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.
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“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.
As you can imagine, there have been a lot of attempts to make sense of what Mr Trump is trying to do about tariffs. As of the time of my writing this, the dollar is coming under pressure, Mr Trump appears to be ratcheting up the tariff war with China to even higher levels, and there are signs that a few of his allies are getting nervous (seriously, how on earth can he have people working in his government such as Elon Musk and Peter Navarro who talk to each other in this way?)
One way to think about the the US/rest of world imbalances is that this is about production and consumption. In various ways, countries such as Germany, Japan and China produce a lot, and tend to be careful on how much they consume; on the flipside, the US loves to consume. As Joseph Sternberg in the Wall Street Journal puts it:
The core of Intellectual Trumpism runs as follows: The global economy is characterized by large, policy-induced imbalances in both trade and capital flows. These are caused at root by the decisions of some large economies—Germany, Japan and especially China are the usual suspects—to subsidize production by suppressing consumption in their domestic economies. This creates “surplus” output that they foist on the U.S.
This view isn’t wrong, so far as it goes. Those economies and others historically deployed a range of policy tools to boost exports. In China, the most egregious manifestations are direct subsidies for exporting companies. Less visible to foreign eyes is the financial repression: the deliberate suppression of domestic interest rates and political control of credit to subsidize businesses (which benefit from cheap borrowing) at the expense of consumers (who receive less income from their saving and investment). Such policies can take many forms. In Germany, extensive subsidies shield large companies—meaning exporters—from the worst energy-price consequences of Berlin’s dumb net-zero climate policies. Households pay full freight for electricity.
This is an interesting point about the control of credit and yes, Net Zero, intersecting in ways that suppress consumption and encourage production, much of which has to go overseas – to places like the US.
Sternberg continues:
Because other economies under-consume, the argument runs, they accumulate excess savings. They recycle these savings into the U.S., where we transform foreign claims (in the form of equity investments or purchases of American debt) into consumption of the foreign country’s excess production. Hey presto, a trade deficit.
An oddity of this argument is how little agency the U.S. is said to exercise. Once Washington had made the first mistake of opening our economy via tariff reductions and the free flow of capital, it was off to the races.
The truth is much more complex, and politically challenging: While some other economies suppress domestic consumption and subsidize export production, Americans choose to do almost exactly the opposite. Through political choices such as suppressing energy production and distribution, or permitting red tape and the like, or any number of other policy foibles, we make it much harder than it otherwise would be to produce things in the U.S. Meanwhile, you can’t take a step in America without tripping over a consumption subsidy.
So what has the US been doing to encourage consumption?
To cite a few: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stimulate overconsumption of housing. Subsidized student loans stimulate overconsumption of higher education (which, given the poor lifetime earnings prospects of many degrees, should indeed be understood as consumption rather than as an investment in human capital). The earned-income tax credit creates complex distortions that at the margin subsidize consumption while discouraging additional productive work.
Most glaring, though, are our entitlements. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention a raft of other benefit programs, funnel vast quantities of money into consumption. The trick here is that we’re able to finance these via chronic fiscal deficits funded by foreign investors, meaning at the margin Americans borrow from the rest of the world at ultralow interest rates and funnel the cash into consumption at home.
And as the writer says, the “root-cause” solution to the trade deficit issue, to the extent that it is a problem that governments should address, is to rebalance – get rid of consumption subsidies and stop penalising production. That means, for instance, rolling back regulations, zoning laws, etc. (To the limited extent that this is being done by Trump, that is a mark in his favour.)
Some elements of such an agenda can be popular, as Mr. Trump is discovering with his deregulation and cheaper-energy drives. But the entitlement half is a minefield. Republicans are reluctant even about dialing back Medicaid benefits for able-bodied working-age people. The last time anyone tried to reform Social Security, President George W. Bush backed allowing a portion of payroll tax payments to flow into individual investment accounts. The existing system creates a consumption subsidy by transforming tax payments into transfers to recipients; the reform would have created a form of investment subsidy. That bit of good sense degenerated into a traumatic political fiasco for the GOP.
