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]
In light of @Nature’s excellent editorial about why it makes sense to comment on politics (all the way, in their case, to making an endorsement), this is the Pew finding that is most relevant. Following the admonition to stick to science is conceding the idea that scientists can be sidelined in policy decisions. “Stick to science” infantilizes scientists and tells us to sit at the kids table and let the adults decide. We must fight back. Here’s the editorial:
Should Nature endorse political candidates? Yes — when the occasion demands it
Political endorsements might not always win hearts and minds, but when candidates threaten a retreat from reason, science must speak out.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00789-5
Sure, if you ask if folks in the public if they lose faith in science if journals venture into politics, many will say yes. But they don’t actually want science, they want scientific information they can use as they see fit. 3/n @Magda_Skipper @laurahelmuth @KBibbinsDomingo
This gives people the permission to say things like “climate change may be real, but I don’t think we should have government regulation to deal with it,” which is unacceptable. We can’t concede that by letting people pick and choose. Good for @Magda_Skipper for speaking out.
Sweden has made its choice and must live with the consequences. Two years ago almost to the day, after a vote that attracted unprecedented public interest, Sweden introduced a new national flower. It is Campanula rotundifolia, a.k.a. the Harebell or Small Bluebell. No one ever says what happens to the old national flower on these occasions. Does it sit in its bed glowering at its successor, like Ted Heath, or does it try its hand at hosting a TV show like Harold Wilson? Those were the days, when nubile young couples sat up in bed as soon as an ex prime minister came on the telly. But if poor Mr Wilson was confused by that opening sequence, think how a flower would feel.
The only reason I got onto the subjects of harebells and Harold Wilson and pollination being flower-nookie was so that I could make a joke about how Brett Christophers, professor in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University, spends most of his Guardian article tiptoeing around the Campanula rotundifolia. Er, that was the joke. Here’s the article.
This, ultimately, is the nub of the matter. What Sweden is facing up to today is massive, long-term political failure to sort out its housing market.
On the one hand, Sweden has continued to substantially subsidise home ownership, pouring unnecessary fuel on the fire of the housing bubble. Most notable here is tax relief on mortgage interest. Decades after such relief was jettisoned elsewhere – even the famously homeowner-friendly UK got rid of it in 2000, Gordon Brown rightly describing it as a middle-class perk – it remains in place, absurdly, in Sweden.
On the other hand, Sweden has a fundamentally broken rental system,
Tip-
which for a variety of reasons
Toe.
comprehensively fails to make affordable accommodation widely and readily available in the largest cities, especially for those with greatest need and least resources. The effect of this lack of viable rental accommodation has been to further inflate demand for home-ownership, putting additional upwards pressure on house prices and debt burdens.
Well done on James Bond enthusiast David Zaritsky for taking a stand. Let’s treat readers like adults. Sure, the language in some of the books isn’t what I would want it to be, but then Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, and many other writers could be faulted on the same basis. I understand that the Fleming family (I know some of the members and they are good people) has authorised this. But I think this is a mistake, because this process isn’t going to stop.
In a free market (I hardly need to stress the point in this neighbourhood) the owners of copyright and so on can of course do what they want. Their house, their rules, etc. But from a broader perspective, caving into this sort of pressure for change is a mistake that the owners will regret. Fleming wrote books that were racy at the time (even the late journalist, Paul Johnson, was furiously angry about them, showing his prudish side). Fleming had a journalist’s ear for accuracy in conveying dialogue, and the Harlem and Jamaica scenes in Live and Let Die, for example, show that. It isn’t nice, but segregation America and the language used at the time wasn’t nice, and Fleming was both beguiled by American prosperity and shocked by its underside. He conveyed that in muscular prose. (This is a man, who, remember, covered the Moscow show trials in the 1930s, and he knew what censorship meant.) I also think it is presumptious for his descendants to suppose that he’d be fine with having his books re-written to suit more sensitive tastes. The evidence cited in support of this claim is flimsy. One thing he condemned, as the books show, was moral priggery. (This short collection of essays nicely explains this.)
And then there is the Roald Dahl case. Puffin, the publishers of books for children and young adults, has re-written his stories, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to remove words and sentences that, for various reasons, are deemed unacceptable, such as making some characters gender-neutral, or removing the word “fat” around one of the various horrible children, etc. It is bowdlerisation, and some of the actual story “punch”, and that sense of subversive naughtiness that Dahl had, has gone.
