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]
|
So, President Macron’s wife appeared to push him in the face.
A flood of analysis immediately followed. Here is the Guardian‘s offering: “Brigitte Macron’s push has reverberated around the world. Why was it met with a shrug in France?”
The standfirst to Pauline Block’s article is: “Whatever the explanation for the incident, the reaction points to backward French attitudes – including from the president himself”. Although Ms Bock probably did not write those words, they are a fair reflection of her article. It casts its net wide, and among the fish brought up from the depths are the age gap between the Macrons, the convention by which the French press says nothing about the romantic relationships of French politicians, how would we feel if it was a man pushing a woman, and…
That Macron doesn’t see the potential problem in the video points to a narrow, obsolete understanding of couple dynamics and domestic violence. He has twice proclaimed gender equality to be the “great cause” of his presidential mandates before refusing to properly fund it; he has spoken in support of the French actor Gérard Depardieu, who has recently been found guilty of sexual assault and is soon to be on trial again for rape; and to this day, the former interior minister and current justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, who was accused of sexual assault (the case has now been dismissed), has remained in Macron’s cabinet.
It would have been easy enough to turn this moment into a public health message. He could have simply said that he’s all right, thanks for your consideration, but that men who do experience violence should feel no shame in seeking help, using it as an opportunity to discuss domestic violence prevention. Instead, he mocked the “fools” who thought anything could be amiss.
But why should he turn it into a “public health message” if he and his wife really were only larking around? There is something very cavalier about the Guardian‘s “whatever” in “Whatever the explanation for the incident”. The true explanation of the incident is the only thing that matters. If it was play, even play mixed in with annoyance (and such pretended fighting moves can be used to defuse quarrels as well as to escalate them), then it is nobody’s business other than the Macrons’ own, and the demand that he – or she – use it as a teaching moment is intrusive. How would Mme Bock like it if a similar demand for an impromptu sermon were made of her after some innocent but embarrassing incident in her private life was accidentally caught on camera?
But if it was a real attack, there are indeed things to discuss. Does anyone have the right not to have their act of domestic violence investigated because their spouse or partner has not officially complained? Does anyone have the right not to have an act of domestic violence against them investigated because they have made no official complaint? Does it make any difference whether either party is male or female? Does it make a difference if either party is a political leader?
If it was real. But we don’t know if it was. Looking at the video at quarter speed, I still couldn’t decide. So all the questions above are repeated with “act of domestic violence” replaced with “what looks on the face of it like an act of domestic violence”.
In favour of the push crossing the threshold into being an assault, albeit not one intended to cause injury, is the fact that Mme Macron looked angry and refused to take her husband’s arm as she descended the steps, and that the Elysée Palace initially lied and said the video was fake. In favour of it being mere bickering horseplay is that the plane was full of bodyguards specifically charged with protecting the President of France.
What do you think?
Triggered by the political shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, the EU Commission launched a campaign to reassert control over Europe’s political narrative. Central to this is the rhetoric of ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, framed as threats to democratic stability. The Commission presents these programmes as public-interest research initiatives, but they constitute a form of soft authoritarianism, enshrining speech codes and narrowing acceptable opinion through bureaucratic manipulation. This is a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.
The Digital Services Act (DSA), which should be relabelled as the ‘Digital Surveillance Act’, is the crown jewel of this strategy. The legal framework enables the EU to regulate online speech under the guise of protection.
The MCC Brussels report underlines a disturbing fact: the Commission spends 31 per cent more on narrative control than on research addressing cancer, despite cancer causing nearly two million deaths annually in Europe. This prioritisation signals that Brussels fears the cancer of free speech more than the disease. Public funds are being funnelled unaccountably into a disinformation narrative designed to shape, limit and manage the terms of public debate.
– Norman Lewis
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.
In my day job, I have to keep an eye on financial regulations and the compliance regimes such as those of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Switzerland’s FINMA, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, and more.
A few years ago, regulators such as the SEC dropped the hammer on bankers and other financial sector folk for using private chat apps such as WhatsApp in ways deemed unacceptable: “The Securities and Exchange Commission has punished some of the biggest names in banking including Citi, Bank of America and JPMorgan with fines totalling more than $2bn since 2021, amid concerns that a boom in services such as WhatsApp, iMessage and WeChat could be letting market abuse go unchecked.”
