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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Here is a story about a place I once knew. I found it via this post by “TantumErgo” in the UK Politics subreddit. “Owners of former Walthamstow pub ordered to stop using it as Buddhist temple”, the Waltham Forest Echo reports:
An unlicensed Buddhist temple operating out of a former pub in Walthamstow has been ordered to close by Waltham Forest Council.
The Confucius and Tao Association (CTA) bought the Lord Brooke, in Shernhall Street, in 2014 but was refused planning permission to convert the building into a place of worship the following year.
Contemporary reports described its purpose as promoting the teachings of Buddhism, Confucius and the Great Tao through public seminars, while working to tackle poverty and racial tension.
The council’s planning committee refused the charity’s application in early 2015, saying the use of the building as a pub was a “valued part of the social infrastructure of the area”.
No doubt many residents of Walthamstow did value the Lord Brooke being a pub, but it’s not as if they would have continued to have it as their local if only the Buddhists had not taken it over. In 2014 the pub was branded a “drug haven” by the Metropolitan Police and was “shuttered after evidence of drug use was found all over the venue.” No one has been found willing to reopen it as a pub, not surprisingly given the pub trade has been declining for years, mostly due to government actions like the smoking ban, “sin taxes” and increases in the minimum wage.
Faced with the choice between the abandoned building falling into dereliction and having it used by a group known for their harmlessness, one would think the council would jump at the chance to allow the change of use, but no, they preferred to wait for their “prince” in the form of a new landlord to come some day.
So those naughty Buddhists snuck in anyway, and started worshipping in the building so quietly that no one in authority noticed for years. They also opened a vegetarian cafe, the bastards. The Waltham Forest Echo continues:
Despite the town hall’s decision, the TCA [this is a typo for “CTA”, which stands for “Confucius and Tao Association”] appears to have gone ahead with the conversion.
It is unclear when the venue began being used as a place of worship. There is no formal signage for the temple, only for the associated Lotus Bloom Café, and historic remnants of the Lord Brooke are still in place more than a decade on.
Waltham Forest lodged a planning enforcement notice in late April, demanding the charity stops the “unauthorised use of the land and buildings as a place of worship, associated community centre, and ancillary café” and ceases “all gatherings, events and educational classes”.
So the state compulsorily closed down a pub due to it being a drug haven. The state said that the building could only be reopened as a pub. The state made reopening it as a pub a losing proposition. Then the state said that the people who had quietly reopened the building as a place of worship for Buddhists and a cafe open to all had to close it down and restore it to its previous state.
The Confucius and Tao Association ought to scatter the ground with needles and syringes for authenticity, but they are probably too nice.
I came across this post by Brivael Le Pogam on X:
I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it. But it rests on three factual errors, and it’s worth looking at them calmly.
Error 1: Elon’s fortune isn’t a pile of cash. It’s ownership of factories, rockets, and satellites. “Taking half his money,” in concrete terms, means forcing the sale of half of SpaceX and Tesla. The money doesn’t come out of a safe; it comes from the companies themselves, which fall under the control of foreign funds or states. You’re not redistributing cash; you’re dismantling a tool of production. It’s the difference between harvesting apples and chopping down the apple tree.
M. Le Pogam goes on to politely describe two other errors that his interlocutor is making regarding how the richest person in the world got that rich, and how an astonishing percentage of the the poorest people in the world have been lifted out of absolute poverty in my lifetime.
His post is well worth reading for the eloquence of his arguments. But there is another, quite separate reason to give it your attention. You see, Brivael Le Pogam never actually wrote “I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it.” He wrote, “Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent.” The thought behind them was in French, but the English words I read and admired for their eloquence were written by a computer program. Over the last couple of years we have quietly reached and passed the point where automatic translation is, for most practical purposes, invisible.
“Oui, la récompense la plus agréable qu’on puisse recevoir des choses que l’on fait, c’est de les voir connues, de les voir caressées d’un applaudissement qui vous honore.”
“Yes, the most pleasant reward one can receive from the things one does is to see them recognised, to see them greeted with applause that honours you.” – Molière,
– Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
-*-
Wise words. Combine them with the equally wise saying “If you want a job done, do it yourself”, and you get this:
French professor accused of ‘gigantic hoax’ after inventing Nobel-style prize, as reported by the Guardian‘s Kim Willsher:
At a ceremony at the French national assembly attended by Nobel prize winners, former government ministers, MPs, decorated scientists and academics, all attention was on a previously unknown literature professor.