Here’s an incisive commentary on the sorry business from Yaron Brook. Dr Brook thinks the whole “woke” phenomenon has peaked, and maybe it has. There is a defensiveness and sneakiness around what’s gone on in the Dahl case that suggests the perpetrators know what they are doing is bad. I am unsure: I think a lot of foolishness lies ahead of us. The Fleming adjustments are more open and proud, and that bothers me.
Anyway, my take is it that if you don’t like a book, fine. Explain why. That’s what learning, and education, is supposed to give us in developing a capacity to judge and discriminate. A person who cannot do that is not educated.
In the meantime, pre-censorship copies of Dahl, Fleming and others will be worth a lot more money. I have sets of all the Bond stories, and several moth-eaten paperbacks. I intend to keep good care of them. They’re not for sale.
By a sort of savage irony, today is World Book Day. Isn’t that nice?
I have a complaint about the media. First they make a bunch of films with the same stupid plot hole. I refer, of course, to the 1938 Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes, its 1979 and 2013 remakes, and several other movies inspired by it, such as Bunny Lake is Missing and Flightplan.
Then if that were not enough they try to run the same ridiculous “We can act like something whose existence is thunderingly obvious never existed at all and no one will notice” plotline past the public in the newspapers. I refer, of course, to the article by Oliver Moody that appeared in the Times on 6th February 2023. The headline is “Swedish police demand tools to fight ‘unprecedented’ gang crime” and the subheading is “Nation with peaceful reputation averaged one shooting or bombing a day last month”
Swedish police chiefs have warned that crime is hitting “extremely serious and unprecedented” levels after 19 shootings in Stockholm and the surrounding towns since Christmas.
Gun violence between gangs competing over the increasingly lucrative drugs trade has been rising since the turn of the millennium, culminating in a record 63 fatal shootings last year. The country also has the European Union’s highest numbers of drug offences, burglaries and thefts per head, according to the bloc’s statistics agency.
While the firearms murders were already the dominant issue at the general election last September, the concerns have worsened as several gang conflicts in the Stockholm region escalated over the past six weeks.
At least four teenagers and young men have been shot dead in the latest spate of violence. There was on average of one shooting or bombing a day in the area over the four weeks from December 25.
In the most recent incident an adult and two children were targeted at their flat in Arboga, 75 miles west of the capital. Their front door was peppered with bullets twice in the space of a week, although no one was hurt.
Ten police leaders including Anders Thornberg, head of the national police authority, said their agencies were under “historically high” strain. “Day and night our staff are working to deal with fatal shootings, bombings and other serious violent crimes,” they wrote in Dagens Nyheter newspaper.
“But despite this hard and determined work 24 hours a day, and despite the fact that police and prosecutors have never before deprived so many people of their liberty, the detention centres and prisons are full to bursting — more needs to be done.”
The senior police officers said crimes were harder to solve because victims and witnesses have become more reluctant to testify.
Gangs are believed to be hiring children as young as 13 or 14 to intimidate their rivals with gunshots or explosives. Thornberg and his colleagues said the investigations were getting “ever harder to deal with” because of the number of officials involved in youth cases.
The most recommended comment was by J Sture and said, “This article appears to be missing a crucial element. Are we to suppose that this rise in gang warfare and drugs is all to with the native Swedish population? Just asking…”. At the time of writing there are 137 comments to Oliver’s Moody’s article. By my reckoning around 120 of them mock the author for not mentioning that the gangs driving the unprecedented increase in Sweden’s crime rate are made up of Muslim immigrants or their immediate descendants.
Burying the lede can work as a strategy if no one even suspects there ever was a lede there in the first place. When people know damn well what is not being said, it has the opposite effect. This helps nobody and harms everybody, including Sweden’s Muslims. A problem that cannot be named cannot be solved.
In case someone else buys Twitter and it goes away, the image shows matched pairs of headlines from Vox, the Washington Post, Forbes, ABC News, the Insider, CNN, CNBC, the New York Times, the Verge and the AP. Every one of these outlets decided to run essentially the same pair of stories a few months apart. Taking but two examples,
The Insider said “Don’t blame Black Lives Matter protests for the spike in coronavirus cases across the US” and “The Capitol insurrection seems to have caused a superspreader event among lawmakers. Some Republicans refused to mask up.”
