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Beatrice Adler-Bolton
@realLandsEnd
Sanism names a deep, pervasive belief that ppl who appear out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis are not trustworthy, less human & fundamentally disruptive to social life. It’s a hierarchy of credibility and belonging, where visible distress = danger/contamination
1:59 AM · Feb 23, 2026
https://x.com/realLandsEnd/status/2025752283435196882
This tweet by Beatrice Alder-Bolton, co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, has been garnering interest, as it was intended to do. As the title says, while I never doubt the humanity of people who appear “out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis”, I do think that while they remain in this state in public places they are disruptive to social life. I also think that while in this state they are untrustworthy.
Beatrice Alder-Bolton would like us to believe that she trusts them. If she had said that she sympathised with people visibly in psychiatric crisis, I would have believed her. I also sympathise. If she had said that she tries to engage with such people in order to help them, I might have believed her. I have met a few kind souls who habitually respond in this way. I admire them (the kind souls) from a safe distance. But when Beatrice Alder-Bolton implies that she thinks the man having a psychiatric crisis in front of her on public transport is trustworthy, I do not believe her. Her body goes onto high alert just like anyone else’s. And speaking for myself, you bet I don’t trust the crazy guy. You bet I think he might be dangerous. And if he has just emptied his bowels or his bladder in the carriage I do indeed fear contamination.
But in order to be worthy of trust myself, I cannot simply dismiss Beatrice Alder-Bolton as a high-functioning mad left-winger of the sort that even other left-wingers are beginning to realise are poisonous to their cause (“I am begging leftists and liberals to not do this again. It is normal and smart to be nervous and on high alert when someone behaves in a profoundly anti-social way (peeing on the subway) and/or a threatening way (screaming on the subway). The more cities tolerate this, the fewer people ride public transport, the worse that transport gets, and eventually it gets to a breaking point and people wind up voting for right-wing politicians who come in and crack skulls and way over-police.” – Jill Filipovic), I have to acknowledge that when Alder-Bolton’s way of thinking is described as “left libertarian”, the “libertarian” part is perfectly real.
I wrote about the influence that the libertarian writings of Thomas Szasz had and continue to have on me in a post called “Ideology and Insanity on the New York Subway”. Just as certain chemicals are harmless in themselves but dangerous in combination with others, the way that Szasz’s* libertarian ideals combined with the dominant suicidally empathetic ideals of our time has produced results like the random murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown.
There are ways to respect the equal humanity of those who cannot function in society while, well, continuing to have a society. Private property is one, and if that is too much for modern sensibilities, the rediscovery of the right to exclude mad people from public property. To use Ms Alder-Bolton’s word, sanism. The rediscovery of proud, unapologetic sanism.
*You say it “sasses”. In Hungarian the digraph “sz” has the same function as the English letter “s” and the letter “s” on its own is pronounced the same way as the English digraph “sh”. Confusingly, Polish is the other way round.
UK has not given US permission to use RAF bases for Iran strikes… ok, I get it, bonehead Trump has acted in ways that make it clear the Atlantic alliance of yore is now largely dead, for which there are serious geopolitical consequences. But surely, given there still are US bases are on British territory, at least for now, and the theocratic Iranian government is a manifestly unfriendly power, hampering US strikes on the mass murderous mullahs is perverse. That too will have geopolitical consequences.
The lunatic UKGov wants to give Chagos to an ally of China (and pay for the ‘privilege’ of giving them away, for reasons that must surely boil down to naked corruption), I imagine US has drawn up contingency plans to simply take Diego Garcia over if worse comes to worse, with all that implies.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act, one of the most common reasons for filing a suspicious activity report (often abbreviated as SAR) is because someone deposited or withdrew nearly $10,000 in cash. That’s all it takes for you to get labeled as “suspicious” in an official report to the government.
These reports rarely catch actual criminals. Yet, each report is like a red mark on your banking record, nonetheless. And getting too many of these reports filed on you can quickly spell trouble. If you rack up multiple reports (often as few as three), banks will close the account. The bank might know you are likely innocent, but the risk of regulators punishing them for inaction is too high. Fines for failing to report real criminal activity can reach into the millions.
It’s much safer for the bank to close the account than risk fines later, especially if it is a smaller account.
– Nicholas Anthony
Minnesota is not a happy place at the moment, what with the multi-billion-dollar welfare fraud story and now this:
After an immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump portrayed that use of lethal force as clearly justified. Noem averred that the dead woman, Renee Nicole Good, was engaged in an “act of domestic terrorism” because she was trying to “run a law enforcement officer over.” Trump went even further, saying Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” (Reason magazine.)
Bystander video of the incident immediately cast doubt on those accounts. Footage from various angles “appears to show the agent,” later identified as Jonathan Ross, “was not in the path of [Good’s] SUV when he fired three shots at close range,” The New York Times reported on Thursday. “The SUV did move toward the ICE agent as he stood in front of it,” The Washington Post noted. “But the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him.”
