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]
|
The day before yesterday I wrote, “Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.”
One example is Adam Boulton. He is the former political editor of Sky News, among many other prestigious roles, and currently presents on Times Radio. Regular readers may recall that in 2023 he told BBC Newsnight that GB News should be shut down in order to protect the UK’s “delicate and important broadcast ecology”. Boulton’s response to the crisis at the BBC was this tweet:
Adam Boulton
@adamboultonTABB
For the record No words were put into Trump’s mouth. The quotes were him saying what he said.
9:36 AM · Nov 9, 2025
(Hat tip to the science fiction author Neal Asher.)
People in the replies to Boulton’s tweet have a lot of fun snipping out parts of what he said in order to reverse its meaning. But it is not really that funny. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Adam Boulton thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Adam Boulton is lying to you; assume Adam Boulton would lie about you.
Another journalist whose own words demonstrate that he thinks it is fine to use selective quotation to lie to his readers is Mikey Smith, Deputy Political Editor of the Mirror. Back in the days when he was Michael Smith, Mikey worked for Sky News and the BBC. On November 9th, he tweeted this:
Mikey Smith
@mikeysmith
It’s not an assault on the BBC. It’s an assault on facts.
The edit was only remotely a problem if your position is that Trump played no part whatsoever in encouraging January 6th. Which he plainly and obviously did.
7:37 PM · Nov 9, 2025
Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks deliberate, carefully engineered selective quotation is an acceptable journalistic practice. Leading journalist Mikey Smith thinks lying is acceptable. Assume Mikey Smith is lying to you; assume Mikey Smith would lie about you.
Still, perhaps I was a little harsh about journalists in general in my earlier post. Sure, there are plenty of outright liars in the media, and plenty of people who upvote their lies and beg to be lied to some more. But perhaps a larger group is made up of caring, intelligent people who you’d probably really like if you met socially, in the unlikely event that you were invited to one of their social gatherings.
People like Jane Martinson. She is a Guardian columnist, a professor of financial journalism at City St George’s and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group. On November 9th she wrote this piece for the Guardian: “The BBC is facing a coordinated, politically motivated attack. With these resignations, it has given in”
Now the resignations of both Davie and the CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, have shown that baying for blood gets results.
The biggest shock is that this saga began just a week ago with the leak of a 19-page “devastating memo” from Michael Prescott, a former political journalist who spent three years as an external adviser to the broadcaster, published in the Telegraph. The dossier alleges BBC Panorama doctored a speech by Trump, making him appear to support the January 6 rioters, that its Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views, and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender.
I admire in a technical sense the way that Professor Martinson uses the word “alleges”. The claims that the BBC’s Arabic coverage privileged pro-Hamas views and that a group of LGBTQ employees had excessive influence on coverage of sex and gender can be fairly called allegations. Even if one thinks these two allegations are probably true, as I do, whether the behaviour of groups of journalists over a period of years was fair or unfair is not a matter that can be assessed quickly at a distance. Two of the three items in Professor Hutchinson’s list of things that she says the dossier “alleges” truly are allegations, i.e. claims that remain to be proved. The first one is the cuckoo in the nest. Professor Martinson also categorises it as an “allegation” that Panorama misleadingly edited Trump’s speech. If she had wanted to, she could have verified the allegation as fact by watching a twenty-three second video. That particular clip was from news.com.au, but it is widely available. (I suppose we could enter a spiral of distrust and say that maybe that video was faked like the Panorama one, but that would involve admitting the Panorama one was faked, so this option is not available to Professor Martinson.)
Now, Prof. Martinson might complain that it is unfair to focus on that little evasion when later in the article she did go on to say,
None of this is to say that the BBC has not made mistakes. At the very least, the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit of an hour-long Trump speech, which is unacceptable even if that speech was subsequently found to have encouraged insurrection.
