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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On the evening of the 22nd March, visitors to the main UK politics subreddit, /r/ukpolitics found a mysterious message saying that the subreddit, which has nearly 400,000 members, had been set to “private” by its own volunteer moderators.
It was the beginning of a cascade. The lights are going off all over Reddit! Subreddit after subreddit was set to private in sympathy with /r/ukpolitics. Most of them dealt with topics unrelated to politics. At its peak the wave of protest closures affected subreddits collectively having tens of millions of members all over the world.
To understand why this protest against Reddit by its own users gained such traction, we need to go back to the 8th of March when the Spectator published an article by its unlikeliest new writer, the radical left wing “gender critical” feminist Julie Bindel, called “The Green partyâs woman problem”. It contained the lines,
The formidable feminist author and journalist Bea Campbell, a former Green party candidate, resigned from the party last year after being disciplined, in part for refusing to keep quiet about the shocking and disturbing Aimee Challenor case.
That brief reference to “the Aimee Challenor case” was to have dramatic consequences. A hyperlink on the word “case” linked in turn to this Independent article dated 13 January 2019:
Aimee Challenor: Green star failed to properly alert party of father’s child rape charges Independent investigation found transgender activist only alerted two colleagues in ‘informal’ Facebook message
Having parted ways with the Greens, Aimee Challenor joined the Liberal Democrats. Once again her association with the party ended as a result of child safeguarding issues related to someone with whom she lived. This time it was her fiancé Nathaniel Knight. He claims his twitter account was hacked.
A point to note: these events were widely reported. Given a prompt about a person who had left both the Greens and the Lib Dems under a cloud, anyone who follows UK political news would probably be able to dig up her name in half a dozen keystrokes.
Getting back to the main story, at about quarter to eleven on the morning of the 23rd, the ukpolitics subreddit reappeared. It now carried the following announcement:
→ Continue reading: The Streisand-Challenor effect
Today’s Daily Mail:
“Nothing to see here: How most of the left-leaning US media totally ignored Biden’s Air Force One stumble – while the foreign press did their job for them”
The Mail’s Keith Griffith writes,
Major left-leaning U.S. press outlets are largely avoiding mention of President Joe Biden’s repeated stumbles as he boarded Air Force One, while many foreign publications are devoting prominent coverage to the incident.
As of Friday afternoon, the homepages of MSNBC, CBS News, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and New York Times had no mention of Biden’s stumbling incident earlier in the day at Joint Base Andrews.
and
In contrast to the lack of interest in Biden’s stumbles, mainstream U.S. outlets heavily covered an incident last year, in which Trump took mincing baby-steps down a ramp at West Point, which he later explained was ‘very slippery.’
Although Trump did not stumble during the incident, it sparked rampant speculation about his health and criticism over his capacities, including from Biden himself.
‘Look at how he steps and look at how I step,’ Biden said in September 2020, in a clip featured on CNN. ‘Watch how I run up ramps and he stumbles down ramps. OK? Come on.’
If you want to follow Mr Biden’s own advice and compare Trump to Biden on Trip Advisor, the indefatigable New York Post is one of the few US papers with clips of both.
“Coronavirus: Face masks could increase risk of infection, medical chief warns” reported the Independent on March 12 2020:
Members of the public could be putting themselves more at risk from contracting coronavirus by wearing face masks, one of Englandâs most senior doctors has warned.
Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer, said the masks could âactually trap the virusâ and cause the person wearing it to breathe it in.
âFor the average member of the public walking down a street, it is not a good ideaâ to wear a face mask in the hope of preventing infection, she added.
Sales of the masks have sky-rocketed since the Covid-19 outbreak began, with retailers including Boots and Amazon selling out of the products before the virus had even taken hold in the UK.
Asked about their effectiveness, Dr Harries told BBC News: âWhat tends to happen is people will have one mask. They wonât wear it all the time, they will take it off when they get home, they will put it down on a surface they havenât cleaned.
âOr they will be out and they havenât washed their hands, they will have a cup of coffee somewhere, they half hook it off, they wipe something over it.
