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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Our new Prime Minister is taking action to protect British people against unfair dealing.
“It should be just as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to start it. And if something is advertised as half price, it should actually be half price”, he says. Sounds fair.
Darren Jones is stuck paying for some subscriptions that he doesn’t use or want and has asked for Mr Burnham’s help:
And on the scourge of fake price reductions, Anna Ridgway asks,
I was a career policeman. My lived experience (for what it’s worth) was that, generally speaking, serious sex offenders don’t change. Hey, I’m not a criminologist or psychologist, but I spent my working life around criminals of virtually every persuasion. Sex offenders are a special breed. Even “decent honest criminals” tended to agree.
On the other hand, I’ve met ex-offenders (who were, but are no longer, criminals) who’ve changed. I’m mates with a few. I have no problem with people who’ve made mistakes in their lives: we all have feet of clay and there for the grace of God go I (etc). I reckon I’d have made a half-decent Christian.
But the Simon Levy types? No. Fucking. Way. If you get convicted for predatory rape you should have a target on your back ad infinitum. Is my view too extreme? I don’t care, to be perfectly honest. I’m simply as passionate about victims as the criminal justice elites are about “oppressed and marginalized” offenders. I believe the rights of women and girls trump those who’ve demonstrated bad faith and a propensity to offend.
That’s the starting point. Fairness builds from there. Anything else is perverse. A system which invites, almost by default, sexual re-offending. Which is the system we have now.
– Dominic Adler
If you’re interested in all things Plod related, I strongly recommend following Dominic Adler
In fact, RICU has actively become biased against entirely mainstream right-wing beliefs. According to the 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent, while its ‘products related to Islamic terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology…much of the material covering Extreme Right-Wing falls well below the threshold’. Shawcross mentioned that he ‘saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on Right-Wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”.
The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon’. Shawcross also describes RICU analysis of a ‘cohort of social media users it termed “Actively Patriotic and Proud”, listed a prominent Conservative politician and former member of the government as being among figures “associated with far-right sympathetic audiences, and Brexit”’ (who I understand to be Jacob Rees-Mogg). This then, is RICU now. An organisation which seeks to ‘counter extremist narratives’ and maintains ‘contingency communication’ materials ‘for rapid deployment after major incidents’. The methods they deploy are ‘never published’.
– Pimlico Journal
When I was a teacher, many years ago, the Times Higher Education Supplement was on every staffroom table and was considered the voice of the progressive establishment. Perhaps I should not be surprised to see its modern incarnation, Times Higher Education, receive the sort of treatment that was once reserved for the tabloids when they got too nosey about people in power. Progressivism always has the progressivism of a generation ago among its prime targets. Jack Grove of Times Higher Education writes, “I was reported to police over Arday case. I was just doing my job”:
[…] I decided, on second thoughts, to take the voicemail at my desk, about 10 minutes away in Holborn.
I was shocked to hear it was from the Metropolitan Police, asking me to call them back. Why? Nothing remarkable had happened to me in the previous year. When I rang back the officer explained a complaint had been made against me regarding the University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, but the matter was now closed.
But it was important, the officer explained, that I didn’t contact him again, because it was affecting his mental health.
However, I hadn’t emailed Arday in four months – my last direct email had been in September, offering formal right of reply to allegations that he had plagiarised his PhD.
That allegation was not made lightly: I had assembled a 63-page report which detailed how he had apparently used, without proper citation, huge chunks from a thesis written in 2009 by another student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, now a highly respected education academic at Brunel University of London. Further checks found passages that seemed to be lifted from the work of researchers based in the US, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the UK. In total, I submitted 97 pages of evidence to both Cambridge and Arday’s awarding institution, Liverpool John Moores University, for their investigation.
Serious allegations, certainly. Deeply embarrassing and distressing, definitely. Although Arday was eventually cleared of plagiarism by an LJMU review, a frenzy of coverage led to Cambridge opening an investigation into Arday’s academic record and CV, followed shortly afterwards by Arday announcing his resignation.
But were my inquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive and allege some sort of thought crime, particularly if one writes about anti-Jewish racism and violence, free speech, the Middle East, Islam or trans issues. I write about all of them.
I recognised the moment for what it was. A rite of passage, and an attempt to place a boundary around my speech. Informing her as I did so, I reached for my phone and began recording, as much for posterity as for evidence.
– Jonathan Sacerdoti
This is not good enough, says Ofcom. It wants, it seems, pre-emptive powers to block access to sites operating anywhere in the world, should they be deemed harmful to people in the UK.
This is authoritarian nonsense on any number of levels. For one thing, it moves noticeably towards a Great British Firewall, like that used in China. We should also worry that an unelected agency is spending its time digging around the internet looking for material it would like to stop us seeing. Admittedly, we are told that the issue here is material that’s harmful to children and sites such as suicide forums. But it is a racing certainty that any such powers, if given, will be invoked to go well beyond suicide forums.
Equally, it’s not clear whether Ofcom wants these powers to extend to blocking sites to users across the globe. A recent Ofcom update on a suicide site clearly suggests it sees a UK geoblock as insufficient. This really would bring us into cloud-cuckoo-land. No national regulator, whether it comes from the UK, China or Burkina Faso, has any business censoring the global internet.