The Verge said, “Blaming protesters for COVID-19 spread ignores the bigger threats to health” and “COVID-19 cases in the Capitol are only the tip of the iceberg.”
And so on for the rest of them.
I can remember a time when if separate reports written by many different journalists in a whole bunch of famous newspapers and TV channels all said the same thing, it made me more likely to believe them.
It’s always puzzling to people who value ‘the revolution’ more than its alleged benefits to discover that a former comrade actually cares what is true, so chooses a different side if they see the truth is there. When people who value political correctness over actual correctness meet such a puzzle, their way of avoiding having to understand it is often to explain away the change as the result of bribery. Accusing Burke of:
“… praising the aristocratic hand that hath purloined him from himself …”
…helped Thomas Paine explain away Edmund Burke’s prescient criticism of the French revolutionaries. “This is at least an elegant formulation of that perennial hypothesis of venality”, remarks Connor Cruise O’Brien in his biography of Burke – before noting that Paine’s lesser prescience meant he was lucky to escape France before the revolutionaries did to him what they did to so many fellow travellers, as things developed the way Burke had predicted.
Nothing ever changes in these brave new worlds. When it came to curing poverty and suchlike, said Burke, the French revolutionaries were happy to let any quack try out the latest nostrums, but when it came to seizing power, they used historically tried and tested methods “because there they were in earnest”. Matt Taibbi – having reported information Elon Musk made visible about how Twitter helped censor the Hunter Biden laptop story – is getting the same treatment. Journolist has done its best – and it appears that its best is to agree that a bunch of people beholden to Soros, to Pritzker (to Bankman-Fried, till just now) and so on, and their supporters, should all tweet how shameful they think it is that Matt is having anything to do with Elon, because Elon is rich.
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THAT IS THE END OF THIS POST. WHAT FOLLOWS IS JUST BACKGROUND ON BURKE FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS IT.
Ten years ago, I wrote the first of my (very few) instalanched posts. (It was put up for me by Natalie Solent – I was not a poster on samizdata back then.) It was about Edmund Burke. As its old instalink has succumbed to bitrot, I quote the meat of that old post below, in case anyone wants background on his role in my post above.
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When I first started reading Edmund Burke, it was for the political wisdom his writings contained. Only many years later did I start to benefit from noticing that the Burke we know – the man proved a prophet by events and with an impressive legacy – differed from the Burke that the man himself knew: the man who was a lifelong target of slander; the one who, on each major issue of his life, gained only rare and partial victories after years or decades of seeing events tragically unfold as he had vainly foretold. Looking back, we see the man revered by both parties as the model of a statesman and thinker in the following century, the hero of Sir Winston Churchill in the century after. But Burke lived his life looking forwards:
– On America, an initial victory (repeal of the Stamp Act) was followed by over 15 years in the political wilderness and then by the second-best of US independence. (Burke was the very first member of parliament to say that Britain must recognise US independence, but his preferred solution when the crisis first arose in the mid-1760s was to preserve – by rarely using – a prerogative power of the British parliament that could one day be useful for such things as opposing slavery.)
– He vastly improved the lot of the inhabitants of India, but in Britain the first result of trying was massive electoral defeat, and his chosen means after that – the impeachment of Warren Hastings – took him 14 years of exhausting effort and ended in acquittal. Indians were much better off, but back in England the acquittal felt like failure.
– Three decades of seeking to improve the lot of Irish Catholics, latterly with successes, ended in the sudden disaster of Earl Fitzwilliam’s recall and the approach of the 1798 rebellion which he foresaw would fail (and had to hope would fail).
– The French revolutionaries’ conquest of England never looked so likely as at the time of his death in 1797. It was the equivalent of dying in September 1940 or November 1941.
It’s not surprising that late in his life he commented that the ill success of his efforts might seem to justify changing his opinions. But he added that, “Until I gain other lights than those I have”, he would have to go on being true to his understanding.
