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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Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, and Anne Hidalgo, the Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, have written a joint article for the Guardian called “In London and Paris, we’ve experienced vicious backlash to climate action. But we’re not backing down”. They write,
“We welcome efforts such as the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires online platforms to counter the spread of illegal content, including disinformation, and lays the groundwork for holding platforms accountable. But much more is needed. For example, the UK’s Online Safety Act could be strengthened by explicitly recognising climate disinformation as a form of harmful content.”
It is remarkable how people who would be ashamed to support a law to “counter the spread of illegal speech” happily praise a law that “counters the spread of illegal content.” The magic of words: just re-label “speech” as “content” – as being inside something – and it can now truly be contained, as in “restrained or controlled”.
The same people regularly proclaim that Europe is a place which has banished censorship of the press. That is almost true, although both the EU and the UK governments are working to restore their old powers. In the meantime they are willing enough to temporarily refrain from censorship of ideas spread by old technology if it gives them cover for censoring ideas spread by new technology.
Do not go along with their word games. The term “Freedom of the press” is not restricted to words conveyed to the public by means of a a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium. Nor does “freedom of speech” only refer to words that come out of mouths by the action of tongue and lips. In the words of a source they claim to respect, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says,
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Emphasis added.
And while I’m emphasising things, let me also emphasise this: the minute I learn that an idea is being censored, I give that idea more credence.
No, that does not mean that I automatically believe any censored idea entirely. (How could I? A million contradictory falsehoods are censored alongside the truth. The problem is that the act of censorship destroys our ability to tell which of them is the truth.) It means that I strain to hear what is being said behind the gag. It means that I start to wonder how real the claimed consensus is, if those who depart from it are silenced. It means that I start to wonder why the proponents of the “accepted” view feel the need to protect it from counter-arguments.
I said in 2012 that my belief in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) was two and a half letters to the left compared to most commenters on this blog. Damn, it should have been one and a half letters to the right. Oh well, you knew what I meant. With regard to CAGW or whatever they are calling it now, whether I phrase it as my belief moving to the left or my disbelief moving to the right, the surest way to make that movement happen is to pass a law defining “climate disinformation as a form of harmful content”. Then I will know that the so-called scientific consensus on climate change is no such thing. If certain hypotheses cannot be discussed, not only is there no scientific consensus, there is no science.
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A related post, but focussing on self-censorship rather than the government censorship that Mayors Khan and Hidalgo favour: “Bubbles, lies and buttered toast.” Any form of censorship is fatal to science.
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?
In Ms Harvey’s universe – occupied by the likes of Corrêa do Lago, Greenpeace and the UK’s very own ‘Mad Ed’, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – the science is settled, the energy transition is an imperative and decarbonisation will not only save the planet from an impending environmental catastrophe but also bring about economic growth and prosperity. Harvey’s article hinges on the tired assertion that the science of climate change is settled, with a ‘97% consensus’ among scientists that human activity drives catastrophic global warming. This figure, derived from John Cook’s 2013 study, has been debunked repeatedly for its methodological flaws — most notably by scholars like David Legates, who found that only a tiny fraction of the studied papers explicitly endorsed the catastrophic narrative.
– Tilak Doshi
Last year the UK Met Office was shown to be inventing long-term temperature data at 103 non-existent weather stations. It was claimed in a later risible ‘fact check’ that the data were estimated from nearby well-correlated neighbouring stations. Citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders issued a number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to learn the identity of these correlating sites but has been told that the information is not held by the Met Office. So the invented figures for the non-existent sites are supposedly provided by stations that the Met Office claims it cannot identify and are presumably not recorded in its copious computer storage and archive.
– Chris Morrison
For a few hours today the lead story on the front pages of both the Guardian and the Telegraph was about the untimely demise of a plant. The Sycamore Gap Tree was a mildly famous old tree next to Hadrian’s Wall. I don’t think I ever consciously saw it in person, but I had heard of it. The tree’s Wikipedia article – it has its own Wikipedia article – says,
The tree was felled in the early morning of 28 September 2023 in what Northumbria Police described as “an act of vandalism”. The felling of the tree led to an outpouring of anger and sadness.
That last sentence is certainly true. It was one of those news stories that is of little consequence by the normal measures of the importance of news stories but which packed a surprising punch emotionally. I’d heard of that tree. It had a node in my brain, not a big node but one in a nice area near to the ones dealing with history and nature and charming old guidebooks, and now some scumbags had cut it down, apparently for the fun of making me and people like me feel bad. I was glad when said scumbags were arrested and gladder still when earlier today they were both found guilty of criminal damage and told to expect custodial sentences. I was even a little bit glad to read that both men had been remanded in custody prior to sentencing for their own protection.
