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]

A climactic climax every time

It looks like we all missed a major story:

After tense and protracted negotiations, delegates at the United Nations climate conference COP28 have agreed on a deal that calls on countries to transition away from fossil fuels. It is the first time that nations have agreed to such a transition, and marks a major step forward in climate ambitions.

Wired magazine, referring to the 28th UN climate conference, held in Dubai in December 2023. These conferences are officially known as the “Conference of the Parties”, hence the abbreviation “COP”. COP28 was also the subject of this BBC story:

Once the gavel came down in Dubai, the warm words flowed – but will it really have an impact on climate change?

The agreement reached in this glitzy metropolis for the first time nails the role of fossil fuel emissions in driving up temperatures and outlines a future decline for coal, oil and gas.

In UN terms that is historic, and the biggest step forward on climate since the Paris agreement in 2015.

This comment came from someone calling themselves “D1703020689244”:

It’s the same recipe every time.

Argument, confected fury, conference schedule delayed for last minute negotiations, text issued at midnight, gavel comes down, handshakes and cheers.

Who are they fooling other than themselves.

They have a point. The gavel does not always come down literally at midnight, but a pattern can be observed. Who could forget that nailbiter of a finish in Glasgow for COP26 in 2021:

The deal was reached with nearly 200 countries at 7.40pm – more than 24 hours after the two-week summit was scheduled to finish.

It was rivalled in drama only by the the Paris climate change talks of 2015:

In the final meeting of the Paris talks on climate change on Saturday night, the debating chamber was full and the atmosphere tense. Ministers from 196 countries sat behind their country nameplates, aides flocking them, with observers packed into the overflowing hall.

(Spoiler: there was a deal. Not just “a” deal but the world’s greatest diplomatic success. Ever.)

That last-minute deal was rivalled in drama only by – wait, am I allowed two “rivalled onlies”? Probably not. OK, Paris was non-rivalrously rivalled in drama by the “last-minute deal” that saved COP15 in 2009:

The United Nations climate talks that seemed headed for sure disaster were saved from utter collapse late Friday night in Copenhagen, after leaders from the U.S., India, Brazil, South Africa and China came to an agreement to combat global warming.

COP13, Bali, 2007:

Late-night drama pushes US into climate deal

The conference had overrun by a day, despite several night-time sessions. As the wrangling continued, and with no palpable signs of progress, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who had already left Bali for East Timor, was forced to return to rescue the deal from disaster. In a tearful address to delegates, he pleaded: ‘The hour is late. It’s time to make a decision. You have in your hands the ability to deliver to the people of the world a successful outcome to this conference.’

COP11, Montreal 2005:

Weary negotiators finally agreed the revised statement as the talks dragged on into the small hours. They also agreed an action plan among Kyoto members to extend the protocol when its first phase expires in 2012.

COP7, Marrakech, 2001:

They negotiated the terms of a new climate change agreement through the night, and at dawn the exhausted delegates achieved success.

COP3, Kyoto, 1997:

The Kyoto Climate Change Conference has just ended in agreement. Industrialised nations have agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by a total of 5.2% under a differentiated target scheme. This has been one of the most complex international negotiations that has taken place and the governments of the world took it down to the wire.

Kyoto was another all-nighter, apparently. I tried to find some equivalent drama about COP2 (Geneva) and COP1 (Berlin), but that was before they were famous.

And now it’s after they were famous. The plots got too samey. Not even the magnificent opening speech to the COP26 delegates in Glasgow given by Boris Johnson (as documented by the late Niall Kilmartin) was enough to revive interest.

P.S. My apologies to any readers misled by the title of this post. If you want to know where you can be sure of experiencing a satisfying climax, try Azerbaijan.

Maybe you will remember for the rest of your life where you were when you first read this post

Or maybe you, and I, will eventually wince, sigh, and add one more entry to the list that contains the Fleishman-Pons announcement of cold fusion in 1989 and the 2011 OPERA faster-than-light neutrino anomaly.

I followed a link in this tweet by Matt Ridley, and found this article by Sean Thomas in the Spectator:

“Have we just discovered aliens?”

It seems to be serious.

What did you think when you saw this headline?

“White middle-aged men are ‘bottom of everything’ says bank worker sacked over N word”

I thought it meant that the bank worker had either called someone the N-word or had referred to them by that term. I was wrong. The man in question is called Carl Borg-Neal, and you can hear him tell his own story on this video. Mr Borg-Neal was sacked from Lloyds bank, where he had worked for more than a quarter of a century, simply for saying the word out loud as part of a well-intentioned question during a training session on “Race Education for Line Managers” – a training session which had been billed to attendees as a space where they could speak freely.