This the key. Social Security and other big entitlement programmes in the US are, as they are in the UK and much of the West, popular with ordinary voters; and the voters who switched from the Democrats to Republicans in 2016 and 2024 aren’t going to be happy to see these programmes reformed or reduced. It is therefore easy to see why tariffs are a tempting technique – it is easier to go on about those naughty, over-producing Asians and Germans as being at fault, rather than because incentives are structured as they are.
Sternberg concludes:
Note that the end result [of tariffs] is in one way the same as entitlement reform: less U.S. consumption, only via the demand suppression of higher import prices. But beyond that, the two policies diverge—and not to Intellectual Trumpism’s advantage. Among many other problems, protectionism risks depressing domestic production, a warning emerging from industries across America whose supply chains are imperiled by tariffs. It certainly doesn’t help domestic productivity. Entitlement reform, by contrast, tends to be an enormous supply-side spur to future economic growth that benefits households as inflation-adjusted wages rise.
The problem, however, is that entitlement reform is very hard to do, politically. There are some things that will also be politically tough: not everyone likes deregulation, given how occupational licensing and so on often shields vested interests. (Think of how the London mayor tried to hit Uber, at the urging of the traditional taxi sector, a few years ago.) Zoning laws are a problem but they are also supported by people who want to protect the value of their properties, as they see them, and so on. In certain countries, the planning system is so convoluted that it is a major brake on production. Fixing all this takes political will and the risk of antagonising vested interests.
I am travelling to the US soon. I go there regularly for work. Reason magazine has this article. Worth a read:
Border phone searches are in the news a lot lately. Last month, a French scientist was allegedly blocked from coming to a conference in Houston after U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) found statements against President Donald Trump on his phone. A few days later, Brown University doctor Rasha Alawieh was turned away at the airport after CBP allegedly found pro-Hezbollah images on her phone.
How does CBP have the power to rummage through phones so easily? After all, ordinary police can’t just stop you on the street and search your phone without a warrant. But courts have recognized a border exemption to the Fourth Amendment, allowing the government to conduct routine anti-smuggling searches of travelers. Although some lower courts have weighed in on whether that exemption applies to personal electronic files, there’s no definitive ruling yet on phone searches at the border.
Until the Supreme Court rules on the issue, CBP officers are mostly limited by the agency’s own internal regulations. The regulations allow officers to conduct a “basic search” (flipping through the phone by hand) at their discretion, and require “reasonable suspicion” or a “national security concern” to conduct an “advanced search” with forensic phone hacking software such as Cellebrite. The regulations also restrict officers to searching what’s already on the phone, not downloading new data, so phone searches should be conducted in airplane mode or otherwise disconnected from the internet.
As the article notes, organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have put up advice on what to do. The EEF states this: “As of this writing, the federal government is considering requiring disclosure from certain foreign visitors of social media login credentials, allowing access to private postings and “friend” lists.”
For what it is worth, I haven’t ever been asked to show my phone to immigration authorities in places including Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, Switzerland, France, Germany, Malta, or for that matter, the US at airports in California, Boston, Miami, New York and Chicago. But that might change. Sadly, where the US “leads”, the rest of the world can follow. The US is land of the free, and all that. It does, or at least has, set the tone, even if performance was spotty in actual reality.
The Reason article makes the following points about the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada:
Another consideration is what happens on the other side of the journey. Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, which all share intelligence with the U.S. government under the Five Eyes program, have different border privacy policies. Under Australian law, travelers do not have to unlock their phones. Canadian authorities, like US authorities, say they will seize a phone if a traveler refuses to unlock it. New Zealand imposes a $5,000 fine for failing to unlock a phone, and Britain considers refusing to unlock a phone for police to be a counterterrorism offense.
Well, he went ahead and did it. In a ceremony outside the White House, Donald Trump unveiled a list of tariffs on countries, on “friend and foe”, starting with a minimum of 10% (the UK, which is now outside the European Union, was hit with the 10% rate, while the EU was hit with double that amount). In general I see this as a bad day for the US and world economy for all the sort of reasons I have laid out.