Am I justified in thinking that the two men who cut down this particular tree deserve more serious punishment than other people who cut down trees that do not belong to them in order to steal the wood or something? I would not go quite so far as the readers of the Telegraph, who would be quite happy to use the wood to build a gallows and recover the costs by selling commemorative slices, but I am definitely in a vengeful mood.
Why? It was not my tree, except in the feeble sense that it belonged to the National Trust, of which I am member. My suffering at its demise was not zero but was not great either. It didn’t ruin my life. It didn’t even ruin my morning. Presumably the same goes for all the other people who felt bad reading about the vandalism in the paper or hearing about it on the news. They suffered, but not greatly. The tree didn’t suffer. All agree that the criminal damage was a straightforward crime and should be punished, but why do so many people, including me, feel that this was a more serious crime than most instances of criminal damage because it upset people? The post below treats the idea of blasphemy laws and a so-called right to be shielded from offensive speech with a scorn that I fully share. I have an uneasy feeling that I am coming close to setting up an offence of tree blasphemy.
In the comments to my previous post, Zerren Yeoville was inspired by the Pogues’ 1987 classic Fairytale of New York to pen the following lines for Birmingham in its current travails:
‘They’ve got rats big as cats
They’ve got rivers of mould
The smell goes right through ya
You’d best have a cold
When you first took the bins out
On a cold winter’s eve
You promised me dustcarts
were “waiting, you’ll see”….’
The rats as big as cats were also mentioned in the Sun‘s headline today:
NO END IN SIGHT Huge blow for locals in UK’s ‘third-world city’ where Army called in to tackle cat-sized rats & 21k TONS of rubbish
A major incident has already been declared by Birmingham City Council
Lest anyone think the Sun is being melodramatic, the BBC’s headline does not merely feature cat-sized rats but cat-sized rats who have begun their insurrection against humanity:
‘Cat-sized rats are attacking our cars’
NickM also provided commentary in verse on the Birmingham bin strike, but, unless I have misunderstood, that one was written by A.I. so it doesn’t count.
Gosh, ChatGPT is getting alarmingly good.
Credit to the Guardian for discharging their duty to report this story:
Couple who ran Swedish eco-retreat fled leaving behind barrels of human waste
A Danish chef couple who attracted international acclaim with a “forest resort” in Sweden have been tracked down to Guatemala after apparently going on the run from tax authorities, leaving behind 158 barrels of human waste.
Flemming Hansen and Mette Helbæk founded their purportedly eco-friendly retreat, Stedsans, in Halland, southern Sweden, after claiming to have “felt the call of the wild” in Copenhagen, where they ran a popular rooftop restaurant.
Stedsans, formed of 16 wooden cottages looking out on to nature, attracted praise from influencers and reviewers, who described it as “magical” and “enchanting luxury”.
But a few months ago it was discovered that the couple had vanished, leaving multiple animals behind and 158 barrels of human waste, an investigation by newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Politiken has found.
“Dark Laboratory: groundbreaking book argues climate crisis was sparked by colonisation” was the headline of the review of Tao Leigh Goffe’s magnum opus in the Guardian, but the headline is wrong. I have read the whole article, even the captions to the pictures (“The reggae artist Chronixx, whose lyrics form part of the implements Goffe uses to dismantle the superstructure of western science”) so I know all about it. Colonisation was only a symptom. The real villain was Carl Linnaeus. Now you probably thought of Linnaeus as the “biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature” and as something of a hero to ecologists. Not any more!
Central to Goffe’s critique is the notion that European colonialism turned the islands of the Caribbean into a “dark laboratory of colonial desires and experiments … the epicentre of the modern globalised world”.
It was there that enslaving farmers first formulated the structures of modern capitalism, alongside a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science.
Such experiments included the creation of monocrop agriculture, the clearing of terrestrial and marine ecosystems making territories vulnerable to extreme weather, the categorisation of wildlife along lines of superficial characteristics
Told ya Linnaeus was the real baddie. How much better off we would all be if his father had followed his first instincts and apprenticed him to a cobbler. Then we would have respected Black and Indigenous forms of science.
and the now equally discredited categorisation of different races along similar lines.