I am going to quote the Free Speech Union’s own account of the case at length. Much as I admire the FSU’s work (I am a member), I would have preferred to quote just one or two paragraphs and then provide a link to the rest. Unfortunately the FSU’s article on Mr Borg-Neal’s case is to be found under the general URL for the whole organisation, https://freespeechunion.org/, which means that the link will soon point to whatever their next bulletin is about, rather than to Mr Neal-Borg’s case in particular. It would be better if the FSU had a unique URL for each article. I digress. Here’s the article:

The Free Speech Union has won its biggest ever legal victory at the Employment Tribunal, securing damages likely to exceed £800,000 for Carl Borg-Neal, a dyslexic Lloyds bank manager who was sacked following a workplace free speech row.

This is a fantastic result and it’s worth pointing out that Carl’s final compensation package – which includes damages for past loss of earnings, future loss of earnings, a pensions award, compensation for discrimination, aggravated damages and compensation for personal injury – is well in excess of the amount typically awarded to Claimants at the Employment Tribunal.

In July 2021, Mr Borg-Neal was one of around 100 senior Lloyds managers to participate in an online training session entitled ‘Race Education for Line Managers’. Provided by an external organisation, the training formed part of the bank’s ‘Race Action Plan’, launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death the previous year.

Carl had worked for Lloyds for 27 years without incident, was popular among colleagues and had risen to a managerial role at head office. Far from being indifferent to racial equality, he had recently joined a new scheme mentoring young colleagues from ethnic minority backgrounds and was working with three mentees, one of African descent, one of Asian descent and one of European (non-UK) descent.

At the start of the session, the trainer read out a script that established the parameters for what was to follow. “When we talk about race, people often worry about saying the wrong thing,” she said. “Please understand that today is your opportunity to practice, learn and be clumsy… The goal is to start talking, so please speak freely, and forgive yourself and others when being clumsy today.”

Carl was relieved to hear that since his dyslexia can occasionally cause him to ‘be clumsy’ when speaking ‘freely’. During a subsequent discussion on ‘intent vs effect’, he decided to take the trainer’s statement at face-value. Thinking partly about rap music, he asked how as a line manager he should handle a situation where he heard someone from an ethnic minority background use a word that might be considered offensive if used by a white person. Met with a puzzled look from the trainer, he added, “The most common example being use of the word n***** in the black community.”

→ Continue reading: What did you think when you saw this headline?

Robert Reich’s article about Claudine Gay’s resignation is dishonest even by Guardian standards. Sorry, make that US academic standards.

In the days when Comment really was Free at the Guardian, an article as dishonest as this would have received short shrift from the commenters below the line. Because since then the Guardian has decided to protect its writers from hearing what their readers think of them, the author, President Clinton’s former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, probably believes he made his case well. Here is the article: “Powerful donors managed to push out Harvard’s Claudine Gay. But at what cost?”

In the fifth paragraph, Mr Reich writes,

I don’t know enough to address the charges of plagiarism against her, but it’s worth noting that all of them apparently came from the same source, via the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online journal.

He doesn’t know? Could he not have found out? It’s been all over the news, and not just from the Washington Free Beacon, though it was their scoop. (The first two links are to the NYT and the BBC respectively.) It’s not as if Reich would have had to spend months on research and do a paper with Harvard citations and everything. As well as being a former Secretary of Labour, Robert Reich is the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at University of California at Berkeley. One might have expected an academic at a famous American university to be concerned enough by a claim of plagiarism against a distinguished colleague to put some effort into potentially clearing her name rather than weakly throwing his hands in the air and saying, “I dunno”. Unless, of course, he did not wish to know.

A little while later Reich does it again. He writes,

Stefanik then asked the presidents whether calls for intifada against Jews on campus violated the codes of conduct or harassment policies at their universities.

This is deceptive. The answers from the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania that caused such deep outrage were not said in response to Elise Stefanik asking them about whether calls for intifada against Jews violated the codes of conducts or harassment policies at their universities. They were said in response to Elise Stefanik asking them whether calls for genocide against Jews violated the codes of conduct or harassment policies at their universities. Watch the video. The relevant exchange is right at the start. Rep. Stefanik says, “And, Dr Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?”. Dr Gay replies, “It can be, depending on the context.”

Genocide. Not intifada. Genocide. My apologies for being so repetitive, but the difference between “intifada” and “genocide” matters rather a lot.