This will not adjust the worldview of the red hat wearers, but I wonder has it ever occurred to Mr Trump’s fans that his arguments, when adjusted for a bit of rhetoric, are more or less leftist stuff from the 1990s?
I know he trash-talks. I know that much of what he says is aimed at his base, so it should be taken with a pinch of salt, but this is bizarre. Greenland is not part of the United States and has no desire to be. If the USA wants to enter into trade talks that give them mineral rights or even defensive bases, then fine. But talk of taking it is no different to what is going on in Ukraine – a bigger, hostile neighbour taking by force. In reality, they could do it. Greenland could not withstand an invasion, and despite its tough talk, Denmark would be unable to offer much assistance. Denmark, like the rest of Europe, is weak defensively, and the US administration knows it. Despite the trash-talking, I really don’t think he would go that far.
Would he?
As I say, what the Hell is going on here?
– Longrider
Robbie Collin in the Telegraph actually gave it three stars:
Disney’s Snow White: Not too woke – and better than Wicked
“And they all lived adequately ever after” is not the fairy-tale ending Disney was presumably originally gunning for. But at this point, the studio will surely take what it can get.
[…]
…I’ll say this for the result: it’s better than Wicked. The opening act sets out just how existentially tearing our heroine’s existence is under Queen Gal. (With apologies to Milan Kundera, call it The Unbearable Snow-Whiteness of Being.) And for the most part, this section is fairly beige and dull. But once Zegler scuttles off to the forest, where she teams up with two chirpy septets – the digitised dwarfs and a zany gaggle of bandits, who may have been dwarf replacements in an early draft – it really picks up.
The new versions of two classic numbers, Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work, are stylishly choreographed and rousingly performed, while a handful of the new songs, from The Greatest Showman’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, just about keep pace. (I loved Princess Problems, a teasing ode to Gen-Z prissiness which delivers about all the culture-war the film is prepared to wage.)
In contrast, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gives it one star, and I get the feeling that if he had free rein he’d have given it one asteroid:
Snow White review – Disney’s exhaustingly awful reboot axes the prince and makes the dwarves mo-cap
That title [Snow White] is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders.
[…]
There are some changes: the hero is no longer a prince, but a more democratic citizen who leads a Robin Hood type insurgency from the forest against the witch’s tyranny with SW joining in on a Maid Marian basis. But he still gets to do the controversial non-consent kiss once our heroine has gone into her picturesque coma. But the dwarves? Will this film make them look sort of like everyone else, like the Munchkins in Wicked? No. This Snow White feebly makes them mo-cap (motion-capture) animated figures, but it also – heartsinkingly – duplicates their presence by giving the prince his own gang of seven live-action bandits, in which people with dwarfism are represented. This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.
Has anybody reading this actually done that thing we used to do with films before the internet?
“UK hoping to work with China to counteract Trump’s climate-hostile policies”, writes Fiona Harvey in the Guardian.
The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and a host of developing countries, to offset the impact of Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies and his sharp veer towards climate-hostile countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
A “new global axis” with the People’s Republic of China. Who could possibly object to that?
The article continues,
Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, arrived in Beijing on Friday for three days of talks with top Chinese officials, including discussions on green technology supply chains, coal and the critical minerals needed for clean energy. The UK’s green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, but access to components and materials will be crucial for that to continue.
What they mean by this is that the number of people paid to make government regulations, interpret government regulations, comply with government regulations, check that others are complying with government regulations, and punish those who do not comply with government regulations is increasing three times faster than the rest of the economy, which for some mysterious reason is growing more slowly than expected at the moment.
“They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.”
– Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr., regarding the case of Michael E. Mann, Ph.D., v. National Review, Inc., et al in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia Civil Division 2012 CA 008263 B.
Hat tips to John in the comments to yesterday’s post and to John Hinderaker of Powerline via Instapundit.