âIn fact, you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in.â
Asked if people are putting themselves more at risk by wearing masks, Dr Harries added: âBecause of these behavioural issues, people can adversely put themselves at more risk than less.â
I do not post this in order to mock Dr Harries. She made several reasonable points in the video. If she was nonetheless wrong about the overall effect of the population wearing masks, she was wrong in good company – that was medical orthodoxy at the time. I do not post this in order to advocate for or against wearing face masks. (I wear one when circumstances require, while seeking to avoid the behaviours that Dr Harries warned against.) I post it to show how dangerous it is to censor unorthodox views on medical issues. If would-be censors like the Guardian‘s George Monbiot had had his way, we would have banned all talk of mask-wearing in March 2020.
“Second translator of Amanda Gormanâs Joe Biden inauguration poem dumped”, reports the Times.
A fresh controversy over translations of the poem read out at President Bidenâs inauguration has erupted after a Catalan man said that his version had been rejected because he had the wrong âprofileâ.
Amanda Gormanâs five-minute poem, The Hill We Climb, was initially commissioned to be translated by Victor Obiols, a 60-year-old Catalan poet and musician. Five thousand copies of the version by Obiol, who has translated works by Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare, were set to be brought out by the Catalan publishing house Univers by April 8.
However, Ester Pujol, of Univers, told the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia that the authorâs US agency had subsequently expressed a preference that the translation be done instead by âa woman who is young, an activist and a poet, with experience as a translator and, preferably, African American.â Gorman is 23 and black.
How many African-Americans speak Catalan – at all, let alone to the level required of a professional translator? How many Americans speak Catalan? Most translation agencies insist that their translators work into their native tongue because it is very rare for anyone to gain a command of a second language equal to that of their first. Why do Ms Gorman’s US agents value the nationality of their translator above their having Catalan as their mother tongue? Even if we assume that the only reason Gorman’s agents specified “African-American” was that they have set their autocorrect with that as the replacement for “black”, there still cannot be many people who fulfil all those criteria. There are not many black Catalans. Experienced translators of any race are not likely to be young.
The Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, 29, resigned as translator of Gormanâs work in the Netherlands after criticism that she was not black.
Despite the precedent, the Catalan poet was taken aback by the publisherâs decision. âIf I cannot translate a poet because she is a woman, young, black, and a American of the 21st century, then I cannot translate Homer either because I am not an eighth-century BC Greek,â he said. âNor could I have translated Shakespeare because I am not a 16th-century Englishman.â
In the (Glasgow) Herald, Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf writes,
New Hate Crime Bill extends protection of people
Odd headline. Make that some people.
This week Parliament will consider further amendments to the Hate Crime Bill before a final vote on our proposed reforms
By “Parliament” Mr Yousaf means the one with him in it, i.e. the Scottish Parliament. The SNP love this rhetorical trick of pretending the Scottish Parliament is the only one of any relevance to Scotland. Wishing this to be so is a perfectly legitimate goal, but pretending it is already so is premature. Of course all the Scottish people have to do to ensure that the Parliament with Mr Yousaf in it becomes the sole decider of what laws they live under is carry on voting for Mr Yousaf’s party in the numbers they now do.
The new Bill will modernise and consolidate hate crime law and provide clarity. It brings together various piecemeal additions and changes to the law made over time, while also recognising the need to clamp down further on this all too pervasive, damaging behaviour.
As a person of colour the law has protected me, for the last 35 years, from anyone stirring up hatred against me due to my race.
The law cannot have done a very good job of protection, given that he said in the previous paragraph that hate crime was “pervasive”, and that he complains a few paras down about all the hate he receives.
This Bill now extends that protection to people in relation to their age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or variation of sex characteristics (previously known as intersex).
The legislation has come a long way. As Parliament has been considering the detail of the Bill the Government has listened – making changes and reflecting on concerns to improve a piece of powerful legislation that I believe is fitting of the Scotland we live in.
That being the Scotland where race hate crime is pervasive.
Robust Parliamentary scrutiny has been essential to the process.
Concerns over the impact that stirring up hatred offences could have on freedom of expression were raised. And these have been listened to and are being acting upon. We have made a number of significant changes already, including ensuring that any successful prosecution for the new offences must prove that the person intended to stir up hatred. We have also inserted a “reasonable person test” to clarify that when determining if behaviour is “threatening or abusive” an objective test is applied.
By “we” Mr Yousaf means that the SNP reluctantly accepted one amendment from the Scottish Conservative MSP Adam Tomkins. That link takes you to a Guardian article that also notes that “Tomkins and fellow Conservative Liam Kerr failed to secure an amendment that they argued would protect disagreements, for example, at the family dinner table.”
