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]
Well, I suppose one of several silver linings of the current arguments about whether the UK should transfer ownership of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius (the legal case is weak, the strategic case is absurd) and the USA should buy Greenland from Denmark, is that those of us who are a bit off the pace with our geography have had a chance to remind ourselves where these places are, and why they matter.
The Chagos Islands have been what are rather grandly called a British Indian Ocean Territory. The UK government, claiming that it is required to do so under international law (debatable), is to hand the islands to Mauritius – which is hundreds of miles away to the west of Chagos – and will pay Mauritius (a tax haven, by the way) for the ability to have control of said islands for a leasehold period of several decades. That means the UK can no longer decide if other countries – such as China – should be excluded, for example, from putting listening posts in the vicinity. The US military uses the Diego Garcia military base to operate long-haul flights, such as of the B2 stealth bomber and B52 bomber varieties, often to vital strategic effect.
In 2025, when the Starmer government was pushing this arrangement to pass over the islands to Mauritius – and pay Mauritius billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money for the purpose (which is itself a disgrace) – the newly elected Trump administration appeared to be content with the deal, although some in the defence establishment appeared to be worried about the geo-strategic implications of opening a potential door to China in that part of the Indian Ocean. The Chagos transfer remains caught up in UK parliamentary wrangling, but I fear that it will go through – but maybe not if Trump’s comments in the past 24 hours have an impact.
Mr Trump, who is angry at the UK for things such as allowing the Chinese to build a massive new embassy in London (with enhanced spying capabilities, no doubt), and about the UK’s criticism of his Greenland purchase demand (the UK is on firmer ground, if not entirely) has hit at the UK for the Chagos situation. Arguably, Trump’s move gives Starmer, if he is wise enough (is he, ed?) an “off-ramp” excuse to axe the Chagos transfer and put it down as a bad idea. (That would be the smart course, in my view.) Maybe even a smarter course would be for Starmer to let the US buy a stake in the Chagos Islands with a promise to let the UK still use the base on a joint basis. That would deal with America’s concerns about long-haul base access in the Indian Ocean and countering Chinese mischief-making, and perhaps take a bit of sting out of the Greenland issue.
I haven’t space to go into the Greenland case, but suffice to say that I think a US invasion of land that is under Danish rule (Denmark is in NATO) is unlikely to happen and would be outrageous if it did. I think Trump will pull back and over time, some sort of arrangement will be reached once tempers cool. Greenland, given some icecap melting etc, is going to be easier for surface ships and submarines to navigate around, and that makes it an important place for the US/Canada/others to want to protect, given where it is on the map.
But where the Greenland case is relevant in the Chagos case is that the US has a lease of a military base there (signed in 1951 – there were several attempts by the US to buy the place). And Trump has said that leaseholds aren’t enough – the US must own it. The logic he uses is similar to the logic that critics of the Chagos transfer have used – leaseholds aren’t enough because you must have the ability to exclude. Exclusion is the key issue here.
Maybe, therefore, a way forward for Trump and other NATO powers is to insist that US/Western leases in Greenland must involve no such leases for China, Russia and others potentially hostile to NATO members, and that such leases should be reviewed, such as once every 10 years to account for changing geopolitics.
The ability to show a measure of maturity on all sides – including ours in the UK – is critical. I worry that the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact between the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia is likely to end unless matters change. Starmer, who has been a clanking disaster of a Prime Minister, should stop goading the US by foolishly, and in my view fecklessly, giving every impression that the UK is becoming a useful idiot for Beijing. Whatever criticisms one might make of Trump’s recent foreign policy moves, on this occasion, he is more on the side of the angels than some might admit.
Recently, I flicked through James C Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge, written more than 20 years ago, a few days ago. Reading it in light of recent events show what’s changed in the world, and what hasn’t. Recommended.
So soon into 2026, I am delighted Maduro is gone… just as I was delighted when Saddam Hussain was overthrown in 2003. Yet in retrospect, I had no idea how unwise successive US governments would be when it came to handling the aftermath in Iraq.
Trump says what will follow in Venezuela will not be ‘nation building’ so much as literal direct rule by the USA “until a proper and judicious transition” (whatever that means).
Yet is there any indication the US actually has control of Venezuela? To what extent has Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela been dismantled, if at all? One night of air strikes will not have eliminated the regime’s security apparatus. Will there be a Marine Expeditionary Force in Caracas in the next few days?
What Putin understands – and what Britain refuses to face – is that Europe is vulnerable in ways that matter more than tanks or troop numbers. Russia’s president does not need to defeat Nato militarily to cause chaos. As he has already shown through repeated greyzone attacks, Europe’s power grids, subsea cables, energy systems and communications networks offer targets far easier to strike, far harder to defend and politically far more disruptive. Putin’s warning this week was a reminder that Russia knows exactly where our exposed nerves lie.
The United States has threatened to cut off weapons and intelligence to Ukraine unless it signs Donald Trump’s peace deal by next Thursday.
Sources said Ukraine was under greater pressure from Washington to bow to the US president’s demands than in previous negotiation efforts.
“They want to stop the war and want Ukraine to pay the price,” one of the sources told Reuters.
Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday he would use the plan as the basis for negotiations with Russia but Kyiv has warned its red lines must not be crossed in any peace deal.
The Ukrainian leader spoke to his European allies on Friday, including Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, who “welcomed efforts of the US” but called for a “just and lasting peace” for Ukraine.
Mr Trump’s 28-point peace plan is largely favourable to Russia, giving Moscow more Ukrainian territory than it currently possesses and readmission to the G7.
On Friday, the Kremlin maintained that it had not received Mr Trump’s peace plan but warned Mr Zelensky must negotiate “now” or risk losing more territory.
The part I have put in bold type looks alarming. On the other hand, the British press, most definitely including the Telegraph, continually tries to make Trump look as bad as possible. In the first few months after Putin invaded, Ukraine’s resolute defence against the odds saved the country from annihilation – but as the war drags on its position seems to be gradually weakening. What do you think? Is this the best deal Ukraine is likely to get?
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 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 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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