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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“It’s time to pay kidney donors”, writes Jeremiah Johnson in The Dispatch.
He’s wrong. It’s long since past time.
Six years ago, Mr Johnson altruistically donated one of his kidneys to someone who was at that time a stranger. That is admirable. It is also quite rare.
Despite donors like me, end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is still a huge problem in America. It’s a silent epidemic that kills more people than car crashes, breast cancer, homicide or suicide. There is no cure for ESRD—you either get a transplanted kidney or live the rest of your life on dialysis. As of September, there were almost 90,000 people on the kidney waiting list.
The worst part is that, for so many, these deaths are completely preventable.
While there are some ESRD patients who are too old for surgery or too sick to be helped, the majority of ESRD patients can easily extend their lifespan with a donated kidney. Our best estimates show that tens of thousands of people die every year, when they could have been saved by a donated kidney.
We simply don’t have enough kidneys, and people are dying by the tens of thousands because of it. We do, however, have another way to address the problem. We can pay people who choose to donate.
Mr Johnson outlines some of the objections to paying kidney donors:
I know that for some folks, paying for organs seems morally questionable. Perhaps it feels like a violation of the sacred nature of the human body. Or perhaps paying someone to do a good act seems like it inherently violates the altruistic nature of that act. Some folks might have concerns that this will lead to the commoditization of organs or will be used to exploit poor people. I understand and I sympathize with those concerns.
Probably more than I do, but even I acknowledge that the possibility of someone donating a kidney to get out of an immediate financial hole but regretting it later is real. But something similar is true of any consequential decision in life. The only way to make people safe from regretting their decisions would be to take away their control over their own lives. And, as Mr Johnson movingly describes in the next few paragraphs, the human beings currently desperately waiting for a kidney who would be given decades more life (and a life free of the constraints of dialysis) if the number of available kidneys was increased, are also real.
The “icky” thing I mentioned in the title to this post is not donating a kidney. It is allowing someone else to profit by selling one.
In the comments to my previous post, Zerren Yeoville was inspired by the Pogues’ 1987 classic Fairytale of New York to pen the following lines for Birmingham in its current travails:
‘They’ve got rats big as cats
They’ve got rivers of mould
The smell goes right through ya
You’d best have a cold
When you first took the bins out
On a cold winter’s eve
You promised me dustcarts
were “waiting, you’ll see”….’
The rats as big as cats were also mentioned in the Sun‘s headline today:
NO END IN SIGHT Huge blow for locals in UK’s ‘third-world city’ where Army called in to tackle cat-sized rats & 21k TONS of rubbish
A major incident has already been declared by Birmingham City Council
Lest anyone think the Sun is being melodramatic, the BBC’s headline does not merely feature cat-sized rats but cat-sized rats who have begun their insurrection against humanity:
‘Cat-sized rats are attacking our cars’
NickM also provided commentary in verse on the Birmingham bin strike, but, unless I have misunderstood, that one was written by A.I. so it doesn’t count.
Gosh, ChatGPT is getting alarmingly good.
‘Rayner calls in Army to tackle Birmingham bin crisis’, the Telegraph reports:
Angela Rayner has called in the Army to tackle the Birmingham bin crisis.
The Local Government Secretary has used formal powers known as Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (Maca) to summon Army experts after a strike by bin workers, which has lasted over a month, left more than 17,000 tons of waste rotting in the streets.
It is understood a small number of military personnel with operational planning expertise are offering logistical support to tackle the crisis. Sources said there were contingency plans in place to scale up the number of soldiers involved if necessary.
If such a scaling-up does prove necessary, Ms Rayner can cite the example of one of the most revered of Labour leaders:
The London dock strike of July 1949, led by Communists, was suppressed when the Attlee Government sent in 13,000 Army troops and passed special legislation to promptly end the strike. His response reveals Attlee’s growing concern that Soviet expansionism, supported by the British Communist Party, was a genuine threat to national security, and that the docks were highly vulnerable to sabotage ordered by Moscow. He noted that the strike was caused not by local grievances, but to help communist unions who were on strike in Canada. Attlee agreed with MI5 that he faced “a very present menace”.