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this – this ought to be a matter between the staff of these firms and their employers, in my view – the regulatory authorities come down hard on people using these apps in ways that are seen, however mistakenly, to put certain things (such as record-keeping of important conversations) at risk.
And yet as you know, dear reader, we have seen examples in recent days from US government figures communicating via Apps such as Signal to discuss the pros and cons of military action. It has caused a stink for various reasons, but for me, I am struck by how few people have commented on the very different treatment of those who work in finance, and those who hold positions of power and where lives are at stake. In the UK, a while back, it turned out the government of Boris Johnson was using WhatsApp extensively, with inevitably poor results. This has led to extensive commentary.
I think this gets me to a wider point. Wherever I look, I see a breakdown in trust in our institutions, public and private. The extent to which this is deserved is contested, but at the root of much of it is that those who set the rules and call for them appear not to abide by them: Political and NGO big cheeses flying in private jets to discuss catastrophic global warming, for example, or the cases of alleged two-tier justice that have been such a mark of the UK government in recent months.
As most of you will know, I covered the sentencing of the Southport Killer live on Twitter/X as event unfolded in the courtroom on 23 January 2025.
During the hearing, I created a timeline recounting what happened on the day of the attack, minute-by-minute, so that the public could see the full horror of this attack, and what had been kept out of the media.
This was followed by indirect criticism from Merseyside Police who claimed the families had asked for the details of the case not to be published. This had been a lie, told for the convenience of the Police who did not want a riot to breakout as a result of their lies and inaction.
– Charlie Bentley-Astor
Read the whole thing.
Keep comments relevant.
I did not think I could be shocked any more but this Mail on Sunday story shocked me: “Knock knock, it’s the Thought Police: As thousands of criminals go uninvestigated, detectives call on a grandmother. Her crime? She went on Facebook to criticise Labour councillors at the centre of the ‘Hope you Die’ WhatsApp scandal exposed by the MoS”
In a chilling clampdown on free speech, two police officers pay a visit to a grandmother – simply for criticising Labour politicians on Facebook.
Detectives were last night accused of acting like East Germany’s feared Stasi secret police for quizzing Helen Jones over her calls for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the WhatsApp scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday.
Police conceded that the 54-year-old had committed no crime – yet Mrs Jones says she has effectively been silenced by the officers, as she was intimidated by them calling at her door and is too terrified to post on social media again.
You can watch a video of the visit of the two detectives to her house here: “Helen Jones, 54, had a visit from 2 detectives from the Manchester Police”. The person who can be heard speaking from inside the house via an intercom is Mrs Jones’ husband, Lee. The video ends with the detective who was doing the talking saying (at 1:12), “OK. OK. We’ll give you a call on your phone. I am not going to stand out here if you are not going to speak to me.” So far as I can tell Helen Jones was indeed “spoken to” by phone, not at her door. That does not negate the intimidatory effect of having the cops turn up at your door because of something you said on Facebook about an elected official.
The Mail on Sunday continues,
In one post on 4Heatons Hub, Mrs Jones said of Cllr Sedgwick: ‘Let’s hope he does the decent thing and resigns. I somehow think his ego won’t allow it.’ In another, after posting screenshots from the Trigger Me Timbers group, Mrs Jones wrote: ‘Not looking good for Cllr Sedgwick!!!’ to which another member added: ‘Cllr Sedgwick, will you be resigning?’
At around 1.30pm last Tuesday, while Mrs Jones was looking after her baby grandson at a nearby house, a detective sergeant and another officer knocked at her door and spoke to her husband Lee, 54, via an intercom.
A shocked Mrs Jones rushed home fearing something tragic had happened to a loved one. At 2.15pm she received a phone call from an officer thought to be the same sergeant who knocked on her door and was told the police had received a complaint about her recent social media posts.
Speaking exclusively to the MoS, she said: ‘[The officer] said, ‘We’ve had a complaint,’ and I immediately asked, ‘From who?’, and he said, ‘Well, I can’t tell you that’.’
She asked if Cllr Sedgwick or his partner had made the complaint. ‘[The officer’s] exact words were ‘Your thought process is correct in that’,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I asked the police officer, have I committed any sort of crime. Why did you call at my door? They said, ‘Someone has spoken to us about your social media posts.’
