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“PAY UP OR SHUT UP” – “TRILLIONS NOT BILLIONS” – “Global North, PAY UP!” These are some of the signs being held up by climate activists in a photograph taken at the recently concluded COP29 conference in Baku. Perhaps the women holding the “Pay up or shut up” sign are unaware of how many citizens of the Global North wish their governments would take the second option. More probably these activists are well aware that, whatever the citizens of those countries might want, said governments are committed to taking “climate action” and are positively addicted to talking about taking climate action. The link takes you to a Guardian article that continues,
It was only on the last scheduled day of two weeks of negotiations at the UN Cop29 climate summit that developed countries put a financial commitment on the table for the first time.
In reality, this offer took not just two weeks of talks to prepare, but nine years – since article 9 of the Paris agreement in 2015 made it clear that the rich industrialised world would be obliged to supply cash to developing countries to help them tackle the climate crisis.
When it finally arrived on Friday, the initial offer of $250bn (£200bn) a year by 2035 was widely derided as too low. Early the following morning, the countries upped the figure to $300bn, which ended up being accepted, albeit amid acrimony and cries of “betrayal”.
The Telegraph‘s account says,
Cop29 ground out a last-minute compromise deal on Saturday night that offers at least $300 billion (£240 billion) per year by 2035 to help poorer countries confront global warming and allows China’s contributions to remain voluntary.
The sum demanded by the less wealthy nations had been much more following two weeks of negotiations in Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea capital of Baku.
Mukhtar Babayev, the Cop29 president, declared open the final summit plenary after midnight on Saturday, two days after the conference was officially scheduled to end.
A final text was released following several sleepless nights for negotiators, with tensions boiling over as small island states and the world’s poorest countries walked out of one meeting.
A last-minute deal in extra time! Who could have guessed that would happen? Answer: anyone who remembered COP28 in 2023, COP27 in 2022, COP26 in 2021… but I did not come here entirely to recycle my post from this time last year (though I thought the title was amusing), but to point out that rich countries explicitly paying poor countries “to tackle the climate crisis” may have unexpected consequences.
Here is how Wikipedia describes Jizya:
Jizya (Arabic: جِزْيَة, romanized: jizya), or jizyah, is a type of taxation historically levied on non-Muslim subjects of a state governed by Islamic law
Modern writing about jizya as levied in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, tends to emphasize that, for the times, it represented a relatively good deal for adherents of minority religions. It gave those who paid it definite legal status as protected persons. Other descriptions of jizya are less palatable to the modern reader: many Muslim authorities saw the jizya “as a symbol of humiliation to remind dhimmis of their status as a conquered people and their subjection to Islamic laws” and, above all, as an incentive to convert to Islam.
Only it didn’t always work out that way. Robert Hoyland’s book In God’s Path tells of a pious governor of Khurasan called Ashras ibn ‘Abdallah who sent a missionary to bring the dhimmis under his rule to Islam:
…the man they hired preached in the environs of Samarkand, declaring that those who became Muslim would be freed of the poll tax, “and the people flocked to him.” . . . When Ashras realized that a consequence of his policy was a sharp drop in tax revenues, he ordered: “Take the tax from whomever you used to take it from,” and so they reimposed the poll tax on those who had become Muslim, prompting many to apostatize.
Later Islamic rulers learnt from this and similar episodes that they could avoid the trouble such a sharp reversal of policy caused and keep their jizya revenue flowing by quietly discouraging dhimmis from conversion, while, of course, loudly proclaiming how utterly vital it was that they should convert.
Daniel Ortega, remember him?
Ortega was one of the leaders of the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) that overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, thus ending 43 years of rule of Nicaragua by the Somoza dynasty.
For a while Sandinista rule in Nicaragua was popular at home and admired worldwide. A often-repeated line from left wing sources was that its success represented “the threat of a good example”, the good example being of a country thriving despite the opposition of the United States, which had supported Somoza, as it did many right-wing dictators in Latin America.