Mr Yousaf continues,
The Justice Committee has offered critical scrutiny and recently held constructive discussions on a freedom of expression clause that would further protect everyone’s right to freedom of speech.
You don’t say whether these discussions led to any action, Mr Yousaf. Hint: they didn’t. His only reason for cooing about how constructive the discussions were is to conceal the fact that the this clause that would theoretically further protect everyone’s right to freedom of speech was not actually constructed, just talked about.
I am confident that our proposed amendment on this now strikes the right balance between protecting groups targeted by hate crime and respecting people’s rights to free speech.
A number of national Women’s Organisations, such as Scottish Women’s Aid, Engender and Rape Crisis Scotland have raised concerns over the inclusion of a Sex Aggravator.
I’m not surprised. They should never have let a Sex Aggravator sit on a parliamentary committee. → Continue reading: The Hate Crime (Scotland) Bill is due to pass tonight
“Secret Pontins blacklist prevented people with Irish surnames from booking”, reports the Guardian.
For the benefit of readers not from either the UK or Ireland, Pontins is a company that runs holiday camps, and 90% of British or Irish adults who read that headline understood without reading another word that it was not the Irish in general that Pontins wanted to blacklist, it was Irish Travellers. (The Travellers, or MincĂ©iri as the current term is, are a separate ethnic group to the Gypsies or Romani but are often grouped together due to their similar way of life.) Reports of this incident from several sources, such as this later Guardian article by SĂ©amas OâReilly that I saw after most of this post had been written, confirm that people with those names were not banned from Pontins outright, it was rather that Pontins staff were told to check their addresses against the postcodes of Traveller sites before allowing them entry.
The Guardian continues,
Outrage over anti-Traveller list of âundesirable guestsâ that was sent to booking operators
A blacklist circulated by the holiday park operator Pontins telling its staff not to book accommodation for people with Irish surnames has been described as âcompletely unacceptableâ by Downing Street.
The list of âundesirable guestsâ was sent to booking operators, who were told: âWe do not want these guests on our parks.â It said: âPlease watch out for the following names for ANY future bookings.â
The list, which included names such as Carney, Boylan, McGuinness and OâMahoney, was an example of âanti-Traveller discriminationâ, a spokesperson for Boris Johnson said. The document had a picture of a wizard holding up a wand and staff declaring: âYou shall not pass.â
The Guardian did not open comments for that story. As I said in 2011, that is because it knows perfectly well that Guardian readers hate gypsies and travellers.
However the Times did allow readers to comment on its report of the same events, “Pontins had blacklist of Irish surnames”. The comments, as I knew they would, consisted almost entirely of personal accounts of being the victims of theft, violence and intimidation at the hands of Travellers. This outpouring reminded me of something, but I could not put my finger on what. Then it came to me: the #MeToo movement. That came about when women compared notes about their bad treatment by predatory men. Exchanging their “Me, Too” experiences gave these women the knowledge that they were not alone and brought forth a demand that men in general should examine and change their behavioural norms. The #MeToo movement for women was celebrated by modern society, even when it degenerated into condemning men as a group without trial or investigation. Take note of both halves of that sentence. To forbid people to speak of their bitterness only embitters them more. But the historical record of “Speak Bitterness” movements should terrify anyone who cares about justice.
One of the most highly recommended comments to the Times article came from Patrick Joseph Maloney, who said,
As an Irishman with a name that might have made the list, I sympathise with companies that have to walk this tightrope of exclusion and inclusion.
Not all Irish Travellers are guilty of bad behaviour but a sufficiently large enough minority are.
I understand that the Chinese government recently introduced classes for their tourists on how to behave abroad?
Perhaps Traveller rights groups might consider similar moves as an alternative to simply waving the race and discrimination card? The problem is not one of race….. but behaviour.
The government says it wants to end prejudice against Travellers and passes laws to forbid discrimination against them. Mr Maloney’s comment illustrates how spectacularly that effort to bring about goodwill by law has failed.