So what were her exact words? We know that she called for the resignation of Councillor David Sedgwick, but was there something beyond that that has not been reported? I have not been able to find out. But it is acknowledged by Greater Manchester Police that no crime was committed.
Later in the report, a spokesman for Greater Manchester Police is quoted as saying, “We are under a duty to inform her that she is the subject of a complaint.” As Caroline Farrow – who speaks from bitter experience – has pointed out, there is no such duty, and if there were a letter would have sufficed. The cops knew what they were doing when they called at Helen Jones’s door, and Councillor David Sedgwick knew what he was doing when he sent them there: “Had Helen Jones continued to post criticism of Councillor David Sedgwick after being informed of his complaint, the police could claim she could reasonably predict that her posts would cause alarm and distress.”
‘Let’s be clear, we don’t have blasphemy laws in the UK.’ So said Jonathan Reynolds, the UK’s business secretary and premier solicitor impersonator, to the BBC earlier this week. Reynolds was pushing back against US vice-president JD Vance, who gave European leaders a very public dressing down at the Munich Security Conference last week for censoring their voters, and Britain for criminalising its Christians. Of course, Reynolds’s denial was about as trustworthy as his CV.
You needn’t alight, as Vance did, on the vexed issue of ‘buffer zones’ outside abortion clinics, which have led to Christians being arrested for staging silent protests / prayers, to see that blasphemy laws have made a horrifying comeback in Britain. Easily a more vivid example is that, a day before Vance addressed the global great and good in Munich, a man was arrested for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in central London. Another man, who slashed at the Koran-burner with a knife, was also arrested. Welcome to 21st-century Britain, where we ‘don’t have blasphemy laws’ but you can be arrested – and stabbed – for desecrating a holy book. Maybe Reynolds could finally put that legal training to good use and explain the difference to us.
– Tom Slater
The political scientist Timur Kuran coined the term “preference falsification” in 1987. Earlier today he sent this tweet:
Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a political game changer. Also important was his decision to hide people’s “likes” from other users. This diminished preference falsification on X. It also boosted the apparent popularity, and thus the circulation, of un- or anti-woke posts.
Tony Blair greatly increased the ease of postal voting in UK elections by means of the Representation of the People Act 2000. That Wikipedia article says the Act made only “minor amendments”. They were not minor in their effects and nor were they intended to be. Whoever edited the Wikipedia article on Absentee voting in the United Kingdom got it right:
After the introduction of on-demand postal voting in the UK, there has been a massive uptake in postal voting. Whilst in 2001 1.8 million postal ballots were distributed to voters, this has increased to more than 8 million postal ballots by the UK 2017 general election and represented one in every five ballots cast in 2019 United Kingdom general election.
Labour did this because they thought it would help them win elections, of course. Did it? Perhaps not. While it did increase turnout, which historically has usually helped Labour candidates, the increase in turnout was particularly strong among pensioners, who tend to have mobility problems that make it harder for them to get to the polling station in person. Pensioners skew Conservative. The change also had other effects, of which more below.
I can certainly see a reason for some mechanism to be available to let people arrange to vote by post (or vote by mail as the Americans call it) when circumstances make them unable to vote in person. But absentee voting unquestionably degrades the secret ballot. This brings us back to the issue of preference falsification. As the same Wikipedia article says,
In the United Kingdom a 2016 government inquiry found that postal voting “was considered by some to be the UK’s main electoral vulnerability and to provide the ‘best’ opportunity for electoral fraud… Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders… the possibilities of undue influence, theft of postal votes and tampering with them after completion were all still risks.” The government responded by saying it would consider the recommendations on postal voting.
Presumably the government (by then a Conservative one) did consider the recommendations. It evidently decided it wanted more postal voting anyway. Probably that was to get the pensioner vote.
However something changed in the 2024 election that I speculate might lead Labour to fall out of love with postal voting. Of course Labour won that election with a massive majority – but there were some nasty surprises for individual Labour MPs, many of them quite prominent.
Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health, had a majority of 5,218 in the 2019 election. His majority in the 2024 election was 528. The person who came near to unseating him was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Shabana Mahmood, the Secretary of State for Justice, had a majority of 28,582 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 3,421. The person who came near to unseating her was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Jess Philips had a majority of 10,659 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 693. The person who came near to unseating her is a Muslim member of George Galloway’s Workers Party who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Jonathan Ashworth had a majority of 22,675 in 2019. His constituency was considered a safe seat for Labour, but he lost it in 2024 to a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
There are several other similar examples.