The admirers included teenage me. Not that I followed every twist and turn of Nicaragua’s politics, but, at first, it all sounded good. Land reform. Education. Healthcare. If I had known then what I know now “price fixing for commodities of basic necessity” might have told me what was coming, but I did not know then what I know now.
Several years went by and a few discordant notes started to spoil the chorus of praise. The forcible ejection from their ancestral lands of the Miskito Indigenous people (at that time everyone, even the Guardian, called them “the Miskito Indians”) was one ugly incident that I remember noticing. This Time article from 1983, “Nicaragua: New Regime, Old Methods” gives many other examples of Sandinista human rights abuses.
That said, the Sandinista National Liberation Front of that era under the leadership of Daniel Ortega still had enough decency left to hold an election and, having lost it, leave.
I will spare you a blow by blow account of Nicaraguan history from 1990 to the present day. You can read Wikipedia as well as I can. Suffice to say that half a lifetime later the reference books once again list the Sandinista National Liberation Front as the ruling party of Nicaragua and Daniel Ortega as its leader, and this time he has no plans to ever leave.
“Nicaragua: Ortega and wife to assume absolute power after changes approved”, the Guardian sorrowfully reports.
The Geneva-based UN human rights office in its annual report on Nicaragua warned in September of a “serious” deterioration in human rights under Ortega.
The report cited violations such as arbitrary arrests of opponents, torture, ill-treatment in detention, increased violence against Indigenous people and attacks on religious freedom.
The revised constitution will define Nicaragua as a “revolutionary” and socialist state and include the red-and-black flag of the FSLN – a guerrilla group-turned political party that overthrew a US-backed dictator in 1979 – among its national symbols.
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One of the Tintin books – remind me which – starts and ends with a picture of a couple of thuggish cops patrolling a shanty town. The only significant difference between the two scenes is that the party symbol on the police uniforms has changed.
Update: Thank you JJM, who supplied the name of the book. It was Tintin and the Picaros. ¡Viva [Tapioca / Alcázar] !
The Daily Mirror has an exclusive: “EXCLUSIVE: Farmer protest organiser was behind racist and homophobic posts online”
An organiser of this week’s Farmers’ protest in London wrote historic messages including racist and homophobic language online attacking Labour voters, it can be revealed.
“It can be revealed” – this looks like it’s going to be spicy.
Clive Bailye, one of the five farmers who organised the march in the capital, is founder of online community The Farming Forum.
But a Mirror investigation found Mr Bailye had posted a series of remarks using racist language, and disparaging remarks towards people with disabilities, the unemployed and LGBT people.
During the 2019 general election, Mr Bailye suggested “only a disabled, unemployed, black, LGBT, transgender, non tax paying, homeless, vegan immigrant in immediate need of NHS help” would vote for Labour.
I’m waiting for the part where Mr Bailye actually says that being a disabled, unemployed, black, LGBT, transgender, non tax paying, homeless, vegan immigrant in immediate need of NHS help is bad. Unless the Mirror thinks that voting Labour is bad?
In other disparaging comments about race, gender, religion, and disabled people, Mr Bailye suggested “the way to get something done is to claim […] you tripped an suffered injury […] maybe throw in something about being a disabled, transsexual, black, muslim, vegan with learning difficulties while your at it”.
Again, that is an assertion about how claiming to be any of those things gets more favourable treatment, not an actual insult to the groups concerned.
In more recent posts, this summer – in the fall out of riots across England – Mr Bailye posted asking whether “if accused of being far right / anti immigrant hate speech in court do we think saying “i’m on the spectrum” would get you off ?”.
Well, would it? The question is not unreasonable. The official guidelines of the Sentencing Council for England and Wales on sentencing offenders with mental disorders, developmental disorders, or neurological impairments state that the fact that an offender has such a condition should always be considered by the court, although it will not necessarily have an impact on sentencing. It is certainly commonplace for people in the dock to put forward their autism as a mitigating factor.
He also repeated a conspiracy theory in the same post, saying “We have two tier law in this country it seems”.