– Andrew Tettenborn
In the Telegraph today:
The messages that show Covid scientists secretly suspected a lab leak
Scientists who were instrumental in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory admitted in private “we can’t rule it out”, newly released messages show.
In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.
The article, known as “The Proximal Origins of Covid” [Link to the paper here. In fact its title refers to “Origin” in the singular- NS] concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.
But messages obtained and published by US senator Rand Paul show that behind the scenes the scientists voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out experiments on coronaviruses at insufficient biosecurity levels.
The virus emerged eight miles from WIV laboratories and was seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans
and
The messages also reveal that authors were aware that Dr Shi – the lead bat virus scientist at WIV – was herself worried that Covid had been caused by a lab accident.
In September 2021, it emerged that before the pandemic Dr Shi had applied for a grant to insert a furin cleavage site (FCS) into bat coronaviruses – the very addition that made Covid-19 so infectious to humans.
Although the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency dismissed the grant because it was too dangerous, Slack messages showed that scientists feared the work had gone ahead anyway.
Prof Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University wrote that “it isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff”, adding, “We just need to re-convince ourself it is coincidence.”
You may be saying, “I’ve read Viral. This is not news to me”. The news is that it is being reported in a major “quality” British newspaper.
Here is what the Telegraph was saying about the “Proximal Origin” paper on 1st May 2020:
The study that proves conspiracy theorists wrong – coronavirus came from nature
Covid-19 is not a “laboratory construct” but emerged as a result of natural evolution, according to a report which demolishes conspiracy theories about the origins of the disease.
The virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of December and has since spread rapidly across the globe, with more than three million people worldwide now infected.
But fear and misinformation have escalated alongside the pandemic, with the World Health Organization warning that the globe is fighting an “infodemic” as well as an epidemic.
One common myth has been that the new virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was originally made in a laboratory. But in a study, published in Nature Medicine journal, researchers analysed the genome sequence of the coronavirus and found strong evidence it evolved naturally, probably from a bat or a pangolin.
Sarah Newey has more details on the evidence that debunks President Trump’s latest theory.
Nice touch in linking the thing you don’t want people to take seriously to Trump, though that trick no longer works as well as it once did.
There is no shame in having been wrong, so long as you then work sincerely to put things right. In today’s article the Telegraph goes some way to atone for its past errors. Let’s see how the rest of the British media covers this story. Let’s see if the rest of the British media covers this story.
These cases might initially read as isolated absurdities: a pensioner’s raided home, a fine for a nickname, a meme investigated as though it were genuine Nazi propaganda. Taken together, they describe a pattern in which laws designed to protect democracy from its enemies are being turned against ordinary citizens engaged in perfectly legitimate political speech.
Germany’s experience should be a lesson for other countries and their respective governments. It is a reminder that speech laws drafted with the best of intentions — to prevent a return to fascism, to protect politicians from genuine harassment — can, without firm safeguards, be distorted and become instruments of routine political policing. As Dr Zitelmann’s case shows, even a historian who has devoted his career to studying the dangers of totalitarianism is not immune from being investigated under laws that increasingly resemble the very thing they were built to prevent.
– Max Thompson
There is a Crowdfunder live at the moment which tells you everything you need to know about the government of this country. The Centre for Migration Control asked the Ministry of Justice a simple question. How many migrants have been convicted of murder, rape and the supply of weapons? Not opinion. Not spin. A number. The government collects it, sits on it, and refuses to publish it.
The CMC took the case to the Information Commissioner and won. The ICO ruled that the MoJ must publish the data for 2018 to 2024. And what did our Labour government do, faced with a lawful ruling that the public should be told the truth? It lawyered up. It is going to court, at your expense, to prevent you from knowing what it already knows. It is meanwhile withholding the 2025 figures too, presumably on the basis that if a cover-up is worth doing it is worth doing thoroughly.
– Gawain Towler
“Speaking ill of the dead is not an offence, however offensive. If Heather Herbert joins the @SpeechUnion, we will do our best to help.”
I consider my membership dues well spent.
The inimitable Preston Byrne has compared two think tank proposals for restoring free speech within the United Kingdom in A Tale of Two Bills: Comparing the Adam Smith Institute’s and the Prosperity Institute’s Free Speech Proposals.
This kind of thing is an essential part of setting the intellectual ground work for the future.
Combined with the already-passed Online Safety Act and the previously announced intention to ban under-16s entirely from social media — a ban that Prime Minister-in-waiting Burnham intends to support — these laws, enacted or proposed, look to anyone except a Labour lickspittle to be a serious erosion of the rights of the British people to access information freely and express their political opinions online.
These draconian measures bear a striking resemblance to the reaction of a seemingly very different British government to ostensibly dissimilar circumstances: William Pitt the Younger’s infamous series of repressive laws enacted during the 1790s.
Pitt’s anti-radical legislation was designed to preserve elite power, control the public narrative, and protect the lower orders from ideas — what we now call misinformation — reckoned likely to lead them astray. The intent of these laws and the fears they were enacted to allay shed considerable light on Labour’s own attempts at gagging us.
– James Martin Charlton
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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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