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]
|
And Hermer’s characterisation of historical events is in any case cobblers, of course. International law did not stop the actual honest-to-goodness Nazis first time around; American industry and Soviet manpower did that. The idea that if only we had had the ECHR in 1933 all of the unpleasantness of World War Two and the Holocaust could have been avoided is, to put it politely, absurd. One doesn’t constrain a belligerent regime through an ‘international rules-based system’; one does it through force, or the threat of it.
– David McGrogan
As AJP Taylor once wrote, “until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”.
That is emphatically not the case today. Having won the wars, the advocates of freedom comprehensively lost the peace. They lost to such a degree that those of us born and raised afterwards find it hard to comprehend the scale of the change.
It’s easiest to start with the size of the state. To be sure, socialism in Britain has receded from its high point. The nationalisation of coal, iron, steel, electricity, gas, roads, aviation, telecommunications, and railways has been mostly undone, although steel and rail are on the way back in.
But by comparison to our pre-war starting point, we live in a nearly unrecognisable country. In 1913, taxes and spending took up around 8 per cent of GDP. Today, they account for 35 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. To put it another way, almost half of all economic activity in Britain involves funds allocated at the behest of the government, and over half of British adults rely on the state for major parts of their income.
And if anything, this understates the degree of government control. Outcomes which are nominally left to the market are rigged by a state which sees prices as less as a way for markets to clear, and more as a tool for social engineering.
– Sam Ashworth-Hayes (£)
So, President Macron’s wife appeared to push him in the face.
A flood of analysis immediately followed. Here is the Guardian‘s offering: “Brigitte Macron’s push has reverberated around the world. Why was it met with a shrug in France?”
The standfirst to Pauline Block’s article is: “Whatever the explanation for the incident, the reaction points to backward French attitudes – including from the president himself”. Although Ms Bock probably did not write those words, they are a fair reflection of her article. It casts its net wide, and among the fish brought up from the depths are the age gap between the Macrons, the convention by which the French press says nothing about the romantic relationships of French politicians, how would we feel if it was a man pushing a woman, and…
That Macron doesn’t see the potential problem in the video points to a narrow, obsolete understanding of couple dynamics and domestic violence. He has twice proclaimed gender equality to be the “great cause” of his presidential mandates before refusing to properly fund it; he has spoken in support of the French actor Gérard Depardieu, who has recently been found guilty of sexual assault and is soon to be on trial again for rape; and to this day, the former interior minister and current justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, who was accused of sexual assault (the case has now been dismissed), has remained in Macron’s cabinet.
It would have been easy enough to turn this moment into a public health message. He could have simply said that he’s all right, thanks for your consideration, but that men who do experience violence should feel no shame in seeking help, using it as an opportunity to discuss domestic violence prevention. Instead, he mocked the “fools” who thought anything could be amiss.
But why should he turn it into a “public health message” if he and his wife really were only larking around? There is something very cavalier about the Guardian‘s “whatever” in “Whatever the explanation for the incident”. The true explanation of the incident is the only thing that matters. If it was play, even play mixed in with annoyance (and such pretended fighting moves can be used to defuse quarrels as well as to escalate them), then it is nobody’s business other than the Macrons’ own, and the demand that he – or she – use it as a teaching moment is intrusive. How would Mme Bock like it if a similar demand for an impromptu sermon were made of her after some innocent but embarrassing incident in her private life was accidentally caught on camera?
But if it was a real attack, there are indeed things to discuss. Does anyone have the right not to have their act of domestic violence investigated because their spouse or partner has not officially complained? Does anyone have the right not to have an act of domestic violence against them investigated because they have made no official complaint? Does it make any difference whether either party is male or female? Does it make a difference if either party is a political leader?
If it was real. But we don’t know if it was. Looking at the video at quarter speed, I still couldn’t decide. So all the questions above are repeated with “act of domestic violence” replaced with “what looks on the face of it like an act of domestic violence”.
In favour of the push crossing the threshold into being an assault, albeit not one intended to cause injury, is the fact that Mme Macron looked angry and refused to take her husband’s arm as she descended the steps, and that the Elysée Palace initially lied and said the video was fake. In favour of it being mere bickering horseplay is that the plane was full of bodyguards specifically charged with protecting the President of France.
What do you think?