Florent Montaclair, then 46, a balding, bespectacled figure in an ill-fitting suit and rosé-coloured shirt, was receiving the 2016 Gold Medal of Philology – the study of linguistics – from an international society of the same name.
Montaclair was the first French recipient of the medal, previously awarded to the Italian author and linguist Umberto Eco, those attending were told.
It was a glittering event and an impressive achievement – but unfortunately, detectives claim, the award itself was entirely fake and part of a complex international hoax worthy of a film script.
and
Until 2015, when an article appeared in his local newspaper claiming he was about to win the equivalent of a Nobel prize or Fields medal, Montaclair was an unremarkable teaching instructor who liked to write fantasy books, many about vampires, in his spare time.
I’d give one of his novels a go, if any have been translated into English. But perhaps he ought to consider a change of genre, given his demonstrable talent for producing realistic fiction.
After the national assembly ceremony, Montaclair, who gave a Tedx Talk titled the Galilean Challenge, decided the next recipient should be the American intellectual Noam Chomsky, then 87, who travelled to Paris to collect the award in front of 200 people.
Don’t be too sad for Professor Chomsky. He has had awards, prizes, fellowships, honorary degrees, medals and memberships of learned academies poured upon him, not to mention his being the recipient of personal monetary tokens of esteem. His trophies surround him like a glittering ocean. Their lustre can scarcely be dimmed by one of them turning out to be an academic vanity project.
The Guardian article then quotes the public prosecutor, Paul-Édouard Lallois:
Lallois said whether Montaclair obtained that promotion and any material gain from an allegedly fake diploma and medal was at the heart of his investigation.
“In his view, the medal is not a forgery. A forgery implies that there is a genuine medal. As the genuine philology medal does not exist, his medal cannot be a forgery,” Lallois said.
“Anyone can create a medal. You can order online the ‘best journalist in France’ medal, in gold, silver or bronze, award it to yourself and hold your own little ceremony quietly at home over drinks.
“If you stay at home with your little medals on top of your mantelpiece, there are no legal consequences. If, on the other hand, you mention it to your employer, if you mention it to the media, and if all this leads to a certain amount of professional recognition, then it has concrete implications, and that is where the notion of fraud can begin to arise.”
It begins to arise, certainly. But does the notion of fraud ascend all the way into full existence? Like the man accused of wearing a toupée to cover his baldness who replied, “It’s all my own hair – I paid for the toupée myself”, Professor Montaclair could defend himself on the grounds that those in charge of awarding the Gold Medal of Philology sincerely believed he was a worthy laureate.
Montaclair could also point out that many prestigious academic prizes are awarded by foundations that are the creations of one man, with the only difference from his International Society of Philology being that their founders were rich enough to rent offices in a nice part of town and persuade or hire famous names to serve as judges. Montaclair clearly sought to hide his award to himself among his awards to other people such as Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky. If he had remained undetected he might well have managed to pick up a few well-known academic names to serve alongside him in deciding who should receive future Gold Medals. Perhaps his plan was to discreetly retire once the whole process had become self-sustaining.
Or if one wants something more democratic, the media will laud as “world-leading” bodies such as the International Association of Genocide Scholars that allow anyone who pays a fee to become a voting member. Professor Montaclair could say that his society… just hadn’t got any other members yet.
In the end, I would say that even if he does somehow manage to escape a penalty under French law, his use of his home-minted Gold Medal to gain promotion was morally a fraud. And, OK, the whole International Society of Philology being made from his left sock was a bit dodgy too. But the line between a fraud and a gutsy founder operating on the principle of “if you build it, they will come” is not utterly clear cut. Despite being a five times winner of the Prix de l’Academie Solent, I find this a difficult philosophical question.
I will start by saying that there is no doubt whatsoever that Jeffrey Epstein carried out multiple sex offences against children. He was justly convicted in 2019, and should have been brought to justice earlier than he was.
