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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The Urban Dictionary defines a “wedgie” as
…the condition when someones underwear gets stuck up their ass naturally, or by someone pulling it up there. Wedgies are done usually to nerds who wear tighty whities. However it can be done to people who wear boxers to, and of all ages. Wedgies are done as an act of dominance, to torture somone, for sibling rivalry, or just friends messing around.
I hereby add to this definition. A “wedgie” also means an artistic performance that is woke and edgy done as an act of dominance over the audience, which is presumed to consist of white, straight, cisgender, bourgeois, uptight people – tighty-whities, one might call them – who will be shocked but who will not dare to object. The opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, which took place a year ago today, was a wedgie.
Now jump back another three years. Four years and ten days ago, I was excited to post about a series of thirty-five tweets from a then-unknown podcaster called Darryl Cooper, a.k.a. “MartyrMade”. The title of my post was a phrase from one of the tweets that I thought then, and still think now, exactly captured the nature of the loss of trust in institutions that divides my political life into the time before and the time after it happened. Here is the post: “Many Trump supporters don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know with apodictic certainty that the press, the FBI, and even the courts would lie to them if they were”.
So perfectly did that series of tweets resonate with the spirit of the moment that, unknown to me, while I was writing my post about them Samizdata Illuminatus was posting about the same topic.
Time moves on. I have recently added the following note to my post from 2021:
Another edit, four years later (July 2025): After posting this in 2021, I enthusiastically clicked Darryl Cooper’s “Follow” button on Twitter. As the next four years went by, he passed from being someone I followed because I admired them to being someone I followed because I despised them. Cooper is not quite out of the closet as a fan of Hitler. Read “The Case against Darryl Cooper” by John William Sherrod.
I still think this series of 35 tweets that Cooper posted in 2021 went viral for good reason. As I have said before with regard to the far right, if there is a truth respectable people shy away from mentioning, do not be surprised when the despicable people who will say it aloud are listened to.
What has this got to do with a tedious LGBT-whatever parody of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”?
Because the thing that made it finally sink into my consciousness that Darryl Cooper is a Nazi fanboi was this now-deleted tweet from him about that opening ceremony:
No, it wasn’t, you weirdo.
I took the screenshot of the tweet from this post on Instapundit in which Ed Driscoll discusses the “woke Right”.
In case the picture succumbs to link-rot, in the essay to which I link above, John William Sherrod describes it thus:
In yet another post, he posted two pictures. On the right was the blasphemous “Last Supper” depiction from the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. On the left was a photo of Hitler and his entourage with the Eiffel Tower behind them after France fell to the Nazis. Along with those two photos, Cooper posted:
“This may be putting it too crudely for some, but the picture on the left was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.”
“Why is it so hard for the authorities to win public trust? Maybe because they keep lying to us”, Gaby Hinsliff writes in the Guardian:
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.
“Straight white author’s career finally takes off after he tells woke publishers he’s gender queer Nigerian”, reports the Daily Mail.
The artist formerly and now once again known as Aaron Barry is truly a bard for our times:
From 2023 to 2024, Barry had managed to fool 30 respected literary journals around the globe and got about 50 of his ‘nonsensical’ poems published.
He published dozens of pieces as Adele Nwankwo, a ‘gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,’ including one titled After Coming Out: A Wrestling Promo.’
‘The CisBoys thought they could gang up on me and put an end to my championship pursuit?’ the poem published in 2023 reads. ‘Hah! I’ve got Toni Morrison books that hit harder than those bozos.
‘Oh, and this would set the crowd ablaze, cause them to whisk in rattle homemade signs (“The Nigerian Nightmare,” “Nwankwo 11:16,” Step on My Balls, Kween Adele!)’
‘The first poem to ever get picked up was the “yah jah gah hah” one,’ Barry told The Free Press in an article published on Wednesday.
He was referring to one of Nwankwo’s poems that was published in the Tofu Ink Arts Press, which has a mission of ‘amplifying the voices of the under-represented.’
The poem kicks off with a Toni Morrison quote about ‘navigating a white male world’ and features lines such as ‘voodoo prak tik casta oyal drip drip.’
‘It was very obviously nonsense. Just fake bad Creole,’ Barry explained to the outlet as he chuckled, baffled that the poem was accepted to begin with.
Another one of Barry’s characters, b.h. fein, whose pronouns are ‘its/complicated,’ was actually nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net Award.