OK, the parallel between Attlee’s summoning of the Army and Rayner’s is not close, and I made it mostly to poke fun at present day lefties, whose hymns of praise to Attlee usually leave out the verse about him using the army to break a strike, and always omit the one about him being the father of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent.
A better historical parallel to explain Ms Rayner’s distinct lack of solidarity with the striking binmen would be the 1978-9 “Winter of Discontent”.
Credit to the Guardian for discharging their duty to report this story:
Couple who ran Swedish eco-retreat fled leaving behind barrels of human waste
A Danish chef couple who attracted international acclaim with a “forest resort” in Sweden have been tracked down to Guatemala after apparently going on the run from tax authorities, leaving behind 158 barrels of human waste.
Flemming Hansen and Mette Helbæk founded their purportedly eco-friendly retreat, Stedsans, in Halland, southern Sweden, after claiming to have “felt the call of the wild” in Copenhagen, where they ran a popular rooftop restaurant.
Stedsans, formed of 16 wooden cottages looking out on to nature, attracted praise from influencers and reviewers, who described it as “magical” and “enchanting luxury”.
But a few months ago it was discovered that the couple had vanished, leaving multiple animals behind and 158 barrels of human waste, an investigation by newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Politiken has found.
I will get to the subject of Hertfordshire Police in 2025 in due course. First, answer me this: “Why didn’t anyone speak out during the Salem witch trials, given how incredibly fake they were?”
I came across this question in a tweet from someone calling themselves “Science Banana”. Mr or Ms Banana goes on to describe how the Salem accusers started off by denouncing easy targets – two women of questionable repute and a slave. But they did not stop there.
Their next choice was very shrewd. The fourth person the “afflicted girls” accused was a highly religious and respectable woman who had publicly expressed skepticism of their ridiculous bullshit. She was immediately arrested and imprisoned.
Genuine belief would do for most; preference falsification would keep the rest quiet.
After the skeptic, the next “witch” accused and imprisoned was an elderly church lady of spotless reputation. And the same day, a four-year-old girl. She went to prison too. At that point, the accusers knew they could get away with anything.
The Salem Witch trials are usually cited “as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolation, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process.” The evil consequences of all these things were indeed made clear in the witch hunt, which cost at least twenty-five innocent people their lives. But the affair was also a tale of boiling the frog.
Now I’ll talk about what Hertfordshire Police were up to last week. Frederick Attenborough of the Free Speech Union tells the increasingly odd story of Hertfordshire Police vs two primary school parents:
A story that seemed troubling enough when it emerged over the weekend is turning out to be even worse than it first appeared, with the strange willingness of Hertfordshire Police to intervene in a debate at a primary school proving ever stranger.
On Saturday, the Times reported that in late January six uniformed officers in three marked cars and a van had been sent to arrest Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine after their child’s school, Cowley Hill Primary, objected to a series of emails and “disparaging” comments in a parents’ WhatsApp group. As the police carried out a search of the house, the couple were detained in front of their three year-old daughter, before being held in cells for eight hours. And all this for querying the recruitment process for a new headteacher.
Accused of “casting aspersions” on the chair of governors in an “upsetting” way, they were then questioned on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property.
Following a five-week investigation the police concluded there was insufficient evidence and took no further action – although the knock at the door, the squad vehicles and the highly public arrest by half a dozen officers must have felt like quite a punishment already.
No wonder that Mr Allen, a producer at Times Radio, said the couple’s treatment represented “massive overreach” by Hertfordshire Police. He told the Times: “It was absolutely nightmarish. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that a public authority could use the police to close down a legitimate inquiry. Yet we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.”
But it now transpires that the force’s intervention wasn’t restricted to Mr Allen and Ms Levine. Hertfordshire Police also warned Michelle Vince, a local county councillor, to stop helping the family by sending emails to the school on their behalf – or risk being investigated herself.