But I was disturbed by one aspect of the way this story about Epstein that appears on the BBC website was reported: Epstein housed abuse victims in London flats, BBC reveals
Sex-criminal financier Jeffrey Epstein housed women who say he abused them in several London flats in the years after UK police decided not to investigate him, the BBC can reveal.
We found evidence of four flats, rented in the affluent borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in receipts, emails and bank records contained within the Epstein files. Six of the women housed in them have since come forward as victims of Epstein’s abuse.
Many of them – from Russia, eastern Europe and elsewhere – were brought to the UK after the Metropolitan Police decided not to investigate Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 allegation that she had been a victim of international trafficking to London.
The Met said it followed “reasonable lines of inquiry” at the time, interviewing Giuffre on multiple occasions following her complaint and co-operating with US investigators.
Some of the women housed in the London flats were coerced by Epstein to recruit others into his sex trafficking scheme, as well as regularly transported to Paris by Eurostar to visit him, according to emails in the files.
The BBC searched through millions of pages of records gathered by the US Department of Justice in its investigation of the disgraced financier, and released as part of the Epstein files, in order to piece together the most detailed picture yet of his operation in the UK.
It shows how the operation grew more extensive than was previously known – with more victims, established infrastructure such as housing, and frequent transportation of women across borders – right up to Epstein’s death, despite warnings to UK police.
We are not publishing any details about the young women to protect their anonymity as the victims of sexual abuse.
Our investigation found British police had other opportunities to open an inquiry into the disgraced financier’s activities in the UK, in addition to Giuffre’s complaint that she had been trafficked and forced to have sex with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in 2001. Mountbatten-Windsor has always denied any wrongdoing.
Just a few months before his arrest on charges of trafficking children for sex, and his death in jail awaiting trial, our investigation found that Epstein was messaging a young Russian woman on Skype who was living in one of the London flats he paid for.
He sent her an image which is not included in the files but which seems to have been a picture of himself. The woman jokingly asked who the good-looking man in the picture was.
Epstein said it was her landlord – but said that unlike most landlords, he pays rather than collecting the rent.
The woman later went on to ask Epstein for money to pay for her English classes in London and to help buy cutlery and furniture for the apartment. She also asked for visa advice for another Russian woman who was due to come and stay.
The 2019 exchange reveals how Epstein remained in touch with the women he housed in London right up until his arrest and death in jail, and how involved he was in the detail of their lives.
In contrast to the photos released in the Epstein files, which are often decades old, we found the women housed by him in London pictured in Instagram posts, on Russian social media and in high-end fashion shoots.
The exterior of the flat mentioned in the Skype chat is pictured in one of these photographs. In the background a doorbell with the name of the building is visible, which enabled us to find the tenancy agreement in the Epstein files.
A shipment of gifts recorded in the files led us to another apartment. Details of yet another, rented in 2018 and 2019, were buried in a 10,000-page credit card bill. It also recorded the daily living expenses of the woman staying there, who had her own card on Epstein’s account with a $2,000 (£1,477) monthly allowance.
The thing that disturbed me about the BBC’s reporting was the uncritical way in which these adult women were described as “victims” and the way that their claim to have been coerced was reported as absolute fact.
Why should that disturb me? Not because I think that Epstein was incapable of such a crime: we know he was a twice-convicted sexual predator. I also know that sexual coercion can be combined with lavish gifts and a luxurious prison. And I utterly reject the barbaric belief that sexual coercion “does not count” if the victim had previously agreed to sex, including sex that was paid for. Allegations of this type of crime must be taken seriously. As I have said many times, “taken seriously” means “carefully investigated”, not “automatically believed”.
A pity my first reaction upon reading this story was to laugh.
Related posts:
Believe or disbelieve individuals, not whole groups – about Neil Gaiman.
The feminist movement denies rape victims justice
If you don’t care whether a rape really happened, you don’t care about rape
The other day I found this Swedish video giving a perspective (from around 2018) on radical feminism. Tip is to set the video to give you English subtitles if you aren’t fluent in Swedish.
