Pam Warhurst insists she’s no anarchist. Nevertheless, the founder of Incredible Edible, a food-focused guerrilla gardening movement, wants the state to get out of people’s way.

“The biggest obstacle is the inability of people in elected positions to cede power to the grassroots,” she says.

[…]

Her big idea is guerrilla gardening – with a twist. Where guerrilla gardeners subvert urban spaces by reintroducing nature, Incredible Edible’s growers go one step further: planting food on public land and then inviting all-comers to take it and eat.

I doubt this idea would scale up, but if growing food to give to others gives people pleasure, go for it. I cannot bring myself to feel outraged about the odd unauthorised carrot in a municipal flowerbed. And long have I waited to see lines like those I have put in bold type appear in the pages of the Guardian:

But as much as Warhurst’s idea has simplicity and wholesomeness, it also has a radical streak. At its heart, Incredible Edible is about hijacking public spaces – spaces nominally owned by communities, and paid for through their taxes, but administered and jealously guarded by public authorities.

And that is where Incredible Edible meets its biggest challenge: the dead hand of the state.

September 14th, 2024 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)

“Swiss colonial exploitation”

· Culture Wars · Economics, Business & Globalization · European affairs · Historical views · How very odd! · Immigration · Religion

I have just returned from a holiday in Switzerland, where I often go to do deplorable things. While visiting a country, I try to keep an eye on which news stories are trending there. The almighty algorithm has observed my interest in things Swiss and even after my return keeps sending stories from the “swissinfo.ch” website my way. I am sure you can guess what it was about the following story that struck me as odd:

Swiss colonial exploitation highlighted by National Museum

Switzerland’s colonial history is the focus of an exhibition at the National Museum in Zurich. Based on new research, it looks at the country’s role in colonialism and slavery, and considers its legacy today.

If it were not for the way that every museum in the Western world has scrubbed out and re-written the labels on its displays to be “anti-colonialist”, I might consider this exhibition to be a welcome corrective. The Swiss are an admirable people, but they do have a slight tendency to think that their neutrality and their benign absence from the indexes of history books are entirely the results of virtue rather than geography. As the exhibition points out, many Swiss were happy to profit from slavery. Then I read further:

It [the exhibition] tells the story of businessmen who took part in the transatlantic slave trade or made their fortunes trading in colonial commodities and exploiting enslaved populations. In particular, the exhibition presents the whips and handcuffs used on slaves on coffee and cocoa plantations in Ghana, which enabled Swiss businessmen to make their fortunes.

It also tells the story of people who traveled the globe as missionaries or left Switzerland to found settlements and exploit territories considered uninhabited.

Why are traders in colonial commodities, missionaries and migrants lumped in with slavers, as if trading with other peoples, trying to persuade them to believe in the same things you do, or moving to a place you thought was uninhabited were evils in themselves?

It looks to me as if this exhibition is less about telling the stories of the forgotten victims of Swiss oppressors than about classifying the Swiss as an oppressor people, or, to be more exact, about making sure the Swiss know that little things like never having had any colonies are not enough to acquit them of being members of a colonialist race.

*

Related post: “N star star star star, not N star star star star star”.

September 13th, 2024 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)

“How Rent Controls Are Deepening the [Insert Region Here] Housing Crisis”

· Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · European affairs · Historical views · Political Economy

I have read that in the days when newspapers still used metal type, the compositors used to keep commonly used headlines ready-formed. The Bloomberg headline below would require only the substitution of the appropriate country name to work for anywhere in the world in any decade since governments came to vex mankind:

How Rent Controls Are Deepening the Dutch Housing Crisis

A law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating an apartment shortage.

Two years ago, Nine Moraal and her two children moved into a one-bedroom flat near the Dutch city of Utrecht, a comfortable spot close to family and friends. Although she had only a two-year lease, she expected to be able to extend it and stay until she could get one of the Netherlands’ many rent-controlled apartments.

But last spring, her landlord told her she’d have to move out in November, because renting the flat was no longer profitable. Despite “frantic efforts on social media, phone calls, visits to realtors and housing agencies,” the 33-year-old educator says she hasn’t found anything. “The cost isn’t the problem, but a real shortage of housing is.”

Moraal is among the growing number of Dutch people struggling to find a rental property after a new law designed to make homes more affordable ended up aggravating a housing shortage. Aiming to protect low-income tenants, the government in July imposed rent controls on thousands of homes, introducing a system of rating properties based on factors such as condition, size and energy efficiency. The Affordable Rent Act introduced rent controls on 300,000 units, moving them out of the unregulated market.

[…]

ASR Nederland NV, which owns about 15,000 apartments across the country, has called on the government to rethink the measure. Almost its entire portfolio was shifted into the regulated segment on July 1, spurring it to abandon plans to purchase more rental properties, says Jos Baeten, ASR’s chief executive officer. “There are other investment categories that are more appropriate,” he says.

One provision of the law bars short-term leases, instead requiring all contracts to be open-ended. Some in the industry suggest the change will encourage landlords to prioritize foreigners, who are more likely to move away after a few years, giving owners more flexibility.

Emphasis added. That’ll go down well with the PVV, currently the largest party in the Dutch House of Representatives.

August 28th, 2024 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
« Newer Entries  
  Older Entries »