On this occasion, the police attempt at intimidation backfired because Mr Allen is a producer at Times Radio and therefore had instant access to the national press. You can listen to him talk about what happened here. The fact that the police felt confident to proceed as they did strongly suggests that they have done this before to less well-connected people and it worked.
As the article says, it gets worse.
And still there’s more. The email to Ms Vince asked her to forward the warning to anyone she’d cc’ed when contacting the school. This included the local Conservative MP, and former Deputy Prime Minister, Sir Oliver Dowden.
Ms Vince said she felt “uncomfortable” passing on the warning to Sir Oliver. For his part, he was “astonished that a situation could have arisen where any police officer could think it would be remotely acceptable to suggest that an MP should be curtailed in carrying out their democratic duties”.
First a local councillor, then an MP. Note that when the police tried to intimidate a bunch of stroppy parents they did not know that one of them had a job with a national newspaper, but when they tried to frighten Councillor Michelle Vince and Sir Oliver Dowden MP (not just a Knight of the Realm and an MP, but a former Deputy Prime Minister – think about that) into ceasing to represent their constituents, the police knew exactly what these people’s roles were. To stop Councillor Vince and Sir Oliver performing the duties of their elected positions was the point. I rather think that the eminence of Sir Oliver was part of the point, too. They thought they could get away with anything.
The police probably thought of themselves as fearlessly taking on the powerful, a motive which has also been ascribed to those young girls in seventeenth century Salem. But if they really wanted to fearlessly show that no one is above the law, they could have directed the six uniformed officers in three marked cars and a van to arrest someone who might fight back.
“Dark Laboratory: groundbreaking book argues climate crisis was sparked by colonisation” was the headline of the review of Tao Leigh Goffe’s magnum opus in the Guardian, but the headline is wrong. I have read the whole article, even the captions to the pictures (“The reggae artist Chronixx, whose lyrics form part of the implements Goffe uses to dismantle the superstructure of western science”) so I know all about it. Colonisation was only a symptom. The real villain was Carl Linnaeus. Now you probably thought of Linnaeus as the “biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature” and as something of a hero to ecologists. Not any more!
Central to Goffe’s critique is the notion that European colonialism turned the islands of the Caribbean into a “dark laboratory of colonial desires and experiments … the epicentre of the modern globalised world”.
It was there that enslaving farmers first formulated the structures of modern capitalism, alongside a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science.
Such experiments included the creation of monocrop agriculture, the clearing of terrestrial and marine ecosystems making territories vulnerable to extreme weather, the categorisation of wildlife along lines of superficial characteristics
Told ya Linnaeus was the real baddie. How much better off we would all be if his father had followed his first instincts and apprenticed him to a cobbler. Then we would have respected Black and Indigenous forms of science.
and the now equally discredited categorisation of different races along similar lines.
Um, how discredited is that? Richard Dawkins put an entertaining account of the vicious feud between the geneticists and the cladists in The Blind Watchmaker (a feud in which an announcement that some colleague had “gone over to the Cladists” was received with scarcely less horror than an announcement that said colleague had taken Holy Orders), but I thought the whole point was that it all washes up on the same shore in the end. And is it not one of the main conclusions of Linnaean classification that the test of whether Organism X and Organism Y are of the same species is whether they can interbreed? All humans can interbreed, making us one species, QE-categorically-D.
“In opposition to the land, the colonial approach has been one of razing and dynamite, eroding Indigenous relationships to the soil,” writes Goffe. We must, she argues, “connect the dots between the brutal system of chattel slavery and the degradation of the natural environment … The worlds Europeans built depended on making the lives of some disposable.”
The worlds everyone else built are so much nicer.