Burke was several times defeated politically – sometimes as a direct result of being honest – and later (usually much later) resurged simply because his opponents, through refusing to believe his warnings, walked into water over their heads and drowned, doing a lot of irreversible damage in the process. Even when this happened, he was not quickly respected. By the time it became really hard to avoid noticing that the French revolution was as unpleasant as Burke had predicted, all the enlightened people knew he was a longstanding prejudiced enemy of it, so “he loses credit for his foresight because he acted on it”, as Harvey Mansfield put it. (Similarly, whenever ugly effects of modern politics become impossible to ignore, people like us get no credit from those to whom their occurrence is unexpected because we were against them “anyway”.)
Lastly, I offer this Burke quote to guide you when people treat their success in stealing something from you (an election, for example) as evidence of their right to do so:
“The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least, it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments – success.”
The participants in our study, as well as those mentioned in the introduction and many others not included in our sample, are not fringe scientists. Most of them are leading figures: researchers and doctors who prior to the COVID-19 era had a respectable status, with many publications in the scientific literature, some of them with books and hundreds of publications, some headed academic or medical departments, some of them were editors of medical journals, and some had won significant awards. Nevertheless, as our findings show, they were not protected from censorship, nor from the suppression and defamation campaign launched against them. This fact indicates that the message is that no one is exempt from censorship and no academic or medical status, senior as it may be, is a guaranteed shield against it.
Twitter’s mass layoffs, days before US midterms, could be a misinformation disaster
Internal chaos at the company – and the decimation of its staff – has created ideal conditions for falsehoods and hateful content.
The mass layoffs at Twitter, that diminished several teams, including staff on the company’s safety and misinformation teams, could spell disaster during the US midterms elections next week, experts have warned.
What would the woke do without experts – for example Paul Barrett, described as “an expert in disinformation and fake news at New York University”. I’m sure he’s very committed to it, but as to being expert at it – well, judge for yourselves. The Guardian quotes Paul as saying Twitter’s “chaos”, and:
“lack of staff and resources dedicated to counteracting misinformation, has created ideal conditions for election misinformation to thrive … Twitter is in the midst of a category 5 hurricane, and that is not a good environment for fostering vigilance when dealing with inevitable attempts to spread falsehoods and hateful content.”
Man arrested on suspicion of tampering with voting machine
did not prepare me for reading that their concern about this Colorado man was not that he might have affected the June primary but that
it heightened concerns among election officials and security experts that conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election could inspire some voters to meddle with – or even to sabotage – election equipment
Oh, those wicked election deniers! If only they had not raised the idea that such things had already happened, that registered Democrat would never have thought of inserting a thumb drive into a voting machine.
Despite this ingenious framing, I suspect what these ‘experts’ find really hateful is that the ‘information’ they’ve been supplying for two years seems to be missing its target anyway. A recent poll says that 40% agree, and only 36% disagree, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen – and of the 36%, one in three find it “understandable” that others might believe it was, which was not at all the idea meant to be conveyed by always putting ‘baseless’ before ‘claims of election fraud’. (And when the Rasmussen poll a month ago had the don’t-knows choose which side they thought more likely, they did not at all split the way the experts thought they should.) So if that happened despite all those safety and misinformation staffers banning tweets and accounts here, there and everywhere, how safe will the narrative be (I can understand the experts worrying) if Twitter lets reports of vote fraud be seen and assessed by the community, not just the experts?
So much for their fears, now a word about mine. The worst thing about vote fraud is not that it is lied about but that it happens. How much vote fraud will there be in the mid-terms? (Given the conveniently long lead-in times, how much has there already been?) My expectation is: a lot. My hope is: not enough. Hope is not a strategy. This article on the election integrity movement (h/t instapundit) notes some successes but concedes other failures:
Even with the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court victory, that state remains essentially lawless when it comes to election integrity.
– and IIUC, the counting of post-dated or undated ballots in Pennsylvania only got prevented because a judge recently died, leading to an even-numbers stand-off in a key case.
But I can see it will be inconvenient to the lawless if Twitter hasn’t the censors or the will to bring a halt to users showing poll-watching being prevented. No wonder the Guardian and the Independent are upset.