Labour knows full well that its current majority is a mile high but an inch thick, as the saying goes. If Reform eats the Tories, or vice versa, I think that Labour will look with fresh eyes at the issue highlighted in that 2016 report:
Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders.
Sometimes the Guardian shows flashes of its old persona as a guardian of liberty. Publishing this article by Apostolis Fotiadis was one example:
The EU wants to scan every message sent in Europe. Will that really make us safer?
In my 20 years of being a reporter, I have rarely come across anything that feels so important – and yet so widely unnoticed. I’ve been following the attempt to create a Europe-wide apparatus that could lead to mass surveillance. The idea is for every digital platform – from Facebook to Signal, Snapchat and WhatsApp, to cloud and online gaming websites – to scan users’ communications.
This involves the use of technology that will essentially render the idea of encryption meaningless. The stated reason is to detect and report the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on digital platforms and in their users’ private chats. But the implications for our privacy and security are staggering.
Since 2022, EU policymakers have attempted to push the legislation, called the regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse (better known as the CSAM regulation proposal), through. Similar attempts to introduce the tech in Britain via the online safety bill were abandoned at the 11th hour, with the UK government admitting it is not possible to scan users’ messages in this way without compromising their privacy.
Cybersecurity experts have already made their opinions clear. Rolling out the technology will introduce flaws that could undermine digital security. Researchers based at Imperial College London have shown systems that scan images en masse could be quietly tweaked to perform facial recognition on user devices without the user’s knowledge. They have warned there are probably more vulnerabilities in such technologies that have yet to be identified.
The title of this post referred to this story: “Britain’s biggest choir ditches Every Breath You Take over ‘abusive’ lyrics”
The song, which was written by Sting and released in 1983, is considered by some to be a stalkers’ anthem.
Sting has admitted that the words – “Every breath you take/ And every move you make/ Every bond you break/ Every step you take/ I’ll be watching you” – have “sinister” overtones.
I have been predicting this day would come for decades. It is still chilling to see it arrive.
Both today’s Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday carry the story of an ordinary woman whose life was nearly ruined by an AI-edited version of some doorbell footage that falsely showed her uttering racist abuse. The Mail’s story is here. It has the original video without a paywall, but I had started writing this post using the Sunday Times version before I was made aware by commenter JuliaM that the Mail had the same story, so in what follows I will mostly quote the Sunday Times story, ‘I doorknocked for Labour then racist deepfake ruined my life’. An archived version can be found here.
It started harmlessly enough. A PE teacher called Cheryl Bennett said that she would help deliver leaflets for her colleague, Quasim Mughal, who was standing as a Labour candidate in the local elections in May last year.
For that display of friendship, she has paid a heavy penalty. What happened that morning — or, rather, did not happen — has changed her life forever. For a time, it cost Bennett her reputation and her career. She was at risk of a criminal conviction too, and police visited her home to arrest her.
As she approached the door of a household in nearby Dudley, she was accompanied by two people: Mughal, the candidate who is of south Asian heritage, and her previous head teacher, who is not. At first, the owner did not answer.
By the time the door was opened, both colleagues had moved on to the next property, leaving Bennett to ask the person whether they intended to vote. Unbeknown to her, a CCTV camera perched above the door was filming.
Within days, a short segment of the footage had been leaked, edited to remove Mughal, and given subtitles. The resulting video falsely depicted Bennett launching into a racist tirade against the homeowner, with subtitles declaring: “F***ing p*kis. P*kis,” as she walked away from the front door.
Nobody has been able to establish who maliciously doctored the footage, but it was given to Akhmed Yakoob, a Lamborghini-owning criminal solicitor, nicknamed the “TikTok lawyer”, who was an independent pro-Gaza candidate for West Midlands mayor and had close links with George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.
Yakoob posted a narrated version of the fake video on TikTok. He also posted Bennett’s name and place of work.
The video caused a sensation. Within days, it had received 2.1 million views across TikTok, Facebook and X, and prompted hundreds of people, including dozens of parents at her school, which has a large British-Pakistani community, to demand she be sacked. Yakoob and his followers cited Bennett as an example of Labour and Sir Keir Starmer’s lack of interest in Muslim and minority ethnic voters in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war. She was forced into hiding.