Triggered by the political shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, the EU Commission launched a campaign to reassert control over Europe’s political narrative. Central to this is the rhetoric of ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, framed as threats to democratic stability. The Commission presents these programmes as public-interest research initiatives, but they constitute a form of soft authoritarianism, enshrining speech codes and narrowing acceptable opinion through bureaucratic manipulation. This is a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.
The Digital Services Act (DSA), which should be relabelled as the ‘Digital Surveillance Act’, is the crown jewel of this strategy. The legal framework enables the EU to regulate online speech under the guise of protection.
The MCC Brussels report underlines a disturbing fact: the Commission spends 31 per cent more on narrative control than on research addressing cancer, despite cancer causing nearly two million deaths annually in Europe. This prioritisation signals that Brussels fears the cancer of free speech more than the disease. Public funds are being funnelled unaccountably into a disinformation narrative designed to shape, limit and manage the terms of public debate.
– Norman Lewis
“Kneecap rapper charged with terrorism offence over alleged Hezbollah flag at London gig”, reports the Guardian:
Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs with the Irish rap trio Kneecap, has been charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig in London, police said.
The 27-year-old, of Belfast, was charged after an investigation by the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command and is scheduled to appear at Westminster magistrates court on 18 June.
Kneecap, named after the IRA’s favourite type of mutilation, are a rap group who sing in the Irish language. They’ve had it all, the award winning biopic, the laudatory coverage in the Guardian, the visit from Jeremy Corbyn. And now they’ve had the visit from the counter-terrorism police.
In these cases I never know whether to wrap myself in the mantle of libertarian righteousness and defend even these terrorist fanboys – it was only a piece of patterned cloth, FFS – or to say with Ulysses S. Grant that “I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”
The late Niall Kilmartin examined this dilemma in this post, “The equal oppression of the laws”. He gave a characteristically fair hearing to both sides, but concluded:
We will not lack for mind-broadening frenemies to defend even after tolerating ‘equality before the law’ arguments against the loudest “I can say it but you can’t” enforcers of the double-standard. The woker-than-thou of today love purging the woke of yesterday – they will supply.
Equality before the law is good in itself. Demanding equality of oppression before the law is a way to expose a dishonest process. Think carefully before judging it a betrayal of our war against the hate speech laws’ evil goal, rather than a way – that can be both honest in itself and effective – of waging it.
We have had laws against ‘inciting racial hatred’ for 60 years. It’s the settled, apparently inviolable position of British law that there are some things so dangerous they cannot be allowed to be said. We have taken, in effect, the precise opposite path to the United States. It was in the 1960s that the US Supreme Court gave the First Amendment its teeth, following a slew of high-profile cases brought by silenced civil-rights leaders. Where America came to see free speech as the answer to bigotry, Britain came to see censorship as essential to multicultural harmony.
– Tom Slater
No one with a shred of humanity could fail to sympathise with Leanne Lucas. On 29th July 2024, she was hosting a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance and bracelet-making workshop in Southport when Axel Rudakubana walked in and started attacking the children, killing three of them. In trying to protect the children Ms Lucas herself was stabbed five times.
When people suffer terrible things, they often throw themselves into searching for a means to help others avoid the same fate. Ms Lucas thinks she has found her cause. The Daily Mail reports:
Southport survivor calls for ban on pointed kitchen knives – as she says she’s not been able to use one herself since the attack that left three girls dead
[…]
After her horrific experiences, the teacher had assumed there would be tighter controls around kitchen knives and was shocked to find there weren’t.
She said: ‘Every time I learnt something new, I’d think, “That doesn’t sound right. Surely there are laws in place so that couldn’t have happened.” The more my eyes have been opened, the more I’ve been able to formulate an idea.’
She does not seem to be entirely clear in her mind whether that idea is a cultural change or a legal one. If my only source had been the BBC’s article on the same topic, I would have thought she was only advocating that people voluntarily adopt a different style of cooking that employs knifes with rounded tips rather than traditional knives with sharp tips.
This idea will not work. The sort of person who would take her proposed pledge to commit to exchanging their pointed knives for round-tipped ones could have a nuclear weapon in their cutlery drawer and still be no threat to anyone. But I have no objection to her proposing it as a desirable cultural change. I do have an objection to her proposing to ban pointy kitchen knives, as if the existing ban on murder lacked only this finishing touch to be effective.