Assuming that it is satire, let it be put in the balance when one assesses the contribution of the land of Olaf Palme and Gunnar Myrdal to the World,
And again, if this was so obvious in 2018, why did it take so long for these types to be called out for what they are elsewhere?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton
@realLandsEnd
Sanism names a deep, pervasive belief that ppl who appear out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis are not trustworthy, less human & fundamentally disruptive to social life. It’s a hierarchy of credibility and belonging, where visible distress = danger/contamination
1:59 AM · Feb 23, 2026
https://x.com/realLandsEnd/status/2025752283435196882
This tweet by Beatrice Alder-Bolton, co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, has been garnering interest, as it was intended to do. As the title says, while I never doubt the humanity of people who appear “out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis”, I do think that while they remain in this state in public places they are disruptive to social life. I also think that while in this state they are untrustworthy.
Beatrice Alder-Bolton would like us to believe that she trusts them. If she had said that she sympathised with people visibly in psychiatric crisis, I would have believed her. I also sympathise. If she had said that she tries to engage with such people in order to help them, I might have believed her. I have met a few kind souls who habitually respond in this way. I admire them (the kind souls) from a safe distance. But when Beatrice Alder-Bolton implies that she thinks the man having a psychiatric crisis in front of her on public transport is trustworthy, I do not believe her. Her body goes onto high alert just like anyone else’s. And speaking for myself, you bet I don’t trust the crazy guy. You bet I think he might be dangerous. And if he has just emptied his bowels or his bladder in the carriage I do indeed fear contamination.
But in order to be worthy of trust myself, I cannot simply dismiss Beatrice Alder-Bolton as a high-functioning mad left-winger of the sort that even other left-wingers are beginning to realise are poisonous to their cause (“I am begging leftists and liberals to not do this again. It is normal and smart to be nervous and on high alert when someone behaves in a profoundly anti-social way (peeing on the subway) and/or a threatening way (screaming on the subway). The more cities tolerate this, the fewer people ride public transport, the worse that transport gets, and eventually it gets to a breaking point and people wind up voting for right-wing politicians who come in and crack skulls and way over-police.” – Jill Filipovic), I have to acknowledge that when Alder-Bolton’s way of thinking is described as “left libertarian”, the “libertarian” part is perfectly real.
I wrote about the influence that the libertarian writings of Thomas Szasz had and continue to have on me in a post called “Ideology and Insanity on the New York Subway”. Just as certain chemicals are harmless in themselves but dangerous in combination with others, the way that Szasz’s* libertarian ideals combined with the dominant suicidally empathetic ideals of our time has produced results like the random murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown.
There are ways to respect the equal humanity of those who cannot function in society while, well, continuing to have a society. Private property is one, and if that is too much for modern sensibilities, the rediscovery of the right to exclude mad people from public property. To use Ms Alder-Bolton’s word, sanism. The rediscovery of proud, unapologetic sanism.
*You say it “sasses”. In Hungarian the digraph “sz” has the same function as the English letter “s” and the letter “s” on its own is pronounced the same way as the English digraph “sh”. Confusingly, Polish is the other way round.
Ronan McCrea starts his Telegraph article with a glimpse into the past.
Three and a half decades ago, Henri Leconte, then one of the world’s biggest tennis stars, swept up in the adulation of the crowd, mocked a gay-looking ball boy on the centre court of a Wimbledon warm-up tournament. Pointing at the boy, he swung his wrist limply, while laughing, and encouraging the crowd to join in the fun.
And everybody thought it was a hoot. Everybody except one.
The ballboy was me, aged 13, and I still vividly remember the horror and total isolation I felt at the time. The fact, however, that such a scene would be unimaginable today shows the extent to which society has changed its approach to gay people.
Yes. If I were not hearing about this incident from the person with most cause to remember to the day when it happened, I would have thought it took place in the 1960s or 70s, not 1990.
But the dramatic shift in society’s approach to homosexuality mustn’t be taken for granted. Indeed, I fear it could all too easily return: it takes a striking degree of complacency to think that after centuries and centuries of repression, a few decades of tolerance could mark an irrevocable change.
Ironically, the unprecedented freedom that we’ve won in the past few decades is now under threat from within our own ranks – not least the approach of gay rights groups like Stonewall.
I’m among many gay people who believe that hanging on to what we have would be a good long-term result.