The intro of the award-worthy piece, titled Shakespeare’s C*msl*t, reads: ‘To ?️ or not to ?️ William Shakespeare’s ??? little c*msl*t ??? : that is the question.
A 2024 interview with b.h. fein appears in a magazine called “The Cry Lounge” here:
hi there, reader! i’m b. h. fein (they/them or it’s/complicated)~~! i write lots of stuff (mostly in lowercase), but my gluten-free bread and vegan butter is free verse poetry. i haven’t been sending my stuff out for too too long, but i feel like i recently cracked the code as to what i can offer the poetry world
They wasn’t wrong there.
-*-
I was going to add a “Related Post” link to my Samizdata post about Rahila Khan, whose short stories about the lives of Asian girls and women in a depressed English town were much admired in the literary world of the late 1980s until she turned out to be the Rev. Toby Forward, an Anglican vicar. Virago, the publisher, had all its unsold copies of Down the Road, Worlds Away pulped. The post I thought I remembered writing seems to have metaphorically shared their fate.
“The Covid ‘lab leak’ theory isn’t just a rightwing conspiracy – pretending that’s the case is bad for science”, writes Jane Qiu in the Guardian.
That’s right. In the Guardian. My surprise at the location of the article was equalled by my surprise at the location of its writer: “Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing.” I didn’t know there were independent science writers in Beijing, but I guess there must be for an article on this particular topic written by someone describing themselves as such to appear. Anyway, she writes:
Some scientists assert evidence supporting natural-origins hypotheses with excessive confidence and show little tolerance for dissenting views. They have appeared eager to shut down the debate, repeatedly and since early 2020. For instance, when their work was published in the journal Science in 2022, they proclaimed the case closed and lab-leak theories dead. Even researchers leaning towards natural origins theories, such as the virus ecologist Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountains Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, told me they lamented that some of their colleagues defend their theories “like a religion”.
No one embodies the crisis of trust in science more than Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance. A series of missteps on his part has helped to fuel public distrust. In early 2020, for instance, he organised a statement by dozens of prominent scientists in the Lancet, which strongly condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, without disclosing his nearly two-decade collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conflict of interest.
Similarly, he denies that his own collaboration with the Wuhan lab involved gain-of-function research, even though Shi Zhengli – the Chinese scientist who led the bat-borne coronavirus studies – has openly acknowledged that the lab’s work produced at least one genetically modified virus more virulent than its parental strain. (That work is not directly relevant to the origins of Covid-19.)
The documentary [Christian Frei’s Blame: Bats, Politics and a Planet Out of Balance, short title Blame] claims that attacks on EcoHealth Alliance and the spread of lab-leak conspiracy theories have fuelled distrust in science. In reality, it’s the other way round: public distrust in science, fuelled by the unresolved H5N1 gain-of-function controversy and by lack of transparency and humility from scientists such as Daszak, has driven scepticism and increased support for lab-leak theories.
This is not news to anyone who has read Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book Viral. Or to anyone who does not entirely get their news from the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times, come to think of it. Still, better five years late than never. Why now, I wonder? Did someone at the Scott Trust take Katharine Viner to one side and gently suggest that it would be nice if the customary Guardian delay between “this is an absurd far right conspiracy theory” and “it’s the fault of the far right for talking about it before we did and using up all the available words” was not too far out of line with the nearly four years it took to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and Joe Biden was senile? Or is something big about to break?
My point is: to anyone who understands the reality of Putin’s regime, the idea that he has “gone CRAZY” and is killing people is… well, CRAZY. Vladimir Putin is in power and retains power precisely because he has always been someone who is prepared to lie, manipulate and kill to achieve his objectives. That is literally what the KGB trained him to do.
In his post criticising Putin, Trump went on to add: “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right”. Finally, it seems, our American friends are beginning to understand who they are dealing with.
– Konstantin Kisin (£)
The idea that the British government should subsidise an American mine is pretty weird. Very weird even. But it does seem to be about to happen.
[…]
To the extent that we’ve got a scandium expert lying around I’m it. Niocorp isn’t going to work. But the British government, using your and my money, is eager to invest in it?
Why can’t they leave us just to piss away our own money in our own ways? Why this insistence upon doing it wholesale on obvious disasters?
– Tim Worstall
“Donald Trump will not “break” Canada, Mark Carney promised during his election victory speech on Monday evening. The Liberal leader secured a remarkable comeback victory for the party, which had been set for an electoral wipeout under Justin Trudeau. In a speech to supporters in Ottawa, Mr Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, said Mr Trump’s repeated description of Canada as the 51 state was not an “idle threat”.