Related posts:
Not just physics, Indigenous Australian physics
Decolonise your mind!
and, just for the nostalgia value, here is one from back when when Greens liked science:
Climate change action: “The Science” gives way to “The Physics”
One last thought… having one’s superstructure dismantled by the use of reggae lyrics sounds a distinctly unsettling process. But that is what has been done to western science, we now learn. Therefore The Science no longer is Settled.
UPDATE: OK, so it wasn’t one last thought. More thoughts came overnight, and I want to get them down before I forget. I might expand what follows into another post later.
1) Tao Leigh Goffe is “dismantling the superstructure” of the branch upon which she sits. She says that racist western science caused capitalism, which caused the climate crisis. But the justification we are given for believing that there is a climate crisis comes from that same western science. And if some of us are less convinced than she thinks we ought to be about the scale and imminence of peril, that is not because we have lost faith in science but because we have lost faith in many of the people with “scientist” in their job title.
2) Science does not make men good. It does make them powerful. The article speaks of “a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science”, but one reason that the white men were in a position to enslave and oppress others was that their science was the one that worked.
3) Modern science arose in Western Europe. There was a period of a few centuries where the resulting superiority of European technology – ships and guns at the sharp end, with the power of the ironworks and the printing press behind them – meant that scruffy bands of white “adventurers” could conquer whole continents. That period is over. The scientific method is now available to anyone who wants it. Which mostly seems to be the Chinese at the moment.
Robbie Collin in the Telegraph actually gave it three stars:
Disney’s Snow White: Not too woke – and better than Wicked
“And they all lived adequately ever after” is not the fairy-tale ending Disney was presumably originally gunning for. But at this point, the studio will surely take what it can get.
[…]
…I’ll say this for the result: it’s better than Wicked. The opening act sets out just how existentially tearing our heroine’s existence is under Queen Gal. (With apologies to Milan Kundera, call it The Unbearable Snow-Whiteness of Being.) And for the most part, this section is fairly beige and dull. But once Zegler scuttles off to the forest, where she teams up with two chirpy septets – the digitised dwarfs and a zany gaggle of bandits, who may have been dwarf replacements in an early draft – it really picks up.
The new versions of two classic numbers, Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work, are stylishly choreographed and rousingly performed, while a handful of the new songs, from The Greatest Showman’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, just about keep pace. (I loved Princess Problems, a teasing ode to Gen-Z prissiness which delivers about all the culture-war the film is prepared to wage.)
In contrast, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gives it one star, and I get the feeling that if he had free rein he’d have given it one asteroid:
Snow White review – Disney’s exhaustingly awful reboot axes the prince and makes the dwarves mo-cap
That title [Snow White] is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders.
[…]
There are some changes: the hero is no longer a prince, but a more democratic citizen who leads a Robin Hood type insurgency from the forest against the witch’s tyranny with SW joining in on a Maid Marian basis. But he still gets to do the controversial non-consent kiss once our heroine has gone into her picturesque coma. But the dwarves? Will this film make them look sort of like everyone else, like the Munchkins in Wicked? No. This Snow White feebly makes them mo-cap (motion-capture) animated figures, but it also – heartsinkingly – duplicates their presence by giving the prince his own gang of seven live-action bandits, in which people with dwarfism are represented. This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.
Has anybody reading this actually done that thing we used to do with films before the internet?
“Councils begging for your savings isn’t a net zero innovation – it’s an embarrassment”, writes James Baxter-Derrington in the Telegraph.
In an attempt to plug the ever-increasing funding gap, bankrupt-adjacent local councils have dusted off the begging bowl and covered it in tinsel.
Under the guise of investment, Green-led Bristol has become the latest council to offer what smells like a voluntary council tax to fund responsibilities that should be met from their existing budgets.
[…]
But in a demonstration of phenomenal gall these local bodies have launched their own Kickstarter for Councils, asking not only their residents, but anyone across the country, to foot the net zero bill – in exchange for below-market returns.
These green bonds can be found on Abundance Investment, a platform that facilitates these loans for a slice of the pie – 0.75pc of the total sum raised alongside an annual 0.2pc fee. The website proudly declares that it offers investments with councils “in a solid financial position”, despite Bristol councillors declaring just two months ago that the body faced bankruptcy if it can’t close its £52m funding gap.