Mr McCrea then describes the almost Stakhanovite pressure on companies and their employees to do ever more to prove their “allyship”:
Getting a good score on the [Workplace Equality] index requires a dizzying range of active steps from verifying that suppliers are “committed to LGBT inclusion” and community engagement work. In the US, the main gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign, went even further, recommending a kind of gay tithe (as or they put “cash or in-kind donation to at least one LGBTQ+ specific organisation”) along with a “standard of demonstrating at least five efforts of public commitment to the LGBTQ+ community”.
I suspect any private sense of “commitment to the LGBTQ+ community” that the managers and employees of these companies might once have had was neutralised by the third public demonstration of commitment and sent well into reverse by the fifth.
He continues,
This approach not only risks alienating people who are happy to live and let live but don’t like being subjected to propaganda at work. It also undermines the key argument that helped gay rights to advance in recent decades, namely that accepting gay people required simply that approach: live and let live.
He is right. Though I agree with what he has said so far, I doubt that Mr McCrea would agree with what I am about to say: as a libertarian, I believe on principle that there should not be any anti-discrimination laws whatsoever. I think gay people would be more accepted, not less, if coercion was removed from the equation entirely – and even if they weren’t, I would still advocate for it on the grounds of the fundamental right to free association. However, back in the real world, at least the laws against discrimination in employment and so on do not reach that deeply into people’s personal lives. They are nearly always passed after the bulk of the public have already been won over by moral argument. Their main effect is to make people somewhat grumpier and more cynical about doing what they were going to do anyway. A terrible wrong turning was made when gay activists, having got about as far as was logically possible in terms of forbidding workplace discrimination, started trying to compel speech, as in the cases of Lee v Ashers Baking Company Ltd and others in the UK and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in the US.
Note that in the British case at least, the plaintiff was not shocked to discover that the bakers would not bake a cake with his required slogan on it. Gareth Lee deliberately sought out bakers who would object. He wanted to set the legal precedent that they could be compelled to promote a message antithetical to their beliefs. If the decision had gone the other way, I have sometimes wondered what Mr Lee’s position would have been regarding slogans offensive to his deepest beliefs.
Although both the Ashers and the Masterpiece cases were eventually decided in favour of the right of the defendants to free speech (which includes the right not to be forced to speak), the years-long attempts to force people to write words which they thought were morally wrong made a mockery of “live and let live”. Legal cases such as these, and the increasingly onerous demands for displays of support for the LGBTQ+ cause made upon every workplace and institution, have made many people feel – as did the Stakhanovite workers – that every act of compliance merely lays them open to new demands. That breeds enmity, not solidarity. Stop demanding that people feel certain emotions. Let us get back to the humbler, more achievable principle of “live and let live”.
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?
The wealthy don’t protest. They exit.
– Alessandro Palombo
In the Guardian, April O’Neill writes,
The Online Safety Act is now partly enforceable. Paul might make you think a bit harder about it. Understandably, much of the conversation surrounding it has been focused on protecting children, but there is a glaring hole in this legislation regarding the protection of adults. Despite a 2022 report for the Ministry of Justice finding that the role of the internet in radicalisation pathways “was most evident for older rather than younger individuals”, the Tory government backed out from provisions that would have prevented adults from seeing “legal but harmful” content online over fears about freedom of speech.
April O’Neill holds that the people who need to be forcibly protected from hearing bad opinions are old people who distrust left wing media sources. Ms O’Neill is the winner of The Guardian Foundation’s 2025 Emerging Voices Awards (19-25 age category) recognising young talent in political opinion writing.
“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.
It is notable that the inquiry’s concentration on the work of the Government’s dis- and mis- information operation assumes that anyone questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines is spreading such information. In reality the main source of dis- and mis- information is the Government: the manifest failings of the MHRA have been concealed; the safe and effective narrative is a sham.
I have yet to see any news report of the meeting but hope one will appear somewhere. I also hope that transcripts of the speakers’ presentations will become available. I note that the Perseus Group has made several witness statements to the Hallett Inquiry; whether these have been put on the inquiry website is a little difficult to determine, as the ‘statements’ tab leads to a list which is 809 pages long. I got through the first five without finding anything sensible buried among the trivia. Maybe the submissions are there somewhere. Somehow I doubt it.
– Dr. Andrew Bamji
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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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