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]

WordPress plugins…

Which WordPress plugins are recommended for adding posts to Parler (which will be back) & Gab? I have axed the previous buttons for linking to Twitter & Facebook (basically fuck ’em).

Technical issues

We are experiencing some technical issues with the commenting system… working on it!

Update 14th August 07:30 UTC: comments are now working. Service may be spotty while we investigate the underlying issue.

How the quality of mercy is strained

Prosecutorial discretion is a power jealously protected by prosecutors, who will tell stories about forgoing prosecution of 18-year-old guys for “rape” of their 17-year-old girlfriends, of not prosecuting people for technicalities when the equities demanded they violate those technicalities. It all sounds so decent and commonsensical.

That’s how people like Epstein go forever in safety, how Clinton escaped prosecution for the same acts that put others in prison regularly, how the Jussie Smollets of the world walk away from their troubles . . .

You don’t need to be that well connected to benefit. Bobby b, commenter of this parish, worked for a time as a criminal defence lawyer in the twin cities of Minneapolis / St. Paul.

In my relatively short crimdef career, I asked prosecutors to use that kind of discretion many times. It worked for the judge’s kid, for the cop, and for two staffers of the St. Paul City Councilperson. They were the only ones deserving of the city/county attorneys’ mercy.

We’ve seen the US Department of Justice exercise a lot of ‘discretion‘ recently (and not so recently). Bobby warns us that this bit of the deep state runs a lot deeper than that.

(After ‘discretion’ finally ran out for him, I assume it was a different but liaising bit of the deep state who arranged that one fine day in the middle of the night the ‘forever’ safe Epstein suddenly expired in his ‘guarded’, ‘suicide-watched’ cell.)

Spin off site: The Great Realignment

Samizdata is a site that writes about things from a primarily libertarian perspective (which means different things to different people, of course). But the issue firmly wedged in the minds of many people here is not a libertarian/non-libertarian issue, it is political, and it has split the samizdatistas much as it has split the UK.

Brexit.

Samizdata needs to get back to writing the kind of things it has always done, and will continue to do, but that does not mean the overtly political stuff is not worth saying… just not here. Not on samizdata. After much pondering, I have decided it just isn’t what this site should be about.

And that is why we now have The Great Realignment, an overtly political site in its very early days for all the various things that do not really fit on samizdata. It is not a replacement, it is a fork in our particular road. I believe that we are now entering a period in which many of the assumptions that have underpinned the UK’s political order are no longer true, but the politics we see have not yet adjusted to this uncertain half-glimpsed future. This is what we will be discussing, with a UK focus, but we may well look at similar realignments elsewhere.

Check it out.

Site Renovation

We’re performing some long-needed maintenance on the site. If we did things right, you should not have noticed most of our work, but there will be a few user-visible changes.

First, you may have noticed that the site is much, much faster now than it was a few days ago. The (temporary) price of this has been the “Recent Comments” sidebar is now visible only on the front page. We will restore the sidebar when our new theme is complete.

Second, as implied above, we’re working on a new site theme. It should be much like the old on the surface. However, it will be much more maintainable, will feature better and more modern mobile support, and have (very) slightly updated aesthetics. It may also improve site performance even further, though things are quite snappy after our first round of changes.

Third, there has been a bit of site downtime in the last day, and will be a bit more in coming days as we complete our work. Downtime should never last more than ten to thirty minutes, so if the site is down, fret not, it will be back quickly.

Truly awful WordPress update broke many things…

Until we can figure out how to fix WordPress’ “helpful” update that over-rides CSS, Samizdata will be looking a bit weird… sorry folks.

And hey WordPress… fuck you.  Maybe time to start looking for an alternative to WordPress.

Smitebot on the rampage…

Smitebot seems to be yielding an unusual number of false positives lately, so if your innocuous comment got ‘smited’ and does not appear after half a day or so, feel free to send an email to reply-at-samizdata.net to alert me to the fact that your worthy remarks are languishing in smitebot’s cat box.

An experiment with Samizdata comments

I have enabled ‘nested’ comments for a while as an experiment, thus you will see a ‘reply’ option on each comments that may be used if you seek to reply to that remark specifically, rather than to the article in general. This may or may not become a permanent feature.

Experimenting with user comment editing

We are trying out a plug-in that lets people edit their comments on Samizdata for five minutes after posting them… no more eye watering typos, right? This is just an experiment to see if this causes anything else to break.

Samizdata meat interface componant has been repositioned

I am away from HQ for a few days and looking out over the horizon I see this…

TT-where-sc

Where am I*?

This may cause a delay in un-smiting legit comments that get smitten/smote/smitted by the samizdata Smite-Bot.

* Not you, Jennings, you already know 😛

Possible delays in unsmiting

The samizdata smitebot interface is well and truly out of London, drinking nice wine and eating mighty food, so there may be delays in unsmiting comments that get moderated by the dreaded samizdata smitebot. According to Google Maps, I could walk to Kiev in 170 hours or Warsaw in 92 hours. Where am I?

koscath

cubalibra-001

Delays continue…

As a key aspect of the samizdata interface is still far from Samizdata HQ, and the local internet is powered by small but very noisy frogs on a bamboo treadmill, rather than the usual industrious British hamsters on a steel one, delays in comment moderation will continue for several days…

balinese-hippo-wallowing

[/on David Attenborough Voice]

The hippopotamus is not a creature native to Indonesia, but upon being introduced, it threatens to become deeply invasive, shoving indigenous species out of their ecological niche by devouring their food and stealing their women

[/end David Attenborough Voice]