If belief in the existence of “two-tier law” in the UK is a conspiracy theory, it is one that half the country shares.
A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German.
That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning.
Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all cabinet ministers since September 2021 combined.
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use.
In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up something that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump.
Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a man in SS or SA uniform holding a placard with the words “Germans, do not buy from Jews!”. Niehoff gave the whole group of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”.
Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis?
Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column.
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is.
Will Hutton: “Farmers have hoarded land for too long. Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain”.
“Inheritance tax springs from the universally held belief that society has the right to share when wealth is transferred on death as a matter of justice.”
It is not universal.
“This is not confiscation, especially if the lion’s share of the bequest is left intact.”
It is confiscation.
“It is asking for a share.”
It is not asking.
Sometimes the journalist really is the story: “Telegraph journalist faces ‘Kafkaesque’ investigation over alleged hate crime”, reports the Telegraph.
A Telegraph journalist is facing a “Kafkaesque” investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last year.
Allison Pearson, an award-winning writer, has described how two police officers called at her home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated over the post on X, formerly Twitter, from a year ago.
In an article for The Telegraph, she said she was told by one officer that “I was accused of a non-crime hate incident. It was to do with something I had posted on X a year ago. A YEAR ago? Yes. Stirring up racial hatred apparently.”
When Pearson asked what she had allegedly said in the tweet, the officer said he was not allowed to disclose it. However, at this time last year, she was frequently tweeting about the October 7 attacks on Israel and controversial pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of London.
The officer also refused to reveal the accuser’s name. Pearson recalled: “‘It’s not the accuser,’ the PC said, looking down at his notes. ‘They’re called the victim.’”
An accused person is not told what crime they are alleged to have committed nor who is accusing them, but the police speak as if the crime is already proven. There was a time when Britain defined itself as a place where this could not happen.
Here is another account of the same events from GB News:
“Fury as police officers spend Remembrance Sunday knocking on journalist’s door over social media post: ‘A day celebrating freedom!’”
I am not a huge fan of celebrity chef and food campaigner Jamie Oliver, nor of children’s books whose main selling point is a sleb’s name on the cover, but this is just cruel:
Jamie Oliver apologises after his children’s book is criticised for ‘stereotyping’ First Nations Australians
The man once known as the Hammer of the Twizzlers has not merely apologised but professed himself “devastated” and pulled his book from sale worldwide. So how bad was it?
Billy and the Epic Escape, a humorous fantasy adventure novel, is set in England but involves a subplot where a wicked woman with supernatural powers teleports herself to Alice Springs to steal a child from a fictitiously named community called Borolama. She wants an Australian Indigenous child to join her press gang of kidnapped children who work her land because “First Nations children seem to be more connected with nature”. The adults responsible for Ruby, a young girl who lives in foster care and likes to eat desert bush food, are distracted by the woman’s promise of funding for their community projects. Once abducted, Ruby tells the English children who rescue and repatriate her that she can read people’s minds and communicate with animals and plants because “that’s the indigenous way”.
Ah, the Australian version of what TV Tropes calls the “Magical Negro”
She also tells them she is from Mparntwe (Alice Springs), yet uses words from the Gamilaraay people of New South Wales and Queensland when explaining her life in Australia.
OK, that is a research failure, or, more probably, a complete failure to realise that a quick browse of Wikipedia might be good. The (sadly almost extinct) Gamilaraay language is spoken in a region some 1,700 miles away from Alice Springs, where the unrelated Arrernte language is spoken. But given that this fictional character is already being portrayed as being able to read minds and talk to animals, surely the additional divergence from realism involved in depicting her as speaking the wrong language for her supposed place of origin does not make things much worse. It is like the way that the character Hikaru Sulu from Star Trek was meant to be Japanese but had a vaguely Filipino-sounding last name. Gene Rodenberry thought it symbolised intra-Asian peace or something. You could do that in the sixties and be praised for your progressive vision. These days the same behaviour gets your kids’ book placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, as if it were the junior version of Mein Kampf. There is no need for this. Though they did share an interest in healthy eating, Jamie Oliver is not Hitler. Give his silly book two stars on Amazon and move on.