It was an idle threat, as Carney knows perfectly well. I would ask “What was Trump thinking?”, except I already know that the answer was “This will make my supporters laugh and annoy people I enjoy seeing annoyed.”
I remain glad that Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. election. I have several reasons for this view, but perhaps the biggest one was that for at least half Joe Biden’s term of office a cabal of his “advisers” operated his poor senile body like a puppet. They were preparing to continue their unelected rule for four more years when his visible confusion in the debate against Trump made the pretence no longer supportable, so they replaced him with Kamala Harris, who was deeply complicit in this fraud against the American people. While this was happening, tyrants and terrorists made hay worldwide.
Trump has other virtues besides not being senile. He is brave and determined. Rather than being apologetic at having something as primitive as a nationality, as people like Mark Carney and Sir Keir Starmer are when among their own class, Trump actually loves his country. Unfortunately his ideas on how to advance its interests are often simplistic and counterproductive (e.g. tariffs) and his behaviour is often childish (e.g. pointlessly goading Canada and Greenland).
The very shallowness of Trump’s economic thought may help America avoid the harm tariffs would do it. One of the world’s great tragedies is that very intelligent men remain attached to the bad ideas that appealed to them in youth, and employ their intellect in devising ever more ingenious explanations for why said bad ideas failed this time but will work next time. In contrast, Trump was not argued into supporting tariffs, and probably does not need to be argued out of it. I am reasonably hopeful that when he sees prices go up and his poll numbers slide he will row back on the policy, stopping only to claim it was all a negotiating ploy. (Hell, maybe it was all a negotiating ploy.) J.D. Vance, a genuine intellectual, may be harder to convince.
Alas for Canada, Mark Carney has all of Vance’s intellectualism without his unconventionality. He will continue the policies of his predecessor Justin Trudeau and his explanations of why they are not working will be most eloquent.
Canadians, be warned. One of the candidates in your country’s election tomorrow is accursed. This man has spoken of that of which no man should speak.
Your “biological clock is ticking” is a phrase no man should say. If you have to ask why … #WomenAgainstPoilievre
Indeed, he has spoken of that of which neither man nor woman may ask why it is that of which no man may speak.
Poilievre referred to biological clocks during a news conference Monday as he was defending his campaign’s decision to focus on affordability issues such as housing, even as the country stares down U.S. President Donald Trump and the tariffs threat.
Do you really want a Canada where people can refer to biological clocks? Where men can refer to biological clocks – even while Donald Trump still exists?
It’s a riff on what he said last week at a rally in Stoney Creek, Ont., when he lamented that some millennials are “desperate to buy a home and start a family before the biological clock runs out in your mid-30s.”
In December, Poilievre said he feels for the “39-year-old woman, desperate to have kids but unable to buy a home in which to raise them, her biological clock running out.”
In a pre-campaign interview with academic Jordan Peterson, Poilievre also referred to aging women and their biological clocks, and the issue of housing affordability.
The term “biological clock” and any talk of it “running out” is generally used to refer to a woman’s declining fertility due to a reduction in egg quality and quantity as she grows older.
‘Our biological clocks are none of your business’
Liberal candidate Yvan Baker said the Conservative leader is “using a woman’s fertility as a punchline in a political attack,” calling it “outdated and harmful rhetoric.”
Julie Dzerowicz, another Liberal contender, said in a social media post: “Our biological clocks are none of your business.”
Speaking to reporters in Winnipeg at Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s campaign stop Tuesday, candidate Ginette Lavack said Polievre’s comments are “completely unacceptable.”
“These are not comments that should be made by anyone. A person should have the right to choose the timing of when they’ll make those life decisions. It’s not a comment or a conversation to have publicly like that,” Lavack said.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh was blunt when asked about the remark: “I don’t think any woman wants to hear Pierre Poilievre talking about their body.”
Canadians, it is in your hands to ensure that your country is a place where, as Ginette Lavack wisely advised, no public conversation on such topics can be had.
We live in an age when politics trumps science, and the choice of verb is deliberate. Remember “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence”? How about “Social justice matters more than social distance”? During the Covid-19 pandemic, the frequency of scientists and doctors issuing passionate debunkings of any vaguely scientific idea that Donald Trump happened to mention that day, only to issue equally passionate rebunkings the minute the wind changed, became so great that even the New York Times winced.