Samizdata is not often seen as the go-to place for investment advice, but, on balance and after careful consideration, I would suggest that readers seeking a home for their money avoid “Bristol Climate Action Investment 1” like the plague and avoid “Hackney Green Investment 2” like Hackney. (“Does ‘Murder Mile’ still deserve its name?” asked the Hackney Post after a lull. Short answer: Yes.)
Nonetheless, I salute these councils for seeking to raise additional money by asking for it instead of demanding it with menaces. I would salute them even more if they moved entirely to a voluntary system. Though the prospect is unlikely, I hope the investors make their money back with interest, so that this trend towards councils raising money by ethical means might spread.
“UK hoping to work with China to counteract Trump’s climate-hostile policies”, writes Fiona Harvey in the Guardian.
The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and a host of developing countries, to offset the impact of Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies and his sharp veer towards climate-hostile countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
A “new global axis” with the People’s Republic of China. Who could possibly object to that?
The article continues,
Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, arrived in Beijing on Friday for three days of talks with top Chinese officials, including discussions on green technology supply chains, coal and the critical minerals needed for clean energy. The UK’s green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, but access to components and materials will be crucial for that to continue.
What they mean by this is that the number of people paid to make government regulations, interpret government regulations, comply with government regulations, check that others are complying with government regulations, and punish those who do not comply with government regulations is increasing three times faster than the rest of the economy, which for some mysterious reason is growing more slowly than expected at the moment.
“They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.”
– Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr., regarding the case of Michael E. Mann, Ph.D., v. National Review, Inc., et al in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia Civil Division 2012 CA 008263 B.
Hat tips to John in the comments to yesterday’s post and to John Hinderaker of Powerline via Instapundit.
As Mr Hinderaker says, the facts of this case are rather complicated but the judge’s conclusions are unequivocal – and the conclusion of the court that Dr Michael E Mann, maker of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph”, knowingly participated in a falsehood has a certain… resonance.
Related post: “Samizdata quote of the day – unfortunately the high-status fraudster won.” I am happy to say that the injustice done a year ago has been partially undone by this latest ruling.
“I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America…As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!”
– William Pitt the Elder, speaking in the House of Lords on 18th November 1777 in opposition to the war against the rebellious American colonists.
There are some things about the views of supporters of President Trump, and of Americans in general, about the situation in Ukraine that I understand very well. Consider this Bloomberg clip from the President’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 25th September 2018. The caption to the video says gleefully, “Watch the German delegation’s response at UNGA when Trump says “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” The German delegation had a good laugh at the American rube and his silly ideas about not being dependent on Vladimir Putin, and all the sophisticated people on both sides of the Atlantic laughed with them.
They are not laughing now. They are still asking for money, though. In the face of such arrogance, it is no surprise that President Trump and a great many of his countrymen are saying, “We tried to warn you about Russia but you laughed. It’s nice that you ‘stand with Ukraine’ now, but you can do it with your own money. Bye.”
That, I get. I don’t agree with the view that the conquest of a country in Europe by Russia can safely be ignored by the US, but I can understand it.
What I do not get is how many Americans whose views I normally admire have moved from saying, “This war is sad, but it’s none of our business” to speaking as if Ukraine were morally in the wrong for continuing to fight. To take one example, here is a recent tweet from Elon Musk:
What I am sickened by is years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose.
Anyone who really cares, really thinks and really understands wants the meat grinder to stop.
PEACE NOW!!
Similar impassioned pleas for “peace” are being made by many accounts that I follow on X that belong to Americans who are proud supporters of the right to bear arms, people who would until recently have considered themselves spiritual descendants of those unconquerable Americans praised by Pitt. It seems to me that the position of the Ukrainians now is very like that of the Americans then, right down to the invaders of their country being reinforced by wretched hirelings from far away who have been sold by their leaders and sent to die in a the shambles of a foreign war of which they know nothing.