Weirdly, one of Reich’s subsequent paragraph gets this right:

They should have answered unambiguously and unequivocally that calls for genocide of any group are intolerable.

What happened to make Reich change from claiming the equivocal answers from the three university presidents came in response to a question about “calls for intifada against Jews” in one paragraph to correctly saying that the issue was “calls for genocide against Jews” three paragraphs later? One might expect a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley would see the importance of accurately quoting someone. Unless, of course, the professor of public policy wanted the public to be confused.

Related post: “Why you can be a free speech absolutist and still think the presidents of Harvard, MIT and UPenn should resign in disgrace.”

Too late, Ms Starbird. Trust, once lost, is not so easily regained.

I hear the faint chink of the penny dropping at Guardian. This profile of misinformation specialist – read that job description as you will – Kate Starbird is predictably fawning, but they seem distinctly anxious to get across the idea that she and other misinformation specialists are no longer going to behave in the way they did in the last few years: ‘Stakes are really high’: misinformation researcher changes tack for 2024 US election

A key researcher in the fight against election misinformation – who herself became the subject of an intensive misinformation campaign – has said her field gets accused of “bias” precisely because it’s now mainly rightwingers who spread the worst lies.

Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, added that she feared that the entirely false story of rigged elections has now “sunk in” for many Americans on the right. “The idea that they’re already going to the polls with the belief that they’re being cheated means they’ll misinterpret everything they see through that lens,” she said.

Starbird’s group partnered with Stanford Internet Observatory on the Election Integrity Partnership ahead of the 2020 elections – a campaign during which a flood of misinformation swirled around the internet, with daily claims of unproven voter fraud.

Starbird and her team helped document that flood, and in return congressional Republicans and conservative attorneys attacked her research, alleging it amounted to censorship and violated the first amendment.

Starbird, a misinformation researcher, herself became the subject of an ongoing misinformation campaign – but said she would not let that deter her from her research. Her team wasn’t the only target of the conservative campaign against misinformation research, she noted: researchers across the country have received subpoenas, letters and criticism, all attempting to frame misinformation research as partisan and as censorship.

Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, served as the ringleader of this effort in Congress, using his power to investigate groups and researchers that work to counter misinformation, particularly as it related to elections and Covid-19. One practice that especially upset Jordan and his colleagues was when researchers would flag misleading information to social media companies, who would sometimes respond by amending factchecks or taking down false posts entirely.

That is censorship. One can argue that it is justified censorship, but it is censorship.

Nor is it just Congress attacking anti-misinformation work. A federal lawsuit from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that the Biden administration violated the first amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech.

The Guardian’s writer, Rachel Leingang, has phrased that last sentence so that it could easily be read as saying the whole of the phrase “the Biden administration violated the first amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech” has the status of a mere allegation, a question yet to be decided. I hope Ms Leingang will forgive me if I clear up that potential ambiguity. The U.S. courts may or may not rule that the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the censorship happened.

A new lawsuit from the state of Texas and two rightwing media companies takes aim at the Global Engagement Center, a state department agency that focuses on how foreign powers spread information.

The pressure campaign has chilled misinformation research just ahead of the pivotal 2024 presidential election, as some academics switch what they focus on and others figure out ways to better explain their work to a mixed audience. One thing they will probably no longer do is flag posts to social media companies, as the practice remains an issue in several ongoing court cases.

Hear that? They’ve changed now. Censorship was so 2020. They aren’t going to do that any more. Probably.

There are some forms of privatisation of public property that socialists like just fine

“Alex Salmond given part of the Stone of Scone by son of student who stole it”, reports the Telegraph:

Alex Salmond was given part of the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, by the son of one of the students who stole it from Westminster Abbey, newly released Scottish Cabinet papers have disclosed.

Prof Sir Neil MacCormick presented the then First Minister with part of the stone, on which kings and queens of Scotland were traditionally crowned, in 2008.

Sir Neil’s father, John MacCormick, advised and bankrolled the Glasgow University students who took the 150kg stone from the Abbey on Christmas Day 1950.

So Professor Sir (note the Sir!) Neil MacCormick felt free to give away this historic artefact because he inherited it from his father, who stole it while it was on display to the public. And Mr Alex Salmond, presumably on the strength of then being First Minister of Scotland, felt free to take an object of significance in Scottish history into his personal possession as if it were a mere curio. Nice to see the right of conquest and the hereditary principle being reaffirmed in this day and age.