But if she did so complain about relevant material being downplayed, I wouldn’t have to go to ChatGPT to find a smoothly written defence of the practice. Notice how even in the act of admitting that the Panorama edit was “bad and misleading”, she still puts in a little doubt that it actually happened. She writes, “the Panorama documentary appears to have included a bad and misleading edit“. “Appears to” – can we get BBC Verify onto that? It might be that Jane Hutchinson wrote “appears to” here and “alleges” earlier as part of a subtle attempt to cast doubt on politically inconvenient facts that she knew were true but would prefer her readers to doubt. However I think it more likely that it was a mere reflex; an involuntary flinching of the eyes and mind away from the thought that a situation could exist where Trump – Trump! – was the one being lied about and people like her were the liars, and, more embarrassing yet, that she and people like her might be the ones being lied to. And that this might have been going on for years, and she, a Professor of Financial Journalism, had not noticed.
Let us finish this discussion with a short prayer for Guardian journalists and those who love them:
“Protect me from knowing what I don’t need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don’t know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.”
– Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
“BBC director general Tim Davie and News CEO Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit”, reports the BBC about itself:
BBC director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resign over Trump documentary edit
It comes after the Telegraph published details of a leaked internal BBC memo suggesting Panorama edited two parts of Trump’s speech together so he appeared to explicitly encourage the Capitol Hill riots of January 2021
In a statement, Davie says “there have been some mistakes made and as director general I have to take ultimate responsibility”
I used the tag “Deleted by the Woke Media” because fifty-four minutes of Trump’s speech on January 6th 2021 were deleted by the Woke BBC, and the trailing ends of the tape spliced together to make it appear as if he had said an inflammatory sentence he never said.
Remember the names of those public figures, especially journalists, who say that this was acceptable behaviour by the BBC because it was done to Trump. These people think lying is acceptable. Assume they are lying to you; assume they would lie about you.
The Telegraph has a story – with accompanying videos – that ought to finish several careers at the BBC: “Exclusive: BBC ‘doctored’ Trump speech, internal report reveals”.
What Trump actually said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And 54 minutes later:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
What the spliced-together BBC version made it look like Trump said:
“We’re gonna walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re gonna walk down, we’re gonna walk down any one you want but I think right here, we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and we’re gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong…I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
And immediately afterwards:
“Most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say I wanna thank you very much, and they go off to some other life but I said something’s wrong here, something’s really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country any more.”
In case your screen is not showing all the lines through most of the second version, the falsely edited BBC version made it look like Trump said,
“We’re gonna walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be with you and we fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”
It seems like only yesterday that I posted this in 2021 :“The background and motive of yesterday’s attacks were unclear”.
And here we are again. It has been hours since the mass stabbing on a train travelling from Doncaster to Kings Cross. There were many witnesses. Two men have been arrested. No other suspects are sought. I find it hard to believe that the background and motive of yesterday’s attacks really do remain unclear to the police, the government, or the press. But they certainly have not been made clear to the public.
The Home Secretary has urged the public to “avoid comment and speculation at this early stage”. There are times when this is good advice. This is not one of them. “Nature abhors a vacuum” is never more true when the vacuum is one of information about a crime that makes millions think, “That could be me”. Did you learn nothing from Southport? The only thing that will dissipate the hurricane of speculation is to replace it with facts. It is not as if your strategy of politically correct evasiveness is working. It hasn’t worked for years.
Update: one of the arrested men was innocent and has been released. The only suspect for this crime has now been named as Anthony Williams, aged 32. This development makes the slowness of the police to release any details worse, not better. Williams is black. Those who were inclined to believe that the authorities were trying to avoid saying that the two suspects were Muslim are not going to say, “Oh, how foolish I was” when it turns out the only suspect is black. Furthermore official tardiness meant that an innocent man was under a cloud for long after it should have been clear that he was innocent. What were they playing at?
“Why is it so hard for the authorities to win public trust? Maybe because they keep lying to us”, Gaby Hinsliff writes in the Guardian:
If you were to invent a scandal expressly to convince conspiracy theorists they were right all along, the story of the Afghan superinjunction would be hard to beat.
A secret back door into Britain through which thousands of immigrants were brought, under cover of a draconian legal gagging order that helpfully also concealed an act of gross incompetence by the British state? It’s a rightwing agitator’s dream. “The real disinformation,” wrote Dominic Cummings on X, a platform notably awash with real disinformation, “is the regime media.” Yes, that Dominic Cummings.