Science has always been politicised, but it was not always this bad. Cast your mind back to the turn of the century – 1998 to be precise. Antivax sentiment was not completely unknown but in general vaccines were seen by almost everyone as the means by which smallpox, diptheria and polio had been banished to the history books. I still see them this way. Here is a graph taken from the website of the Office for National Statistics of life expectancy at birth in the UK from 1841 to 2011. As the accompanying article says, the fairly steep rise in the second half of the time period was probably due to health improvements in the older population, but the ASTOUNDINGLY steep rise between 1890 and 1950 was probably due to health improvements in the younger population. Take a bow, childhood immunisation. We have forgotten how lucky we are to have been born in the age of the vaccine.
In 1998 something happened that caused trust in vaccines to slip. The following is an extract from the Wikipedia page for Dr Richard Horton, who was then and is now the editor of The Lancet, probably the world’s pre-eminent medical journal:
“On 28 February 1998 Horton published a controversial paper by Andrew Wakefield and 12 co-authors with the title “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children” suggesting that vaccines could cause autism. The publication of the paper set off a sharp decline in vaccinations in Europe and America and in subsequent years globally.”
I want to make clear that there was nothing wrong in the Lancet publishing Wakefield’s paper. How else is science meant to advance, other than by putting forward hypotheses and inviting all comers to replicate them or refute them? The wrong lay in sticking to this particular hypothesis long after it had been disproved. Horton only retracted Wakefield’s paper in February 2010, after Wakefield had been struck off the register of the General Medical Council for financial and medical misconduct.
There have been at least two switches in the political coding of Wakefield’s theory since it came out. Stereotyping madly, in the first few years after 1998 antivax sentiment was seen as a belief held by low-status Christian hicks in the American South. From about 2005 onwards antivax views also became popular among West and East Coast hippies, practitioners of alternative medicine and the like, most of whom were left wing, and a good deal more media savvy than the former group. Dr Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet who published and defended Wakefield, is, without exaggeration, a Marxist. Back in 2006, I posted about his view that, “As this axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease.”
One of the many evils of the scientific and medical censorship practised during the Covid-19 pandemic is that people whose attitudes ranged from belief in David Icke’s shape-shifting lizards to having doubts about specific Covid-19 vaccines that might be right, wrong, or a bit of both, but which are certainly reasonable, were all lumped together under the heading of “vaccine denialists” and condemned en masse. That meant that people who might have been open to argument were never argued with. Persuasion in either direction cannot happen if people cannot discuss a subject. Science cannot happen if people cannot discuss a subject. I remember commenting to this effect to the Times in late 2021. My comment lasted about five minutes before being deleted.
It is 27 years since 1998, 15 years since 2010, and five years since the start of the pandemic. Time for another burst of news stories about autism and vaccines. The script is much the same but many of the actors have swapped roles.
“RFK’s statements prove autistic people and their families everywhere should fear Trump and his allies”, writes John Harris in the Guardian’s Sunday sister, the Observer. The initials “RFK” refer to Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. There is a video of the speech made by Kennedy on April 16th to which Mr Harris is objecting here and I found a transcript of it here.
→ Continue reading: Two different types of irrationality over autism
“Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that parts of the Maga movement are embracing a form of Right-wing wokery, with their own dark conspiracy theories, cult of victimhood, identity politics, denial of reality, moral grandstanding, hypersensitivity and purity tests.
“In this vein, whingeing about trade deficits deserves to be dismissed as critical trade theory’, as Trumpian corollary of critical race theory: it postulates, nonsensically, that any shortfall must be caused by unfair practices, oppression or historic injustice. The ‘woke Right,’ a term coined by James Lindsay, is almost as much of a turn-off as the original Left-wing variety.”
– Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph (£)
He gives Mr Trump high marks on taking the fight vs DEI, some of the DOGE cuts (with a few caveats), and on energy policy (which in my view is Trump’s ace in the hole). But the broader point Heath makes about where he thinks Trump/Maga is losing it, including this nifty term of Heath’s, “critical trade theory”, is absolutely spot-on. It is, in my view, one of the big blinds spots of today’s populist Right and threatens to undo the good things that a Trump 2.0 might achieve, which would be bad not just for the US, but the West in general. As Heath goes on to write (and remember, he’s a pro-Brexit, free market chap, and not some obdurate Never Trumper), a course correction is needed. And Trump is not incapable of it.