There is no doubt that Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, has been the victim of a vicious assault. There is no doubt that the person who carried out this attack was David DePape. There is widespread doubt about many other aspects of the story. The most common theory is that far from breaking into to the Pelosi residence as an assassin, DePape was invited in as a male prostitute, only for the two men to quarrel over payment or drugs. I will not rehash the arguments put forward in support of this theory, which are available to be read all over the internet. I do wish to stress that if all or any of this is true, it in no way excuses the crime. It would, however, make it a different type of crime from the one the media say it is.
The media would have you believe that these doubts come only from mad conspiracy theorists. They are not helping their case by silently changing details of their own reporting.
Look at these screenshots of two Politico accounts of this story, presented side by side by Stephen L. Miller under the apt caption “Seriously WTF”.
The screenshot on the right takes you to a Politico story about the attack on Paul Pelosi written by Jeremy B. White and Nicholas Wu. I was familiar with this version because I had read it myself a few hours earlier. The title is “Police offer new details in Paul Pelosi assault” and the dateline (in American format) is given as 10/28/2022 09:46 PM EDT. The URL is https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/28/police-pelosi-attack-intentional-00064098. Do I labour the point? That’s because I think this version of the story will disappear soon. Read it while you can. It says:
Two years ago, a post of mine looked at why people were falling for the BLM narrative about Floyd and Chauvin – not just the usual suspects who’d already fallen for the ones about Zimmerman and Wilson, but people like this guy, eloquently aware that Floyd was simply…
“a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end”
…yet swallowing the idea of police guilt in his death. (Before or after reading this post – or instead, if this post seems too long – by all means (re)read my old one.)
Now that poor (literally) Chauvin’s appeal seems to be overcoming his lack of funds for a lawyer, and the Minnesota Supreme Court’s refusal of a public defender, it’s time to remind people why it is folly to look at a picture of prone Floyd dying while under police restraint and confabulate belief in BLM’s narrative about it. My old post told people to read the story forwards, not backwards. This one tells people to know the background before studying the foreground. The usual suspects will continue telling the usual lies, but after two-and-a-half years of experiencing what believing BLM brings, maybe more people are prepared to review things they fell for back then.
Two superficially-contradictory statements are key to grasping what happened:
“PayPal shut down the accounts of the Free Speech Union, its founder the journalist Toby Young and a news website he created after alleged Covid-19 vaccine misinformation”, the Times reports:
Recent tweets by Young appear to question links between excess deaths and the Covid-19 jab, despite no evidence of a link between the two. The Daily Sceptic, of which he is editor-in-chief, also publishes articles on the topic. In 2021 Young was rebuked by Ipso, the press regulator, over a “significantly misleading” column that claimed the common cold could provide “natural immunity” to Covid and London was “probably approaching herd immunity”.
However, he insisted he was not anti-vaccine: “I believe the risks of the mRNA vaccines outweigh the benefits for those under 65 and without any medical conditions. We have repeatedly made it clear in The Daily Sceptic that while we have reservations about the efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccines we do not take a position on whether people should take them or not but encourage them to do their own risk assessments.”
For the record, I have had all the Covid vaccinations, and plan to have the booster. But if Big Tech wanted to spread doubt about the safety of Covid vaccines there would be no better way to do it than what they are doing now. The purpose of this is obviously to censor. Like all types of lying, censorship can often work well for the liar at first, but once people know that censorship is occurring, they start to doubt every subsequent statement from a censored source. Every line is read through a lens stamped with the words “What else are they hiding?” In this case, “Are they hiding reports of adverse reactions? Do they even know if adverse reactions are occurring, given that you can’t talk about it?”
What about the argument that Paypal are a private company and ought to be able to exclude whoever the hell they like? This is one of many things I would gladly leave to the free market if we lived in anything like a free market. Unfortunately, in the real world the big companies are locked in a loving embrace with the State. They are quite happy to squelch troublesome people like Toby Young in exchange for regulators squelching troublesome competitors. In an industry where there are very few big players, it does not take long for a senior civil servant to make all the necessary calls. Then suddenly all sorts of ordinary things get difficult. Want to buy or sell on eBay? This is the list of permitted payment methods. Short, isn’t it? How long before all of them follow Paypal’s lead?
I miss the days when these verses from the Book of Revelation were the preserve of wild-eyed men walking the streets wearing sandwich boards:
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads,
17 that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name.
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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