Um, how discredited is that? Richard Dawkins put an entertaining account of the vicious feud between the geneticists and the cladists in The Blind Watchmaker (a feud in which an announcement that some colleague had “gone over to the Cladists” was received with scarcely less horror than an announcement that said colleague had taken Holy Orders), but I thought the whole point was that it all washes up on the same shore in the end. And is it not one of the main conclusions of Linnaean classification that the test of whether Organism X and Organism Y are of the same species is whether they can interbreed? All humans can interbreed, making us one species, QE-categorically-D.
“In opposition to the land, the colonial approach has been one of razing and dynamite, eroding Indigenous relationships to the soil,” writes Goffe. We must, she argues, “connect the dots between the brutal system of chattel slavery and the degradation of the natural environment … The worlds Europeans built depended on making the lives of some disposable.”
The worlds everyone else built are so much nicer.
Related posts:
Not just physics, Indigenous Australian physics
Decolonise your mind!
and, just for the nostalgia value, here is one from back when when Greens liked science:
Climate change action: “The Science” gives way to “The Physics”
One last thought… having one’s superstructure dismantled by the use of reggae lyrics sounds a distinctly unsettling process. But that is what has been done to western science, we now learn. Therefore The Science no longer is Settled.
UPDATE: OK, so it wasn’t one last thought. More thoughts came overnight, and I want to get them down before I forget. I might expand what follows into another post later.
1) Tao Leigh Goffe is “dismantling the superstructure” of the branch upon which she sits. She says that racist western science caused capitalism, which caused the climate crisis. But the justification we are given for believing that there is a climate crisis comes from that same western science. And if some of us are less convinced than she thinks we ought to be about the scale and imminence of peril, that is not because we have lost faith in science but because we have lost faith in many of the people with “scientist” in their job title.
2) Science does not make men good. It does make them powerful. The article speaks of “a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science”, but one reason that the white men were in a position to enslave and oppress others was that their science was the one that worked.
3) Modern science arose in Western Europe. There was a period of a few centuries where the resulting superiority of European technology – ships and guns at the sharp end, with the power of the ironworks and the printing press behind them – meant that scruffy bands of white “adventurers” could conquer whole continents. That period is over. The scientific method is now available to anyone who wants it. Which mostly seems to be the Chinese at the moment.
“Councils begging for your savings isn’t a net zero innovation – it’s an embarrassment”, writes James Baxter-Derrington in the Telegraph.
In an attempt to plug the ever-increasing funding gap, bankrupt-adjacent local councils have dusted off the begging bowl and covered it in tinsel.
Under the guise of investment, Green-led Bristol has become the latest council to offer what smells like a voluntary council tax to fund responsibilities that should be met from their existing budgets.
[…]
But in a demonstration of phenomenal gall these local bodies have launched their own Kickstarter for Councils, asking not only their residents, but anyone across the country, to foot the net zero bill – in exchange for below-market returns.
These green bonds can be found on Abundance Investment, a platform that facilitates these loans for a slice of the pie – 0.75pc of the total sum raised alongside an annual 0.2pc fee. The website proudly declares that it offers investments with councils “in a solid financial position”, despite Bristol councillors declaring just two months ago that the body faced bankruptcy if it can’t close its £52m funding gap.
Samizdata is not often seen as the go-to place for investment advice, but, on balance and after careful consideration, I would suggest that readers seeking a home for their money avoid “Bristol Climate Action Investment 1” like the plague and avoid “Hackney Green Investment 2” like Hackney. (“Does ‘Murder Mile’ still deserve its name?” asked the Hackney Post after a lull. Short answer: Yes.)
Nonetheless, I salute these councils for seeking to raise additional money by asking for it instead of demanding it with menaces. I would salute them even more if they moved entirely to a voluntary system. Though the prospect is unlikely, I hope the investors make their money back with interest, so that this trend towards councils raising money by ethical means might spread.
“UK hoping to work with China to counteract Trump’s climate-hostile policies”, writes Fiona Harvey in the Guardian.
The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and a host of developing countries, to offset the impact of Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies and his sharp veer towards climate-hostile countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
A “new global axis” with the People’s Republic of China. Who could possibly object to that?
The article continues,
Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, arrived in Beijing on Friday for three days of talks with top Chinese officials, including discussions on green technology supply chains, coal and the critical minerals needed for clean energy. The UK’s green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, but access to components and materials will be crucial for that to continue.
What they mean by this is that the number of people paid to make government regulations, interpret government regulations, comply with government regulations, check that others are complying with government regulations, and punish those who do not comply with government regulations is increasing three times faster than the rest of the economy, which for some mysterious reason is growing more slowly than expected at the moment.