Some readers, particularly those new to libertarian ideas, will find it hard to believe that anyone could have any other motive than hatred of Travellers for saying that it would be better for all parties, including the Travellers themselves, if there were no such laws. I can only beg such readers to ask themselves if our current policy is working. People who have done nothing wrong being turned away merely for appearing to belong to a certain ethnic group is clearly unjust. But that is not a description of the bad old days before the Race Relations Act 1965 and the many anti-discrimination laws that followed, it is a description of life in Britain in 2021 with all the laws in place. All that has been achieved by more than half a century of ever-increasing punishments and social pressure is to ensure that these days the “undesirables” are usually excluded by means of a nod and a wink. Whichever Pontins employee wrote that list was unusually careless to put it on paper. But the fact that they did put it on paper, complete with jokey reference to The Lord of the Rings, shows how accepted anti-Traveller hostility is. You don’t put Gandalf clip art on top of an announcement that is likely to be met with outrage. The writer assumed that the staff would accept what he or she saw as the obvious need to keep Travellers out. Evidently most of them did accept it: the blacklist operated for quite some time before someone blew the whistle. I do not consider it wicked to ask what experiences brought the Pontins staff to this state of mind. I assume that there was an implied “after what happened last time” there.
Open prejudice is less cruel than secret prejudice. The sign in the boarding-house window saying “No blacks, No Irish” can be argued against. The quiet word to a member of staff about those people cannot be. A company that openly refuses the custom of members of certain groups purely on account of their race can be challenged – and they lose the custom. But turn them away with a smile and a lie and it can go on forever.
For some, that outcome is fine. What they object to in the anti-racism laws is not that the laws make racism worse but the laws put them to the inconvenience of having to lie. To be clear I object to these laws in principle (people should be free to associate with whom they please) and because I want to see a world where people are judged on what they have done as individuals, not on what someone else with the same surname did. True, there is evidence that the crime rate among Travellers is statistically high, and it is no more wrong to suggest that they need to ask themselves what they should do to change those parts of their subculture that are harmful than it is to urge that males or whites should do the same. But before you condemn the Travellers as a group remember that, like all of us, they have been moulded by their history. Ach, why repeat myself? I said it in my post of 2011 as well as I ever will:
âWelfareâ has continued its steady work of ruin. I read a very fine article in the Telegraph about a decade ago which I cannot now find. It described with sadness rather than hostility how, although gypsies had lived half outside the law since time immemorial, there had at one time been countervailing incentives to build relationships of trust with settled people. The gypsies had regular circuits and seasonal work. They needed pitches, employment and customers. They needed people to remember them from last time as good workers and fair dealers. Welfare has eroded that, and their former means of making a living have gone the way of the cart horse and the tin bucket. Nor is the difficulty just that technology has moved on, it is also that the bureaucratic net of form-filling and taxes has tightened so that the casual jobs they once could do within the law must now be done outside it. As in the drugs trade, in illegal trade in labour where there can be no redress for swindling on either side, such swindling is commonplace.
In that post I also said much more hated Travellers and Gypsies had become in my village since I first came to live there. Since then it has only got worse. But, as I also said back then, “I really donât think it is the gypsies themselves who have changed so much. What has changed in the last few years is that they have become a state-protected group. God help them. State protection is better than state persecution as cancer is better than a knife in the ribs.”
Nine years later the cancer is further advanced. For all that, I do not think it is incurable. Human nature is immutable, but laws are not. For now reversing the spread of “equalities” legislation seems politically impossible, but as the years go by and ever-multiplying laws against hate never seem to reduce it, people of goodwill will start to wonder if it might be time to try another strategy.
In 2012 scientists found the Higgs Boson. In 2015, after fifty years of trying, they finally found gravitational waves.
In 2021…
Leave camp turned Brexit into a religion to capture votes, study finds
Vote Leave turned Brexit into its own religion to capture supporters, a recent study by the universities of Birmingham and Warwick has found.
Researchers said slogans such as “take back control” used the NHS as the country’s Holy Grail that could be rescued from European forces threatened by Britain’s unique historical place in the world.
They also said Brexiteers focused on secular theological concepts such as sovereignty and nation to engage voters.
A study found it. It is Science.
Two days ago the BBC reported that the Supreme Court had ruled that Uber drivers are workers rather than being self-employed.
With what glad hosannas did the drivers greet the news of their liberation!
Er, no. As Sam Dumitriu writes in CapX,
Putting questions of legality to one side, itâs clear Uberâs business model works for drivers. If you donât believe me, just ask them. Countless surveys have found that the majority of Uber drivers are happy with the status quo and would not sacrifice flexibility for greater security.