She’s not wrong about dishonesty and censorship from the authorities causing people to rightly distrust them, but she cannot see the elephant in the room because she is looking at the room from inside the elephant.
In December 2023, I asked “Non-sarcastically, why am I so sure that this image is generated by AI?” and listed the reasons why I thought that a picture purporting to show gleeful Israeli soldiers in Gaza was a fake.
In July 2025, I must modify my question. Why am I mostly sure that this image, also purporting to show events in Gaza, is generated by AI?
I saw the picture in a Telegraph story written by Melanie Swan and called “More than 90 dead in UN aid truck massacre in Gaza”. The caption says, “Injured Palestinians are taken to hospital after over 90 were killed waiting for humanitarian aid Credit: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty”.
Here are some of the reasons why I think the picture is AI-generated:
I always start by counting their fingers and toes. The left foot of the guy holding his knee appears to have six of the latter.
The little toe of the left foot of the bare-legged boy sitting in the centre looks wrong; too wide, no toenail – just a wedge of flesh.
Staying with the boy, his legs seem malformed – the distance from knee to ankle too long, the thigh too short and too narrow.
His right arm is too short and floppy, like the vestigial arm of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The little finger of the hand of the guy with the beard seated on the right of the picture does not join up to the hand correctly – either that or he was unfortunate enough to be born with his left hand where his right hand ought to be.
The writing on that white bag on the shelf is blurred in a way characteristic of A.I.
Moving back to the left of the picture, where is the long, thin arm pointing diagonally downwards coming from? In what position would a person be lying or standing in order to have their arm come out at that angle?
Compare the thin arm to the arms of the other people in the picture. It looks too long and thin to be true; an adult’s arm would be thicker, a child’s arm would be shorter. And, though I strain to see it, the hand looks almost as if it has two thumbs.
If you look at the picture under high magnification, it looks almost like someone has drawn around the figures with a Sharpie. These black outlines are particularly noticeable with the long-legged boy and the man clutching his knee.
This one is more speculative, but do the interiors of Israeli or Palestinian ambulances actually look like that? The (oddly sparse) contents of the shelves suggest a medical purpose, but the shelves themselves look like they come from someone’s kitchen.
Taken separately, all of the above points could be explained away. Lenses distort. Human bodies vary. Hunger makes people thin. Perhaps I will end up deleting this post in shame at having questioned the suffering of real human beings. Perhaps, but, having been able to find at least eight oddities, I think that Getty Images would be justified in putting a few pointed questions to Ali Jadallah.
However, I was right to say in 2023 that “this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer”. It is even more true now.
Added 22/07/2025: Reading the comments to the Telegraph article, a lot of the commenters are saying, like me, that one of the photographs the Telegraph has used to illustrate it is fake. Only they are talking about a different picture. This one:
It shows a boy running away while a cloud of smoke rises from the buildings behind him.
With the picture of the men in the vehicle that I talked about above, my suspicions were raised the instant I saw it. The hyper-defined outlines and sharp colours gave a sort of slick, sweaty appearance to the flesh of the people depicted that I have often seen in A.I. art and noticed on that picture even before I started counting their digits. There is nothing like that in this second picture. The strange things about it suggest Photoshop rather than DALL-E or Midjourney. The border of the smoke cloud is at a suspiciously neat 45 degree angle. There is also something suspicious about the way the buildings to the left of the boy merge into the smoke. But the main problem is the running boy himself. The photographer appears to have caught him in mid-air – fine, that can happen when taking a photo of a person leaping or running, and catching that moment is usually considered the mark of a successful, dramatic picture – but he is too high off the ground to be plausible. And he has no shadow.
Or does he? There are two darker almost-horizontal lines or one slightly bent line below and to the left of him that could be his shadow. And before anyone brings up the similar horizontal lines to the right of him, those could be the shadow of a tree or pole just outside the picture. He is still suspended at an unlikely height, though. All in all, I am less convinced of the fakeness of this picture than of the other one – and the whole point of this post was that it is getting harder and harder to tell.