“They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.”
– Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr., regarding the case of Michael E. Mann, Ph.D., v. National Review, Inc., et al in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia Civil Division 2012 CA 008263 B.
Hat tips to John in the comments to yesterday’s post and to John Hinderaker of Powerline via Instapundit.
As Mr Hinderaker says, the facts of this case are rather complicated but the judge’s conclusions are unequivocal – and the conclusion of the court that Dr Michael E Mann, maker of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph”, knowingly participated in a falsehood has a certain… resonance.
Related post: “Samizdata quote of the day – unfortunately the high-status fraudster won.” I am happy to say that the injustice done a year ago has been partially undone by this latest ruling.
“Never forget that making Britain into a broke, repressive dystopia was a deliberate choice”, writes Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph.
The article starts by repeating a familiar refrain about the unprecedented loss of civil liberties during the pandemic.
As we approach the fifth anniversary, we don’t like to admit that we destroyed our economy, took away part of our kids’ childhoods, permanently aggrandised the state and indebted ourselves for a generation – all for nothing.
All true, but the real meat is here:
Five years ago this Tuesday, Jenny Harries, then the deputy chief medical officer, gave an illuminating, though now neglected, interview. It was not neglected at the time. On the contrary, it took place in No 10, and the interviewer was the prime minister himself, Boris Johnson.
Dr Harries – who has since become Dame Jenny, and been put in charge of the UK Health Security Agency – was impressively level-headed. She explained that, “for most people, it really is going to be quite a mild disease”.
She advised against wearing facemasks unless told otherwise by your doctor. She explained why Britain, unlike many countries in Europe, was not banning large meetings or sporting events. There was, she reminded us, a plan in place, and it provided for the gradual spread of the disease through the population in a way that would not overwhelm hospitals. Try to suppress the spread too vigorously, she said, and there would be a peak later on (which, indeed, is exactly what happened).
Dr Harries was absolutely right, but she was only repeating the global consensus. A little earlier, the WHO had looked at lockdowns and concluded that they were “not demonstrably effective in urban areas”. Its researchers had carried out a study of 120 US military camps during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and found “no statistical difference” between the 99 camps that had confined men to quarters and the 21 that had not.
As recently as 2019, the WHO had declared that lockdowns as a response to respiratory diseases were “not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it”.
Dr Harries knew all this. And so did Boris, who spoke what was, in retrospect, the most telling line of the entire interview: “Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science,” he said.
If was capable of having that thought, he was capable of acting on it, or rather of continuing to act on it. He was not, as I once thought, a man in a panic who, pathetically but understandably, followed the the united voice of “the experts” because he could not imagine doing anything else. As a successful politician he knew the political nature of the pressure he was under and chose to give into it. He switched which expert to follow – switched from the expert who was right to the “expert” who was wrong – on political grounds. Oh, no doubt his decision was influenced by which expert shouted the loudest (it was not Jenny Harries) and said the scariest things, but a refusal to be moved from a rationally-decided course by emotional displays is the very definition of a leader. I wonder, does he ever think now about how near he came to being the second Churchill he dreamed of being? All he had to do was stay firm.
Dr Harries responded that she was proud that Britain’s response had remained scientific.
Five days later, Boris took to the airwaves to tell people “to stop non-essential contact and travel”. A week after that, we were in lockdown (a term borrowed from prison, which I held out against using for as long as I could). What changed? Well, on March 16, Neil Ferguson and the team at Imperial College published an apocalyptic report based on modelling that estimated that if no measures were put in place deaths over the following two years could reach more than half a million.
And it was popular. Very popular.
Although we sometimes now imagine that Boris wrenched our freedoms from our unwilling hands, it was the other way around. We have forgotten the “Go Home Covidiots” banners, the terrified phone-ins, the YouGov poll showing that 93 per cent of voters wanted a lockdown.
Persuading people that they have been badly treated is easy. Persuading them that they themselves have behaved badly and stupidly is not easy at all. How do we do it? A cynic would say there is no need to try. Just publicly blame everything on “the politicians” (in this case Boris Johnson, who certainly deserves plenty of blame but not all of it) in the same way that the Greens publicly blame all the environmental damage they believe comes from humanity’s reliance on oil on “the oil companies” rather than the people who use the oil, namely all of us. But I do not believe that any strategy of persuasion that relies on a conscious lie can succeed in the long run.
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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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