We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
And lo, there be pestilence in the land. And the King didst decree that all should partake of the magic potion. And then Andrew of Bridgen didst say, “All my followers are dying!” And the gods of Tory didst smite him. And then John of Campbell didst say, “Funny. All my followers are dying!” I must make haste to Bridgen by means of fibre optic cable and parlay with him. And the gods of Google didst smite him. But the Lord had spoken to Tommy of Luton – that most unpromising of his servants – and said “taketh a recording of this YouTube and uploadeth it to Telegram so that my people might hear the word of Campbell and Bridgen.” And he did. And the Lord was pleased.
Update: And the Lord did command that all his brethren didst install Telegram on their tablets of silicon that they might hear the word of Campbell and Bridgen.
Update 2: the censored video of Dr. John Campbell interviewing Andrew Bridgen is also available on BitChute
Two men have admitted removing body parts of a man who is accused of carrying out castrations and broadcasting the footage on his “eunuch maker” website.
Nathan Arnold, 48, a nurse from South Kensington, west London, admitted the partial removal of Marius Gustavson’s nipple in the summer of 2019.
Damien Byrnes, 35, from Tottenham, north London, admitted removing Gustavson’s penis on 18 February 2017.
Gustavson, who is originally from Norway, is said to have been the ringleader in a conspiracy involving up to 29 offences of extreme body modifications, the removal of body parts, the trade in body parts and the uploading of videos.
Given that these people were all consenting adults, I do not understand why their actions (other than the theft of the anaesthetic) should be a criminal offence, particularly as surgical operations to remove people’s penises are legal in male to female sex change operations. Does it make a difference in principle whether the appearance aimed for when surgically removing a penis is female or eunuchoid?
My question is not designed to provoke the reaction “Of course it should be legal to do this, just as it is legal to perform sex change operations”. Nor is it designed to provoke the reaction “Of course it should be illegal to perform sex change operations, just as it is illegal to do this.” I can see reasonable justification for saying that changing someone’s body to be like lots of other people’s bodies is much more likely to go well than changing their body to a form few others have. By “go well”, I mean be likely to increase the wellbeing of the person upon whom the operation is performed, or be less likely to decrease it, and also to go well in the same ways that any surgical operation is judged a success or a failure.
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.
Why does everything have to be justified on the basis that it will help the NHS? Especially when the NHS is failing its patients so badly? UK healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP now ranks fifth highest in the OECD, yet the system isn’t delivering even the most basic forms of care. Some 2.7 million people are sitting anxiously on the waiting list.
If you have not seen this, discussing catastrophic care protocols, it beggars belief. If anyone with more germane technical knowledge can pick holes in this, please do so in the comments because if this is entirely correct, we should be looking at a Nuremburg level response.
What is the 77th Brigade for? According to its own website, the mission of this unit of the British Army is to CHALLENGE THE DIFFICULTIES OF MODERN WARFARE. Despite the capital letters I do not feel hugely better informed. It continues,
We are a combined Regular and Army Reserve unit. Our aim is to challenge the difficulties of modern warfare using non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of the opposing forces and adversaries.
Um, okay. I would not want the difficulties of modern warfare to go unchallenged. I would even be up for them challenging the easy bits of modern warfare while they’re at it. However, before I give my wholehearted support to “adapting behaviours of the opposing forces” I would like to know what adapting-without-a-to means in normal English. Is it us changing them or them changing us? The question is pertinent because according to a whistleblower who contacted the civil liberties organisation Big Brother Watch, the last part of the line about the target of the British Army’s behavioural adaptation squad being “opposing forces and adversaries” seems to have been quietly dropped.
This link allows you to download a Big Brother Watch report called Ministry of Truth: the secretive government units spying on your speech.
The key findings are:
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, Conservative MPs David Davis and Chris Green, high profile academics from the University of Oxford and University College London, and journalists including Peter Hitchens and Julia Hartley-Brewer, all had comments critical of the government analysed by anti-misinformation units.
Targeted speech included public criticism of the government’s pandemic response – particularly lockdown modelling and vaccine passports – as well as journalists’ criticism of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and MPs’ criticism of NATO
Soldiers from the Army’s 77th Brigade, tasked with “non-lethal psychological warfare”, collected tweets from British citizens posting about Covid-19 and passed them to central government – despite claiming operations were directed strictly overseas
A counter-misinformation unit pressured the Dept. of Health to attack newspapers for publishing articles analysing Covid-19 modelling that it feared would undermine compliance with pandemic restrictions.
MPs and journalists were featured in “vaccine hesitancy reports” for opposing vaccine passports
Contractors paid over £1m to trawl social media for perceived terms of service violations on selected topics and pass them to government officials
Counter-disinformation units use special relationships with social media companies to recommend content be removed
Front organisations aimed at minority communities were set up to spread government propaganda in the UK
BBW have provided a jolly little template that allows you exercise your legal right to find out if you personally were having your social media posts monitored. However that does seem to involve giving the government the real name behind your twitter handle, which in the circumstances…
Becoming vaccinated was the easy choice, not the hard one. There was never any evidence it was the sensible choice and it could be argued – and this may seem harsh – that if you were determined to be part of the group, wilfully and determinedly deaf to any counter-argument or even call for caution, absolutist in your own belief in you virtue and knowledge, irrationally frightened of death, unthinking, superficial and glib, fearful of other people’s opinion of you, filled with desire/fear to comply with the powerful for safety or favour, then becoming vaccinated was the only choice. But these are not exactly admirable qualities.
I suspect this article will annoy some people as it is a divisive issue. I do not agree with every point of the article either (I am not anti-vaccines per se, I just don’t think this particular one made any sense), but it does raise points worth pondering.
It was generally known [the Inspector-General said] that great quantities of opium were grown up-country and smuggled into the wealthy cities in violation of the law with the connivance of the provincial and military officials. The illicit growth, transport, and consumption had become a serious problem, and the question arose whether the Chinese Government should not recognize an evil that seemed ineradicable from China, create a monopoly of the drug, and license users at rates, of course, as nearly prohibitive as practicable.
– Sir Francis Aglen, The Times, 25 January 1923 as dredged up by yours truly for this week’s episode of What the Paper Said.
‘Ms Ardern choked up as she detailed how six “challenging” years in the job had taken a toll
Labour Party MPs will vote to find her replacement on Sunday.
The shock announcement comes as polling indicates the party faces a difficult path to re-election on 14 October.’
The only shock was that she chose to jump rather than be pushed. Still, she can comfort herself with the thought that though her support inside New Zealand may have diminished, she remains much esteemed by the great and good worldwide.
“Canada wrestles with euthanasia for the mentally ill”, reports the BBC. Actually, the headline starts with the question “Who can die?” to which I would have thought the answer was obvious. But while death undoubtedly comes to us all eventually, when the state pays for healthcare it pays the state to make death come sooner:
… last autumn, authorities launched an investigation after at least four veterans were prompted to consider Maid [the acronym for Canada’s medical assistance in dying programme] by a Veterans Affairs case worker, who now no longer works for the department. In one instance, veteran and paralympian Christine Gauthier said she was offered the option by the employee after she asked for a wheelchair ramp to be installed in her home.
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.
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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