Were the Americans of December 1776 culpable for not laying down their arms when all seemed lost? Should the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware be covered up in shame?
Washington not caring about the meat-grinder
“Never forget that making Britain into a broke, repressive dystopia was a deliberate choice”, writes Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph.
The article starts by repeating a familiar refrain about the unprecedented loss of civil liberties during the pandemic.
As we approach the fifth anniversary, we don’t like to admit that we destroyed our economy, took away part of our kids’ childhoods, permanently aggrandised the state and indebted ourselves for a generation – all for nothing.
All true, but the real meat is here:
Five years ago this Tuesday, Jenny Harries, then the deputy chief medical officer, gave an illuminating, though now neglected, interview. It was not neglected at the time. On the contrary, it took place in No 10, and the interviewer was the prime minister himself, Boris Johnson.
Dr Harries – who has since become Dame Jenny, and been put in charge of the UK Health Security Agency – was impressively level-headed. She explained that, “for most people, it really is going to be quite a mild disease”.
She advised against wearing facemasks unless told otherwise by your doctor. She explained why Britain, unlike many countries in Europe, was not banning large meetings or sporting events. There was, she reminded us, a plan in place, and it provided for the gradual spread of the disease through the population in a way that would not overwhelm hospitals. Try to suppress the spread too vigorously, she said, and there would be a peak later on (which, indeed, is exactly what happened).
Dr Harries was absolutely right, but she was only repeating the global consensus. A little earlier, the WHO had looked at lockdowns and concluded that they were “not demonstrably effective in urban areas”. Its researchers had carried out a study of 120 US military camps during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and found “no statistical difference” between the 99 camps that had confined men to quarters and the 21 that had not.
As recently as 2019, the WHO had declared that lockdowns as a response to respiratory diseases were “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it”.
Dr Harries knew all this. And so did Boris, who spoke what was, in retrospect, the most telling line of the entire interview: “Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science,” he said.
If was capable of having that thought, he was capable of acting on it, or rather of continuing to act on it. He was not, as I once thought, a man in a panic who, pathetically but understandably, followed the the united voice of “the experts” because he could not imagine doing anything else. As a successful politician he knew the political nature of the pressure he was under and chose to give into it. He switched which expert to follow – switched from the expert who was right to the “expert” who was wrong – on political grounds. Oh, no doubt his decision was influenced by which expert shouted the loudest (it was not Jenny Harries) and said the scariest things, but a refusal to be moved from a rationally-decided course by emotional displays is the very definition of a leader. I wonder, does he ever think now about how near he came to being the second Churchill he dreamed of being? All he had to do was stay firm.
Dr Harries responded that she was proud that Britain’s response had remained scientific.
Five days later, Boris took to the airwaves to tell people “to stop non-essential contact and travel”. A week after that, we were in lockdown (a term borrowed from prison, which I held out against using for as long as I could). What changed? Well, on March 16, Neil Ferguson and the team at Imperial College published an apocalyptic report based on modelling that estimated that if no measures were put in place deaths over the following two years could reach more than half a million.
And it was popular. Very popular.
Although we sometimes now imagine that Boris wrenched our freedoms from our unwilling hands, it was the other way around. We have forgotten the “Go Home Covidiots” banners, the terrified phone-ins, the YouGov poll showing that 93 per cent of voters wanted a lockdown.
Persuading people that they have been badly treated is easy. Persuading them that they themselves have behaved badly and stupidly is not easy at all. How do we do it? A cynic would say there is no need to try. Just publicly blame everything on “the politicians” (in this case Boris Johnson, who certainly deserves plenty of blame but not all of it) in the same way that the Greens publicly blame all the environmental damage they believe comes from humanity’s reliance on oil on “the oil companies” rather than the people who use the oil, namely all of us. But I do not believe that any strategy of persuasion that relies on a conscious lie can succeed in the long run.
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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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