I wish this Quote of the Day were less appropriate to the year just gone

“I stayed up last night… Not so much to welcome the new year, but to make sure the old one leaves…”

Ben David, in the comments to the previous post.

Still, hope springs eternal in the human breast. 2024, here we come.

Non-sarcastically, why am I so sure that this image is generated by AI?

This post is reposted from a source I do not trust (Double Down News) by a person I do not trust (Dr Susan Michie, adviser to the SAGE committee and literal communist) on a topic (the Israel-Hamas war) where AI-generated fakery is rampant. Remember the six-fingered Palestinian child?

Closer examination give yet more causes for doubt – the bizarrely elongated finger on the left hand of the soldier second from the left, the way that, perhaps in compensation, the right hand of the rightmost man seems to have no fingers at all. There is something wrong about the bipod of his rifle, too. The angle of the windows on the left of the picture looks off. The flame coming out of the window is too neatly defined.

But what interests me is that I thought “AI-generated” before I looked closely enough to see any of that. Possibly the thing that tipped me off, if I am right at all, was that all the elements of the alleged photograph looked exposed to the same degree, when one would think that the glow of the flames would dominate. Even that form of words, which I got from my husband, is more explanatory than whatever it was that screamed “fake” to me.

That said, this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer.

Latine scribe, calumniator!

“Anglis adhuc mundum regit, sed id necessario OK non est. Tempus est vim suam cohibere?”, writes Michele Gazzola in the Guardian.

Pro disertis, clara sunt beneficia — aliis, sunt ingentia gratuita. Hic viae sunt nonnullae ad boost iustitiam linguisticam

What good things have happened this year?

I’ll start.

Javier Milei.

Lots of space launches.

And?

Help me make an inspirational poster

Taking a Christmas break from my customary snarkiness, I mean this without irony. I would like to make one of those motivational posters with an inspirational quotation or slogan on it. The slogan would express an idea that I already believe strongly, only I have not yet found the best way to express it.

The starting point is a slogan that has many variants, but the version I saw first and like best is:

“If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was always yours. If it does not, it never was.”

Knowing my audience, I shall link to the demotivational version as well. It’s a quote from B.J. Novak, who was probably a ray of sunshine until he played the temp in the American version of The Office.

So, the slogan for which I reach is similar to that one (the motivational version, not Novak’s), but is about acceptance rather than love. Something like:

“If you seek acceptance, don’t demand it, ask for it. If the other person says yes, you know you are truly and freely accepted. If they say no,

Then what? I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure if it’s even a good idea to mention the consequences of the other person saying “no”. I suppose I could say “better to be aware they do not accept you than to be deceived by them feigning acceptance out of fear, which will probably lead to them stabbing you in the back whenever they get the chance”, but that one’s a bit of a downer to put on a poster. The point I really want to make is that true acceptance cannot be had if the person being asked to do the accepting does not have the option to say “no”.

The reason I seek a more pithy way to express this sentiment than anything I have come up so far is that, as I said a few years back in a post called “To knock on the door is better than booting it in”, “Like some warrior cultures of old, the grievance culture holds getting what you want by asking or peaceably trading to be fit only for slaves. The superior person does not ask for what they want; they demand it.” This attitude is culturally dominant in both senses.

I can see why this disastrous misapprehension arose. There are circumstances where the only moral course is to demand one’s just rights as rights, with not the slightest hint of pleading. But there can be no right to be accepted, just as there can be no right to be loved.

Sad about all those people killed in the Lockerbie air disaster. I guess the stars were against them that night.

First Minister
@ScotGovFM
On the 35th anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster, First Minister @HumzaYousaf has expressed sympathies to those who lost loved ones on board Pan Am Flight 103 and on the ground.

The word “disaster” has its origins in astrology. It means “ill-starred”. But the people killed on 21st December 1988 were not killed by bad weather, human error, or an unfortunate conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. They were murdered.

Pan Am Flight 103 (PA103/PAA103) was a regularly scheduled Pan Am transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via a stopover in London and another in New York City. The transatlantic leg of the route was operated by Clipper Maid of the Seas, a Boeing 747 registered N739PA. Shortly after 19:00 on 21 December 1988, while the aircraft was in flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, it was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew in what became known as the Lockerbie bombing.[1] Large sections of the aircraft crashed in a residential street in Lockerbie, killing 11 residents. With a total of 270 fatalities, it is the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom.

[…]

In 2003, Gaddafi accepted Libya’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid compensation to the families of the victims, although he maintained that he had never given the order for the attack.