We are entering an age in which decisive authentication of a photograph will no longer be possible. The question will be whether one trusts the source. I do not trust anything coming out of Gaza.
Back when the world was still damp from the Flood and Peter Davison was Dr Who, I was in the University Officers Training Corps. I don’t know if the term is still used by the British Army, but back then a green, typewritten piece of paper headed “Part One Orders” was always on display on the unit noticeboard. Well, I think it was green. It was certainly typewritten, because everything was at that time – that’s how I knew at once that the people saying that the “Rathergate” documents that purported to have been written by an officer of the Texas Air National Guard in 1973 were fake had a very good case. The big thing about Part One Orders was that they were orders. You had to obey them, which meant you had to know what they were. You were under orders to read the Orders, specifically to check whether they had changed since you last read them. Reading a short document once a week was not an onerous requirement for Officer Cadet Solent but I gather that proper soldiers had to check ’em every day and woe betide them if they did not. On the other hand, the existence of Part One Orders meant that if some almighty balls-up happened because someone did not realise that circumstances had changed, the tide of woe could be diverted away from the immediate ballser-upper if he could show that the change had never been announced on the P1s.
Poor lefties. They are under at least as strict a requirement to keep abreast with changes to their orders as that imposed by Section 5.121 of the Queen’s Regulations (1975) but nobody will ever openly tell them that the orders have changed. Not even on Bluesky. Maybe on WhatsApp if they are very high ranking, but the foot soldiers of the progressive movement just have to know by osmosis.
That is why I can find some pity in my heart for the teachers at Bilton School in Warwickshire who sent home a twelve year old girl called Courtney White for wearing a Union Jack dress on Diversity Day, and then found themselves being condemned by a Labour Prime Minister. Not a lot of pity, but some. Nobody told them that the world had changed since 2022. Obviously, they should have been able to work it out from the fact that Reform are leading in the polls but maybe they were too busy putting up posters to notice.
“The Covid ‘lab leak’ theory isn’t just a rightwing conspiracy – pretending that’s the case is bad for science”, writes Jane Qiu in the Guardian.
That’s right. In the Guardian. My surprise at the location of the article was equalled by my surprise at the location of its writer: “Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing.” I didn’t know there were independent science writers in Beijing, but I guess there must be for an article on this particular topic written by someone describing themselves as such to appear. Anyway, she writes:
Some scientists assert evidence supporting natural-origins hypotheses with excessive confidence and show little tolerance for dissenting views. They have appeared eager to shut down the debate, repeatedly and since early 2020. For instance, when their work was published in the journal Science in 2022, they proclaimed the case closed and lab-leak theories dead. Even researchers leaning towards natural origins theories, such as the virus ecologist Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountains Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, told me they lamented that some of their colleagues defend their theories “like a religion”.
No one embodies the crisis of trust in science more than Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance. A series of missteps on his part has helped to fuel public distrust. In early 2020, for instance, he organised a statement by dozens of prominent scientists in the Lancet, which strongly condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, without disclosing his nearly two-decade collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conflict of interest.
Similarly, he denies that his own collaboration with the Wuhan lab involved gain-of-function research, even though Shi Zhengli – the Chinese scientist who led the bat-borne coronavirus studies – has openly acknowledged that the lab’s work produced at least one genetically modified virus more virulent than its parental strain. (That work is not directly relevant to the origins of Covid-19.)
The documentary [Christian Frei’s Blame: Bats, Politics and a Planet Out of Balance, short title Blame] claims that attacks on EcoHealth Alliance and the spread of lab-leak conspiracy theories have fuelled distrust in science. In reality, it’s the other way round: public distrust in science, fuelled by the unresolved H5N1 gain-of-function controversy and by lack of transparency and humility from scientists such as Daszak, has driven scepticism and increased support for lab-leak theories.
This is not news to anyone who has read Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book Viral. Or to anyone who does not entirely get their news from the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times, come to think of it. Still, better five years late than never. Why now, I wonder? Did someone at the Scott Trust take Katharine Viner to one side and gently suggest that it would be nice if the customary Guardian delay between “this is an absurd far right conspiracy theory” and “it’s the fault of the far right for talking about it before we did and using up all the available words” was not too far out of line with the nearly four years it took to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and Joe Biden was senile? Or is something big about to break?