Yakoob has since paid substantial damages for his publication of the video.
For a time, however, it looked as though vindication might never come. Within a short time of Yakoob’s TikTok post at 7.30pm, her phone started to vibrate while she was at a friend’s house.
“My phone just started going off like I’d just stepped out of Love Island or I’d just become famous. It was going absolutely berserk on the table. So I picked it up thinking: ‘Family, is there something going on?’ So I looked at my phone and I had loads of work emails going through.”
Most of them contained abuse. Some were written by children at her own school. “Appalling,” one pupil said. “Being racist is harmful because it disregards the inherent worth and dignity of individuals solely based on their race.” Another wrote: “I didn’t expect a teacher of your standard to be discriminative of races.” Bennett, confused, protested that she had said no such thing, but the messages kept on coming through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. “Stop lying.” “Ur not getting away with this.” “Racist little bitch.”
Then came the formal complaints, as well-meaning parents wrote to the head teacher demanding an investigation and threatening to contact the board of governors. The secondary school received 800 complaints in a short time, some from parents at her school, others from her previous school.
Within hours, the head teacher had told Bennett not to return to work for her own safety. She was not safe at home either, where she lived alone. Strangers arrived at the homes of her parents and her grandmother demanding information as to her whereabouts. Even her car number plate was circulating online.
She stayed at a friend’s home that night. At about 2.30am, West Midlands police went to her home to arrest her, putting a postcard through her door asking her to call them.
The Mail’s version of the story makes it clearer that Ms Bennett having fled to a friend’s house was the reason that she was not present when the police arrived at her home to arrest her at 2.30am. Even if she had been guilty, I do not see why the police thought it was necessary to turn up at that hour to arrest a woman for a non-violent crime.
The Sunday Times account continues:
“I was just constantly in survival mode. I was just trying to get through every single day. And it’s only because I’ve been raised by a very strong family, by very strong women, in terms of you keep fighting and pushing through. Because there was days where I just thought: ‘Would it be easier if I was to just end my life?’ Just because I felt like my career would never be same.”
Before long, police discovered the video was a hoax. They obtained the original doorbell footage, which specialist officers could see bore no resemblance to the subtitles in the video. On May 8, a spokesman for the force said they had found “no evidence of any racist slurs or language used”.
Lucky for her the original footage was still available. How long do they keep it on file? Round here we tend to assume surveillance is bad in itself, but we may soon end up being grateful for it more often than not.
The Guardian reports,
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
Richard Sennett’s article in the Guardian, “McCarthyism stalked my family. Its paranoia contains a lesson for Trump’s second term” is well titled, but, as usual, the lesson is not the one the Left thinks it is.
Professor Sennett’s article treats the Second Red Scare as if it were simply an eruption of irrational hatred. This treatment of the McCarthy era was the standard one when I was young, but feels quaint now. The Venona Project established that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed that many senior people in the American federal government were Soviet agents, he was right. The link takes you to a 2015 post by Patrick Crozier that I recommend you read. I also recommend you read Niall Kilmartin’s comment – McCarthy was right, but he was not a nice man. Professor Sennett is correct to say this about how McCarthy and Roy Cohn chose their targets:
They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets. People such as the playwright Arthur Miller repelled McCarthyite charges through vociferous counterattacks, while more compromising ex-commies such as the choreographer Jerome Robbins suffered sustained persecution. My uncle, threatened by the FBI, turned the tables by conjuring up personal injury lawsuits naming the agents who menaced him; the FBI then lost interest in his case. Cohn thought of commie-hunting as a matter of profit and loss, pursued only so long as there could be a benefit to the persecutor. If not, ideology did not drive him to persist.
“They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets.” Well observed mate, but you didn’t have to wait until the eve of Trump’s second term before making the parallel. Trump did nothing McCarthyite when he was president the first time, and I see no good reason to suppose he will be any different when he becomes president a second time. Professor Sennett, where were you in 2020 when your observations about how political witch-hunts work might have helped people who actually were being targeted in the same way as your parents were? What you are describing – the orgiastic yet opportunistic denunciations of individuals, with their degree of guilt a secondary consideration; the digging up of long-abandoned political flirtations; the way that apologies only excite the mob further – that is not Trumpism. That is Wokism.
|
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.
|