As Mr Hinderaker says, the facts of this case are rather complicated but the judge’s conclusions are unequivocal – and the conclusion of the court that Dr Michael E Mann, maker of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph”, knowingly participated in a falsehood has a certain… resonance.
Related post: “Samizdata quote of the day – unfortunately the high-status fraudster won.” I am happy to say that the injustice done a year ago has been partially undone by this latest ruling.
The notion that Russia is inherently stronger than Europe is false, of course — Europe has a lot more people and a lot more heavy industry. All the pushups in the world haven’t prevented the vaunted Russian military from turning in a decidedly lackluster performance in Ukraine. But to the American right, perceptions and posturing and vibes are often more important than numbers and statistics. Russia gives off strength, so it must be strong.
And to the American right, strength is everything in international affairs. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and concepts like the rules-based international order or international law are laughable. If Russia and Europe are to fight, Trump and company want to bet on the side with the shirtless pushups.
– Noah Smith
“I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you CANNOT conquer America…As to conquest, therefore, my Lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies—to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms, never! never! never!”
– William Pitt the Elder, speaking in the House of Lords on 18th November 1777 in opposition to the war against the rebellious American colonists.
There are some things about the views of supporters of President Trump, and of Americans in general, about the situation in Ukraine that I understand very well. Consider this Bloomberg clip from the President’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 25th September 2018. The caption to the video says gleefully, “Watch the German delegation’s response at UNGA when Trump says “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” The German delegation had a good laugh at the American rube and his silly ideas about not being dependent on Vladimir Putin, and all the sophisticated people on both sides of the Atlantic laughed with them.
They are not laughing now. They are still asking for money, though. In the face of such arrogance, it is no surprise that President Trump and a great many of his countrymen are saying, “We tried to warn you about Russia but you laughed. It’s nice that you ‘stand with Ukraine’ now, but you can do it with your own money. Bye.”
That, I get. I don’t agree with the view that the conquest of a country in Europe by Russia can safely be ignored by the US, but I can understand it.
What I do not get is how many Americans whose views I normally admire have moved from saying, “This war is sad, but it’s none of our business” to speaking as if Ukraine were morally in the wrong for continuing to fight. To take one example, here is a recent tweet from Elon Musk:
What I am sickened by is years of slaughter in a stalemate that Ukraine will inevitably lose.
Anyone who really cares, really thinks and really understands wants the meat grinder to stop.
PEACE NOW!!
Similar impassioned pleas for “peace” are being made by many accounts that I follow on X that belong to Americans who are proud supporters of the right to bear arms, people who would until recently have considered themselves spiritual descendants of those unconquerable Americans praised by Pitt. It seems to me that the position of the Ukrainians now is very like that of the Americans then, right down to the invaders of their country being reinforced by wretched hirelings from far away who have been sold by their leaders and sent to die in a the shambles of a foreign war of which they know nothing.
Were the Americans of December 1776 culpable for not laying down their arms when all seemed lost? Should the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware be covered up in shame?
Washington not caring about the meat-grinder
Carney is living, breathing proof that expert credentials are no substitute for sound judgement or political acumen. He has embraced just about every naff and dangerous political trend of our times, never deviating from the Davos script.
Most notoriously, as governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020, Carney became the high priest of Project Fear ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote. He warned before the referendum that a Leave vote would spark an instant recession. It didn’t. He claimed Brexit would make investment in British assets so risky that it could ‘test the kindness of strangers’ should the UK take the leap. Needless to say, this was politically motivated hysteria, not a sober assessment of Britain’s economic prospects outside the EU.
More recently, his endorsement of Labour’s Rachel Reeves as chancellor ahead of the UK General Election also smacked of both dubious judgement and needless political interference. Carney said in autumn 2023 that it was ‘beyond time’ her plans were put into action. Yet since Reeves’s plans were actually put into action, in her first budget in October last year, the UK economy has teetered on the brink of recession, unemployment has risen and government borrowing costs have shot up. Call it the Carney kiss of death.
– Fraser Myers
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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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