I am not going to get into the “who did what?” side of this, but I think that to some extent, this is what happens when people who are pressured to “get results” and operate in a system where they are encouraged to do so. For many years, law enforcement in different countries has had this issue, with the US in the lead. We are seeing the increasing militarisation of law enforcement. Radley Balko, who now works at the Washington Post, has done important work in shining a light on where this is going for many years. Things are seemingly getting worse the current administration but this did not come from nowhere.
Several Samizdata commenters are, if I recall correctly, those with law enforcement experience, so I’d be interested to know what the rights and wrongs are here.
When U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in a predawn raid on Saturday, it should have been a moment of triumph for Venezuela’s democratic opposition. But rather than endorsing the leadership of Edmundo González, whose victory in July’s 2024 election was stolen by Maduro, President Donald Trump announced he’d work with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president for the past six years. After Trump called her “gracious” and claimed she was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” the Maduro-controlled Supreme Court swiftly appointed her as acting president on Saturday, once again sidelining the elected opposition.
Rodríguez is neither gracious nor a reformer. She’s a self-identified communist who has held key positions under both former dictator Hugo Chávez and Maduro, Venezuelan political writer Paola Bautista de Alemán tells Reason. In 2017, Maduro tapped Rodríguez to be president of the illegitimate constituent assembly that usurped the powers of the elected National Assembly to silence the opposition. Later that year, Maduro appointed her to the “Anti-Coup Command,” tasked with taking measures against alleged coup plotters and terrorists, labels routinely applied to peaceful opposition figures.
– César Báez
The US Congress is to all intents and purposes dead. It cannot function with the filibuster rule and an evenly balanced country with the two sides highly belligerent. Now the question we want to ask is: is this a good thing or a bad thing? One the negative side it means that the government can’t get anything done, but on the positive side it means the government can’t get anything done.
– Fraser Orr
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?
Kudos to the Guardian for not soft-pedalling this:
Chomsky had deeper ties with Epstein than previously known, documents reveal
The philosopher and the sex trafficker were in contact long after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, documents reveal
The prominent linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky called it a “most valuable experience” to have maintained “regular contact” with Jeffrey Epstein, who by then had long been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, according to emails released earlier in November by US lawmakers.
Such comments from Chomsky, or attributed to him, suggest his association with Epstein – who officials concluded killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges – went deeper than the occasional political and academic discussions the former had previously claimed to have with the latter.
Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages, though the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor has insisted not “one penny” came directly from the infamous financier.
That is not much of a defence. Money is fungible.
Later, the article quotes from a letter written by Chomsky praising Epstein:
“The impact of Jeffrey’s limitless curiosity, extensive knowledge, penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals is only heightened by his easy informality, without a trace of pretentiousness. He quickly became a highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.”
In fairness, all that stuff about penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals was probably true. Epstein would not have been able to rise as high – or sink as low – as he did without being able to read people. Epstein’s forte was befriending famous people, introducing them to each other, being at the centre of the networks of the global elite. My guess is that of the pleasures this position brought him, the status ranked higher in his mind than the money or the sex.
Added 23rd November: I am going to take the liberty of promoting a slightly edited version of something I wrote in the comments in reply to this excellent comment by Fraser Orr to the main post.
Fraser Orr writes, “FWIW, I find it a bit disturbing that mere association with this loathsome man (Epstein that is) that somehow convicts the associate”. I quite agree. Apart from the importance of the presumption of innocence in all circumstances, i.e. criminal or near-criminal wrongdoing needs to be proved, it should be obvious that a big part of the appeal of the sexual services that Epstein was offering was exclusivity. It wouldn’t have worked if everyone was invited. But I don’t think there’s any suggestion that Chomsky was involved in the sex stuff at all. My guess is what Epstein got out of associating with Chomsky was the feeling that he was an intellectual too, and one of the things Chomsky got out of associating with Epstein was a frisson of transgressiveness. He was above such bourgeois conventions as refusing to talk to someone who had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. But it looks very much as if the other thing Noam Chomsky got from his association with Jeffrey Epstein was money. “Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages” This sounds evasive. What does the thing about “sorting the disbursement of common funds” even mean? It sounds like something to do with calculating how the money should be split between him and his first wife. I can see how working out how to divide joint earnings after a marriage ends might be complicated, but why did Noam Chomsky doing whatever he was doing regarding money from his first marriage require Jeffrey Epstein to send him more than quarter of a million dollars? For an intellectual to take money from a disreputable but very rich patron is not a crime, but all those who laud Chomsky as a fearless social justice advocate and opponent of abusive power might like to reconsider their tributes.
The Telegraph reports,
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?
The ideological divide within MAGA has grown increasingly harsh. Trump is not, at heart, a professional politician. Rather, he is a blend of New York developer and carnival barker. His uneasy alliance with ‘tech bros’, Wall Street insiders and fervent right-wing nativists was never stable. It was held together mostly by Trump himself – and by the awfulness of the Democrats.
Even as he strikes a populist pose, some people influential in MAGA flirt with ideas like eugenic Darwinism and a permanent ruling aristocracy. Others within MAGA embrace isolationism and attacks on minorities, particularly Jews. Trump rejects such notions, but too many top GOP figures, argues Senator Ted Cruz, seem terrified of alienating the odious Tucker Carlson to do so.
– Joel Kotkin
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.
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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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