A survey carried out by Oxford University academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Thor Berger, in partnership with Uber, found that drivers reported higher levels of life satisfaction compared to other London workers, despite on average earning less. And, counter to the conventional wisdom, drivers typically worked full-time in other jobs before choosing to shift to Uber. Furthermore, more than four-fifths of drivers agreed with the statement: âBeing able to choose my own hours is more important than having holiday pay and a guaranteed minimum wageâ. They found that drivers would accept a move to fixed hours â but only if it came with a 25% pay rise.
Perhaps they had looked across the Atlantic and seen the results of California’s attempt to save gig economy workers from working in the gig economy:
In Uberâs home state of California, 70% of drivers backed Proposition 22, a ballot measure that created a carve-out for ridesharing services from the stateâs tough laws on freelance work. The measure passed with 59% of the vote in November.
AB 5, the freelancer law which Prop 22 was responding to highlights how interventions designed to solve a problem in one market can have unintended consequences in others.
When it passed, Vox published an article: âGig workersâ win in California is a victory for workers everywhereâ. A month later they published another article: âFreelance journalists are mad about a new California law. Hereâs whatâs missing from the debate. The alternative to AB5 would be worseâ. Two months later, Vox Media itself cut hundreds of freelance writing jobs in California.
What the BBC story looked like 41 minutes after it was published:
The hashtag #FireGinaCarano trended on Twitter for hours following an anti-Semitic story the actress shared on her Instagram.
The link to the Wayback Machine does not seem to be working at the moment, so until it comes back online you will just have to trust me when I say that was the wording that caused me to notice the story a few days ago, though I was too busy to do anything about it at the time. I have only watched a few episodes of The Mandalorian and could not have named Gina Carano. But I knew from the mealy-mouthed paraphrase that was all the BBC gave us of her exact words that something was up.
What the BBC story looks like now:
The hashtag #FireGinaCarano trended on Twitter for hours following a story shared on her Instagram, that some branded anti-Semitic.
Well they corrected it, didn’t they? What’s the problem?
The second part of the problem is that the correction is scarcely less slanderous than the original and is more cowardly. All the “correction” does is allow the BBC to make the accusation of anti-semitism via un-named proxies rather than in its own voice.
The first part of the problem is how did the BBC writer ever come to think Carano’s words were anti-semitic at all? Here is what she actually said, reported by The Scotsman, which unlike the BBC provided a screenshot of Carano’s own words:
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…. even by children.
đ
âBecause history is edited, most people today donÂŽt realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
“How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?â
Overblown, yes, melodramatic yes, self-indulgent in the comparison of current political spats to the Holocaust, yes, and someone needs to tell her that when discussing mass murder sad-face emojis are not helpful – but nothing in what she said was hostile to Jews. I can answer my own question of how the BBC’s un-named reporter came to announce as fact that those words were anti-semitic. It is because BBC journalists have got out of the habit of reading the tweets and Instagram posts that prompt so much of their reporting nowadays. Oh, they scan them to check that the link isn’t dead and does not refer to some completely unrelated person in Iowa, but the idea of reading, of mentally processing the words and weighing what the author meant, is beyond their pay grade.
I do not complain about the fact that most BBC stories are repackagings of stories that were first reported somewhere else: that is inevitable. My complaint is that the BBC increasingly no longer bothers to undo the package and take a look at what lies inside. The only check the BBC really does take care over is the postmark: does this come to us from a reputable source, such as the New York Times or angry people on Instagram.
I mention the New York Times with due reverence. While the BBC was an early adopter of the technique of placing the correction to what was a front page story on page 28B, the NYT was the true pioneer.
As Roger Kimball writes,
And the New York Times, true to form, has been a veritable fount of misinformationâan ironical contingency since the paper has recently called for a âreality czarâ to combat âmisinformation,â i.e., ideas with which they disagree. Take its account of what happened to Officer Brian Sicknick, who died on January 8, two days after the Capitol mĂ©lee. That same day, our former paper of record reported that Sicknick died after â[P]ro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy[!], overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher. . .â
Click the link. Youâll see that an announcement that the column, though originally published January 8, had been updated February 12. Now that sentence is missing, though they donât say so, and Sicknick died ofâwell something else.
Kimball goes on to say, “The Times wasnât alone” and to link to this link-filled column by Julie Kelly that gives chapter and verse of how the New York Times spread the meme that Brian Sicknick was definitely and deliberately bludgeoned to death far and wide.