Today’s Guardian has up an article with the title “Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says” and the strapline “False claims obstructing climate action, say researchers, amid calls for climate lies to be criminalised”.
Quote:
Climate misinformation – the term used by the report for both deliberate and inadvertent falsehoods – is of increasing concern. Last Thursday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, called for misinformation and greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry to be criminalised. On Saturday, Brazil, host of the upcoming Cop30 climate summit, will rally nations behind a separate UN initiative to crack down on climate misinformation.
“It is a major problem,” said Dr Klaus Jensen, of the University of Copenhagen, who co-led the Ipie review. “If we don’t have the right information available, how are we going to vote for the right causes and politicians, and how are politicians going to translate the clear evidence into the necessary action?
Canadians, be warned. One of the candidates in your country’s election tomorrow is accursed. This man has spoken of that of which no man should speak.
Your “biological clock is ticking” is a phrase no man should say. If you have to ask why … #WomenAgainstPoilievre
Indeed, he has spoken of that of which neither man nor woman may ask why it is that of which no man may speak.
Poilievre referred to biological clocks during a news conference Monday as he was defending his campaign’s decision to focus on affordability issues such as housing, even as the country stares down U.S. President Donald Trump and the tariffs threat.
Do you really want a Canada where people can refer to biological clocks? Where men can refer to biological clocks – even while Donald Trump still exists?
It’s a riff on what he said last week at a rally in Stoney Creek, Ont., when he lamented that some millennials are “desperate to buy a home and start a family before the biological clock runs out in your mid-30s.”
In December, Poilievre said he feels for the “39-year-old woman, desperate to have kids but unable to buy a home in which to raise them, her biological clock running out.”
In a pre-campaign interview with academic Jordan Peterson, Poilievre also referred to aging women and their biological clocks, and the issue of housing affordability.
The term “biological clock” and any talk of it “running out” is generally used to refer to a woman’s declining fertility due to a reduction in egg quality and quantity as she grows older.
‘Our biological clocks are none of your business’
Liberal candidate Yvan Baker said the Conservative leader is “using a woman’s fertility as a punchline in a political attack,” calling it “outdated and harmful rhetoric.”
Julie Dzerowicz, another Liberal contender, said in a social media post: “Our biological clocks are none of your business.”
Speaking to reporters in Winnipeg at Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s campaign stop Tuesday, candidate Ginette Lavack said Polievre’s comments are “completely unacceptable.”
“These are not comments that should be made by anyone. A person should have the right to choose the timing of when they’ll make those life decisions. It’s not a comment or a conversation to have publicly like that,” Lavack said.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was blunt when asked about the remark: “I don’t think any woman wants to hear Pierre Poilievre talking about their body.”
Canadians, it is in your hands to ensure that your country is a place where, as Ginette Lavack wisely advised, no public conversation on such topics can be had.
In the Guardian, April O’Neill writes,
The Online Safety Act is now partly enforceable. Paul might make you think a bit harder about it. Understandably, much of the conversation surrounding it has been focused on protecting children, but there is a glaring hole in this legislation regarding the protection of adults. Despite a 2022 report for the Ministry of Justice finding that the role of the internet in radicalisation pathways “was most evident for older rather than younger individuals”, the Tory government backed out from provisions that would have prevented adults from seeing “legal but harmful” content online over fears about freedom of speech.
April O’Neill holds that the people who need to be forcibly protected from hearing bad opinions are old people who distrust left wing media sources. Ms O’Neill is the winner of The Guardian Foundation’s 2025 Emerging Voices Awards (19-25 age category) recognising young talent in political opinion writing.
“Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?” asks Jonathan Kay in Quillette.
“I find this story astonishing as an outsider,” a British historian told me on social media last week. “Can I just confirm what I believe to be the case: There is no proof of any burials… just GPR [ground-penetrating radar] ‘anomalies’ [that] haven’t been investigated? The 215 children are, as things stand, entirely notional?”