I wish I were only talking about this:
“Essex Police Issue Update After WWII Bomb Safely Detonated in East Tilbury”
(This Twitter thread by Tony Brown @agbdrilling shows detailed pictures of how the bomb was found and safely exploded under sand.)
But the thing uppermost in my mind was actually this:
“Amsterdam rioters ‘planned Jew hunt on Telegram’ before they attacked Israeli football fans”
“Why has the American center right disappeared from the ballot box?” asks Jan-Werner Müller in the Guardian. Along the way, he takes a minute to say this about Ronald Reagan:
Infamously, he kicked off his 1980 election campaign in Mississippi – close to the site where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964 – and endorsed “states’ rights”.
This line of thinking seems odd. Sixteen years had gone by between the murder of the civil rights activists – almost certainly a crime carried out by Democrats – and Reagan launching the Republican campaign at a place nearby. Evidently Professor Müller thinks that a place where a crime occurred must remain off-limits for political activity for longer than sixteen years, lest having a campaign event there be taken as endorsement of the crime. If one took seriously the argument made by Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton that the infamous pro-Nazi German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 meant that Trump’s rally in the same venue in 2024 was tainted by co-location, then the time for which a place must not be used for political activity after a crime or extremist political event would be at least 85 years. This would rule out almost all of America. Good thing the limit only seems to apply to Republicans.
Update: having written the post above, I found that the point I wanted to make today had already been made far better in 2011 by David Kopel, writing in the Volokh Conspiracy website (now at Reason magazine): “Reagan’s infamous speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi”.
“Donald Trump closes in on victory with two crucial swing-state wins”, reports the Guardian.
I am glad that lawfare and censorship did not prove to be winning tactics.
“Elderly litter picker who voluntarily cleans up local area fined for forgetting walking stick”, the Telegraph reports.
An elderly volunteer litter picker has been handed a fine for accidentally leaving his walking stick by the roadside.
Alan Davies was “shocked, angry and upset” to be penalised by Walsall Council when he forgot his cane in Aldridge, West Midlands, on Sept 6.
Mr Davies and his friends had been on their daily litter pick along Longwood Lane and Hayhead Wood.
The grandfather said he drove off, forgetting to pick up his walking stick and a bag with his cushion inside, which he had placed by the roadside.
Mr Davies claims Walsall Council tracked him down after trawling through local CCTV footage.
He said council officers found his address by using his car’s number plate and sent him the fine last week.
And this is typical:
Mr Davies’s neighbour Ann said: “£150 is a lot of money for a pensioner. You cannot speak to the council on the phone, it has to be [by] email. Not everyone has the internet. Hopefully when people realise what Alan is being put through the council will back down.”
In the end Walsall Council did rescind the fine, although the story does not say whether Mr Davies ever got his walking stick back.
Some aspects of this story reminded me of the raid a few days ago by multiple agents of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on Mark and Daniela Longo’s home, which ended with the authorities killing a pet squirrel and raccoon. Why have officials in English-speaking countries become so sluggish in pursuing criminals but so dogged in the pursuit of harmless people? There has always been some incentive for cops and officials to go after someone who will not resist in preference to going after a criminal who might stab them, but why has it got so much worse in recent years? Perhaps it is because the number of bureaucrats has so multiplied that responsibility for a process is always divided.
Someone tweeting under the name of “Lyndon Baines Johnson”, a supporter of Kamala Harris, explains how he would like a Harris administration to deal with technological innovators:
Lyndon Baines Johnson
@lyndonbajohnson
If Harris wins, fairly high on the agenda should be finding new federal contractors so that SpaceX and Starlink are shown the door. -OS
8:05 PM · Nov 3, 2024
For all his grievous faults, the actual LBJ would have known how to describe that proposal in a few choice words. He wanted the Apollo program to succeed.
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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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