As I said in an article for the Libertarian Alliance written five years after another massacre of children:
When the parents of the Dunblane children spoke there was every reason for the world to hear about their terrible experience. There was never any particular reason to suppose that their opinions were right. In fact their opinions should carry less weight than almost anyone else’s should. This point is well understood when it comes to juries. It goes without saying, or, at least, it once did, that guilt or innocence must be decided by impartial people. Decisions of policy require the same cast of mind as decisions of guilt and innocence.
We want to comfort those who have suffered unfairly. One way you comfort someone is by agreeing with them, by allowing them emotional license for any outburst. In the ordinary course of life and death, though, even as we say, “yes, yes” to a distraught person we discount – not ignore, but discount – the content of what they say. Phrases such as “He didn’t know what he was saying” or “She was mad with grief” illustrate this. Then, after a while, they are expected to get back to something like normal.
[…]
However it came about, nowadays we give the bereaved parents at Dunblane, the survivors of rail crashes, and similar groups both the license to say anything due to the distraught and the intellectual consideration due to experts. They can’t have both. Not because I’m too mean to give it to them, but because the two are logically incompatible. The press and public have handed power to those least able to exercise it well.
There’s an old saying in policing, usually uttered after the latest scandal or disaster: ‘The public get the police they deserve.’ It reflects how police officers feel about the elites who set their rules of engagement, as well as the occasionally capricious public they serve: whatever the police do will be criticised by somebody. Which, probably, is as it should be; policing isn’t a popularity competition. If a police officer is performing their duties properly, ‘somebody’ is going to have their day ruined. That ‘somebody’ used to predominantly be criminals. Sadly, that’s no longer the case. Yet still, I wonder, What did we, the British people, do to deserve the police we have now?
– Dominic Adler
Read the whole thing.
The Guardian, 6th December 2024: Romanian court annuls first round of presidential election
The Guardian, 9th March 2025: Pro-Russia Călin Georgescu barred from Romanian presidential election re-run
The Guardian, 15th May 2025: Romania might be about to make a Trump-admiring former football hooligan its president. This is why
Georgescu sounds a nasty piece of work, and Simion not much better, but the “election interference” that might truly kill off Romanians’ faith in democracy is not coming from them.
Police face lawsuit after former officer arrested over ‘thought crime’ tweet, reports the Telegraph:
A retired special constable is preparing to sue Kent Police after being arrested over a social media post warning about rising anti-Semitism.
Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham in Kent, was handcuffed at his home by six officers from the force he had served for a decade after replying to a pro-Palestinian activist on X.
The 71-year-old was detained for eight hours, interrogated and ultimately issued with a caution after officers visited his home on Nov 2 2023.
On Tuesday, Kent Police confirmed that the caution was a mistake and had been deleted from Mr Foulkes’s record, admitting that it was “not appropriate in the circumstances and should not have been issued”.
So long as the consequences of police misbehaviour are born by the taxpayer, not the police, why should they care? Words are cheap. They’ll settle out of court, promise not to do it again, and do it again.
Police body-worn camera footage captured officers scrutinising Mr Foulkes’’s collection of books by authors such as Douglas Murray, a Telegraph contributor, and issues of The Spectator, pointing to what they described as “very Brexity things”.
He voted with the majority. They could tell he was a wrong’un.
In Britain, in 2025, whether or not you should be able to criticise a religion, mock its practices, burn its texts, is an alarmingly live issue. And when I say ‘a religion’, you know which one I’m talking about. This debate has lit up again this week, following the charges brought against Hamit Coskun for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His one-man protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chalked up as a religiously motivated public-order offence, drawing the condemnation of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and causing an X feud between two MPs. Rupert Lowe – the member for the Very Online right – condemned our backdoor blasphemy laws, while Adnan Hussain – one of the so-called Gaza independents who rode a wave of sectarian, anti-Israel bile into parliament at the last General Election – accused Lowe of singling out Muslims under the guise of freedom of speech.
– Tom Slater
Before it’s possible to suggest a solution to a problem, it’s necessary to grasp the root cause of the problem itself. A sort of Reverse Chesterton’s Fence exercise.
So, what has gone wrong? As we never tire of repeating it’s the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. That is, for the past 78 years we’ve had that coherent national plan. With a long term vision. Run by the Rolls Royce minds of the Men in Whitehall who know best. Which is how we’ve ended up with the output we’ve got, something that would disgrace a Trabant factory.
As it is national control of planning – the TCPA really does define who may build what where, is the nationalisation of land use – that is the problem then the solution is to get rid of what caused the problem. Blow up the TCPA, proper blow up – kablooie.
– Tim Worstall
|
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.
|