|
|||||
|
J.D. Vance, who is the Vice President of the USA, goes to Hungary, an EU member state, and delivers a campaign speech for Victor Orban, the president of Hungary, in which Vance accuses the EU of… interference in Hungary’s elections. Am I the only one who finds that absolutely hilarious? April 9th, 2026 | 47 comments
 “Never mind leading the free world, if Donald Trump were your ageing father, when would you take away his car keys?”, asks Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian. She writes,
It is not strange at all. I think that Ms Hinsliff knows perfectly well why the delicate “cannot discuss” Trump’s possible senility. Her own delicacy in introducing the elephant to polite company demonstrates that. “Suppose that, much as they did with an octogenarian Joe Biden, millions of Americans had sensed something through their TV screens”. Yeah, suppose the sensing-through-the-TV screens had happened before. Suppose your newspaper – suppose your entire media establishment – had frantically squashed the ballooning obvious until it burst like an exploding colostomy bag. Imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that Americans had concluded that either Vice President Kamala Harris was complicit in covering up her boss’s senility or that she was too stupid to notice it. Imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that them voting for Donald Trump in preference to her was a rational decision. You can’t imagine it; that’s your problem. The cloud of smoke you made to hide Biden’s senility has blinded you. March 31st, 2026 | 16 comments
As you probably guessed, it’s a Guardian article. I must admit that I am not that shocked that immigration enforcement officers singled out non-white foreign-born workers. But then I read this…
The horror. Now, as a libertarian, I am well aware of how often “the process is the punishment”. Here are several pages of Samizdata posts containing that phrase. There is no doubt that having cops or similar barging into the premises can lose a restaurant money. And it is an unpleasant experience for customers and employees alike. And I teetered on the edge of supporting open borders for years. And some very bad things can happen in 37 minutes. But in this case, they didn’t. The enforcement officers came in, asked some questions, and went away 37 minutes later. Had they not singled out those workers obviously most likely to be illegal immigrants for questioning, they would have taken longer and caused more disruption. As it was, they evidently spent no more than a few minutes per employee. Judging from the facts if not the tone of the article, in this case British ICE (our version stands for Immigration Compliance and Enforcement and I genuinely wonder if its officers hate the fact that it has the same initials as the US version or if they secretly think it’s cool) did its job with commendable speed. Not paying the £2 parking charge was bad, though. Someone start a GoFundMe. March 26th, 2026 | 4 comments
The Telegraph reports,
Other than seeing Iran free, I don’t even know what I want to be going on. March 23rd, 2026 | 18 comments
I was going to say that Guido’s headline cannot be improved upon, but, on second thoughts, the headline-writer really should have mentioned that the hamster was dressed as Godzilla. Details matter. March 20th, 2026 | 16 comments
“When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take. This will be… probably… your only chance for generations. For many years you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No President was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a President who is giving you what you want. So, lets see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action: do not let it pass.” Back on January 31st, I asked “So… is help on the way for the Iranian protestors or not?” – We now have our answer. I have my differences with Trump on trade, Ukraine, and threats against Greenland, but on this issue… Godspeed. March 1st, 2026 | 53 comments
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. February 24th, 2026 | 14 comments
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. February 22nd, 2026 | 10 comments
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. February 17th, 2026 | 5 comments
Minnesota is not a happy place at the moment, what with the multi-billion-dollar welfare fraud story and now this:
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. January 11th, 2026 | 114 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. January 7th, 2026 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. January 6th, 2026 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||