The mechanism the NYT used is the same as the BBC used in the Gina Carano story. They say something false. Could be deliberate, could just be believing what they want to believe, could be honest error. But anyway, after a few days have gone by someone in the editorial room gets like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden after their scrumping session: And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. So the reporters sew a few leaves – The New York Times Retracts the Sicknick Story – and resignedly wear the aprons around the office a few times while hoping that everyone will think that hand-crafted leafwear is a fashion choice.
Of course anyone who was paying attention has known for at least a month that we do not know exactly how Officer Sicknick died. That is exactly why Niall Kilmartin wrote the following almost prophetic post for Samizdata exactly a month ago: “All who died on the 6th supported Trump. What else do we truly know?”.
Alas, the caveat “anyone who was paying attention” excludes 80% of modern journalists.
Significantly, the rapidly growing UK white-nationalist group Patriotic Alternative is actively targeting younger recruits and recently started Call of Duty Warcraft gaming tournaments for its supporters.
This warning comes from an article by Mark Townsend in the Guardian‘s Sunday sister, the Observer, with the title “How far right uses video games and tech to lure and radicalise teenage recruits”.
“MSPs back criminalising hate speech at the dinner table”, reports the (Glasgow) Herald
HATE speech in the home is set to be criminalised after a Tory attempt to stop it failed at Holyrood.
Critics fear it could lead to over-heated dinner table conversations being investigated by the police under the Scottish Governmentâs new Hate Crimes Bill.
However MSPs on the justice committee agreed with Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf that there should be no exemption for hateful speech and conduct just because it was in a private dwelling.
He said the law often dealt with events in the home, and an exemption could mean, for example, that someone who urged people in their house to attack a synagogue, but then did not take part, could not be punished for inciting the crime.
Humza Yousaf’s choice of example is disingenuous. There has never been a “dwelling exemption” when it came to inciting a crime, and no one has suggested there should be one. The amendment allowing a dwelling exemption that was unsuccessfully tabled by the Tory MSP Liam Kerr related only to the “stirring up of hatred”.
It is disturbing enough that such an amorphous charge should ever be made a matter of law at all, but whatever he might think of the Hate Crime Bill as a whole, Kerr’s proposed amendment in this instance was limited to suggesting that the rule whereby it becomes a crime to stir up hatred would be suspended if âwords or behaviour are used by a person inside a private dwelling and are not heard or seen except by other persons in that or another dwellingâ. In other words Kerr did not think it should be a crime to stir up a particular emotion in another person if done in private. By seven votes to two, the Justice Committee of the Scottish Parliament disagreed. Assuming the Bill passes, it will thus be a crime in Scotland to say words deemed to be hateful, even if done in your own home.
This new crime having been created, will failure to report this crime itself be a crime? According to the website “Ask the Police”, “Whilst there is no legal requirement to report a crime, there is a moral duty on everyone of us to report to the police any crime or anything we suspect may be a crime.” Since asking the same question in “Ask the Scottish Police” redirected me to the same answer, I assume this answer also applies to the separate Scottish legal system. That is only slightly reassuring. Once reported, a potential crime must be investigated. The suspect must be questioned. Witnesses must be called. By the nature of this new crime the suspects and witnesses are likely to be the family members of the accuser. To many that will be a feature not a bug.
I call it a “new” crime, but that is a misnomer. The Scottish Government – soon to be the Scottish State if the ruling party of the current Scottish Government has its way – is set to return to methods of maintaining order that are very old.
“Piers Corbyn has been arrested over leaflets comparing the UK’s Covid-19 vaccine rollout to Auschwitz”, the BBC reports.
The 73-year-old brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said he voluntarily attended a police station on Wednesday.
He was then arrested on suspicion of malicious communications and public nuisance.
The leaflets were offensive. A recent headline in the Evening Standard described vaccination against Covid-19 as a “safe path to freedom”. The leaflets implied that this was a lie by photoshopping a picture of the entrance to the Nazi concentration camp so that its gates appeared to bear the phrase about vaccines rather than “Arbeit Macht Frei”.
Tacky. But if we took to arresting every fool who compares their political opponents to Nazis there would soon be more people in the nick than out of it. Calling people Nazis is not illegal. Being wrong is also not illegal.
If we want to convince people that vaccines are safe, try convincing them that vaccines are safe. As in try to change their opinions by argument. The only thing the arrest and silencing of anti-vaxxers does is make people wonder what the government is trying to hide.
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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, âPorcupinesâ, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty FrĂ©dĂ©ric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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