“Liberal operatives planted ‘stop the steal’ buttons at conservative conference” reports the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). By “buttons” they mean what we in the UK call “badges”.
Two Liberal Party staffers attended last week’s Canada Strong and Free Networking (CSFN) Conference where they planted buttons that used Trump-style language and highlighted division within the Conservative Party.
[…]
Some attendees noticed buttons appearing at the event.
One said “stop the steal” — an apparent reference to Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
[…]
The buttons were scattered in the event space in a way to give the impression that they were made and left by people attending the conference.
In fact, the idea came from the Liberal war room.
On Friday night, in two Ottawa bars, campaign workers shared how the party was behind this move — two Liberal Party staffers attended the conference intended for conservatives and placed these buttons in areas where attendees would find them.
At the pub D’Arcy McGee’s near Parliament Hill, a number of Liberal war room staffers met for drinks on the far side of the bar. This journalist joined one of them for a quick conversation, but heard another staffer, who had previously identified himself as being involved in opposition research, describing how he and a colleague planted the buttons.
The staffer knew he was sitting next to a journalist. When confronted, the staffer at first confirmed what he’d done. But he then denied saying anything when told that CBC News would be reporting on the operation.
To be fair, the staffer’s confident assumption that any Canadian journalist listening would prefer to share in the laughter of the in-group at putting one over the Conservatives rather than report the deception to the public was reasonable given past form. Kudos to Kate McKenna of CBC News for proving him wrong.
The Liberal Party said Sunday evening that some campaigners “regrettably got carried away” with the use of buttons “poking fun” at reports of Conservative infighting.
Liberal spokesperson Kevin Lemkay said the party has conducted a review of the matter and that leader Mark Carney had made it clear “this does not fit his commitment to serious and positive discourse.”
So the culprits have been fired, then? No. Just reassigned.
Ms McKenna’s report finishes with a Conservative spokesperson saying, “One wonders what other dirty tricks the Liberals are behind”. That was my first thought too. Remember those swastikas and confederate flags seen at Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ that Justin Trudeau was so outraged about? While I have no doubt that there were genuine extremists and nutters among the truckers of the Freedom Convoy, as there are in any large political movement, it is perfectly reasonable to wonder whether the Liberal Party was playing the same sort of tricks in 2022 as it was in 2025. A Liberal Party staffer happily boasting in public about having planted fake political emblems to discredit opponents of his party suggests that it is an accepted practice in his subculture.
“It’s time to pay kidney donors”, writes Jeremiah Johnson in The Dispatch.
He’s wrong. It’s long since past time.
Six years ago, Mr Johnson altruistically donated one of his kidneys to someone who was at that time a stranger. That is admirable. It is also quite rare.
Despite donors like me, end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is still a huge problem in America. It’s a silent epidemic that kills more people than car crashes, breast cancer, homicide or suicide. There is no cure for ESRD—you either get a transplanted kidney or live the rest of your life on dialysis. As of September, there were almost 90,000 people on the kidney waiting list.
The worst part is that, for so many, these deaths are completely preventable.
While there are some ESRD patients who are too old for surgery or too sick to be helped, the majority of ESRD patients can easily extend their lifespan with a donated kidney. Our best estimates show that tens of thousands of people die every year, when they could have been saved by a donated kidney.
We simply don’t have enough kidneys, and people are dying by the tens of thousands because of it. We do, however, have another way to address the problem. We can pay people who choose to donate.
Mr Johnson outlines some of the objections to paying kidney donors:
I know that for some folks, paying for organs seems morally questionable. Perhaps it feels like a violation of the sacred nature of the human body. Or perhaps paying someone to do a good act seems like it inherently violates the altruistic nature of that act. Some folks might have concerns that this will lead to the commoditization of organs or will be used to exploit poor people. I understand and I sympathize with those concerns.
Probably more than I do, but even I acknowledge that the possibility of someone donating a kidney to get out of an immediate financial hole but regretting it later is real. But something similar is true of any consequential decision in life. The only way to make people safe from regretting their decisions would be to take away their control over their own lives. And, as Mr Johnson movingly describes in the next few paragraphs, the human beings currently desperately waiting for a kidney who would be given decades more life (and a life free of the constraints of dialysis) if the number of available kidneys was increased, are also real.
The “icky” thing I mentioned in the title to this post is not donating a kidney. It is allowing someone else to profit by selling one.
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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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