The answer, in a word, is yes. Of the 215 “unmarked graves” of Indigenous children that were said to have been “discovered” on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia four years ago, not a single one has actually been shown to exist.
The astonishing thing is not that a remote detection system gave a reading that suggested something dramatic which upon further investigation turned out not to be. That happens all the time, in every field from mining to astronomy. Nor was there anything astonishing about the furore or about the swarms of reporters who converged on the site. If the inconsistencies in soil density had turned out to be dead bodies rather than “old pipes, septic lines, irrigation ditches, bedrock cracks, groundwater sources, mineral deposits, buried utility lines, and landfill artefacts” it would have been a knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself.
What is astonishing, what raises the whole Kamloops affair to the level of mass psychosis, is Official Canada’s response. No graves were found, but it decided to have the whole ‘knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself’ jamboree anyway.
… Canadians were given the impression that these radargrams displayed unmistakable images of child graves—perhaps even skeletons of the (claimed) victims.
Reporters accompanied these reports with descriptions of unspeakable crimes, supposedly sourced to the eyewitness memories of Indigenous elders—including children woken up in the middle of the night to dig shallow graves for their murdered friends
Mr Kay charitably says that Canadian journalists did not realise how many of these tales could be traced to “a defrocked priest named Kevin Arnett—a man who’d also claimed he’d witnessed Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip personally kidnap a group of Kamloops students in 1964.” I suspect that quite a few Canadian journalists did realise it. It is not as if the former Reverend Arnett concealed his views. Unlike many of the journalists, Arnett himself was probably sincerely deluded. Like false positive errors from machines, folk who think that they have secret information about a terrible conspiracy involving someone famous are not that rare. Poor old Arnett missed a trick by only witnessing the late Queen and her consort engage in a humdrum spot of kidnapping and murder. If he had just looked a little longer he would have seen them turn into shape-shifting pan-dimensional alien lizards and would have died richer than he did.
So twelve million Canadian dollars and heaven knows how many tons of earth1 later, the story that led Justin Trudeau to fly the flags on federal buildings at half-mast for almost six months and to hundreds of arson attacks on churches has finally been acknowledged to be a false alarm.
Just kidding over the last bit. Official Canada has not acknowledged it. They are in too deep.
As I suggested above, what made this period in Canada’s history unusual is not that the likes of Kevin Arnett – correction, “Eagle Strong Voice”2 as he later preferred to be called – made bizarre claims and that Noam Chomsky believed them. It’s that the likes of the Law Society of British Columbia believed them.
Not just believed them, but made them into an official doctrine that had to be affirmed by anyone wishing to practise law in British Columbia. The second half of Jonathan Kay’s article tells a story that in its implications is at least as frightening as the hysteria and fury described in the first half. Reading it, one keeps expecting to reach the point where one of the eminent lawyers entrusted with maintaining the standards of their profession in Canada’s westernmost province will finally issue a carefully-worded statement about waiting for evidence before making accusations, or about how both sides of any case must be heard, or about any of that old lawyer stuff that they used to believe in. Four years have gone by and that point has not yet come. More to the point, judging from their behaviour none of these eminent lawyers has yet dared to say to their colleagues, “Guys, I hate to be the one to ask, but have we got a watertight case?”
*
Related post: There will be no “truth and reconciliation” if an inconvenient truth is made illegal.
1Exactly how many tons of earth remains unclear. As CayleyGraph2015 commented in response to the earlier post, for all the talk of urgent investigation, less actual digging seems to have been done than one might expect given the severity of the allegations and the millions of Canadian dollars given to the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation to investigate the site.
2The “Eagle Strong Voice” link takes you to an excellent article by Terry Glavin in the independent Canadian news website The Tyee about Arnett and his claims, including one that might have been the model for “Pizzagate”. It was written in 2008, demonstrating that Arnett was well known on the conspiracy circuit even then. Interestingly, an editor’s note was added to Glavin’s article in 2021 apologetically saying that despite Glavin’s scepticism the remains of 215 children had been detected at Kamloops residential school. I await an editor’s note to the editor’s note.
|
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.
|
