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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“We live with the risk of injury or death in every other human endeavor, from mountain climbing to skydiving, from driving to flying. But for some reason, space-related activities are held to a different standard. Why is it that we see the death of test pilots as an unfortunate consequence of their job, but not for astronauts?”
Rand Simberg, Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space. The book was published in 2013, around a time when Elon Musk and his SpaceX business, as well as others, was not quite as in our public consciousness as it is now. Published 12 years ago, the book retains much of its power and persuasiveness, and lessons apply far beyond spaceflight. Simberg is one of the early bloggers out there, like Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.
P.S. Before sharing this article with your friends and family, please be aware that the Government’s Prevent anti-radicalisation programme has recently declared that concern about mass immigration is “terrorist ideology”. A Prevent training course hosted on the Government’s website lists “cultural nationalism” as something that could cause you to be referred for deradicalisation.
Prevent, you’ll remember, is the programme to which the Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana was repeatedly referred from as young as 13. He went on to stab a number of children and adults, 3 of whom died.
Usman Khan, the terrorist who committed the London Bridge attack in 2019, was under Prevent monitoring when he carried out his attack in the middle of a prisoner rehabilitation event for which he had travelled to London. Prevent officers tasked with monitoring him had “no specific training” in dealing with terrorists.
According to the Prevent training guidance, if you believe that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups” you will be referred to the very programme which failed to deal with them.
This is Britain. So think before you think.
– Konstantin Kisin (£)
Encouragingly, in 2025, wearing a mask in shops, leisure facilities, workplaces or on public transport is for the most part confined to a tiny minority. Alas, the exception to this return of sanity is the health and social care sector, where a few pro-mask ideologues residing in the infection control departments recurringly succeed in muzzling their staff, patients and visitors. While these pockets of fanaticism exist, there is always a danger that – fuelled by the contagion of safetyism – the imposition of mask requirements can re-ignite across all community settings. With this in mind, on this five-year anniversary of the first UK mask mandates, the campaign group Smile Free is about to release a short film, Masking Humanity, in which health and social care experts vividly convey the enormous harms of masks in these settings. Please help to spread the word to assist in the mission to keep blanket masking out of health and social care.
– Dr. Gary Sidley
And Hermer’s characterisation of historical events is in any case cobblers, of course. International law did not stop the actual honest-to-goodness Nazis first time around; American industry and Soviet manpower did that. The idea that if only we had had the ECHR in 1933 all of the unpleasantness of World War Two and the Holocaust could have been avoided is, to put it politely, absurd. One doesn’t constrain a belligerent regime through an ‘international rules-based system’; one does it through force, or the threat of it.
– David McGrogan
In Ms Harvey’s universe – occupied by the likes of Corrêa do Lago, Greenpeace and the UK’s very own ‘Mad Ed’, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – the science is settled, the energy transition is an imperative and decarbonisation will not only save the planet from an impending environmental catastrophe but also bring about economic growth and prosperity. Harvey’s article hinges on the tired assertion that the science of climate change is settled, with a ‘97% consensus’ among scientists that human activity drives catastrophic global warming. This figure, derived from John Cook’s 2013 study, has been debunked repeatedly for its methodological flaws — most notably by scholars like David Legates, who found that only a tiny fraction of the studied papers explicitly endorsed the catastrophic narrative.
– Tilak Doshi
“President Trump appears to be annoyed that trade negotiations with the European Union are dragging along too slowly. Join the club, pal. The biggest victims of Brussels’ indecision and sloth on trade are the Europeans themselves. Even if Mr. Trump’s tariffs fall to U.S. courts, it won’t liberate the Continent from trade war. The bloc is too good at doing damage to itself.”
– Joseph C Sternberg, Wall Street Journal ($)
This, by the way, is part of why I voted for Brexit nine years ago. I saw little chance that the bloc would reform, become more accountable, and make it easier to roll back red tape, and replace one-size-fits-all with mutual recognition of standards.
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
My point is: to anyone who understands the reality of Putin’s regime, the idea that he has “gone CRAZY” and is killing people is… well, CRAZY. Vladimir Putin is in power and retains power precisely because he has always been someone who is prepared to lie, manipulate and kill to achieve his objectives. That is literally what the KGB trained him to do.
In his post criticising Putin, Trump went on to add: “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right”. Finally, it seems, our American friends are beginning to understand who they are dealing with.
– Konstantin Kisin (£)
Millennials are an ultra-conformist generation. If you tell them that something is “cringe”, they won’t go there. If you tell them that it’s “cringe” to say that 2+2=4, they’ll think that this somehow stops 2+2 from being 4.
It was with this style that the Left managed to distance itself from Venezuelan socialism a few years later. They couldn’t delete all their old articles fawning over Venezuelan socialism, but they could make it “cringe” to mention it. And so, people stopped mentioning it.
– Kristian Niemietz
We have had laws against ‘inciting racial hatred’ for 60 years. It’s the settled, apparently inviolable position of British law that there are some things so dangerous they cannot be allowed to be said. We have taken, in effect, the precise opposite path to the United States. It was in the 1960s that the US Supreme Court gave the First Amendment its teeth, following a slew of high-profile cases brought by silenced civil-rights leaders. Where America came to see free speech as the answer to bigotry, Britain came to see censorship as essential to multicultural harmony.
– Tom Slater
“Labour seems to think the British economic renaissance is going to be rebuilt on minor changes to a food and drink trade that amounts to 2-3 per cent of our exports, yet if it really believed this, why is it killing family farms and making them erect solar panels instead?”
– David Frost, former chief Brexit negotiator in the former Tory government, writing about the sellout deal that UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer agreed with the EU at the weekend. The deal effectively puts the UK back into the EU Single Market on farming and food; it also gives a number of concessions that, even if they don’t completely reverse the UK’s independence from the EU, make a number of steps in that direction. This is one of those cases where the devil is in the detail. Like Lord (David) Frost, I want the UK to go for mutual recognition of trade standards, which is what sovereign nation states, such as New Zealand, already do without fuss. Apparently, this is outside the mental universe of Brussels negotiators and the UK government.
The reference in the quote above is to the policy of the current Labour government to impose inheritance tax on family-run farms, a measure that will force a number of these farmers’ families to sell up, possibly selling out to energy companies instead.
From where I stand, it seems pretty clear that Starmer wants to reverse Brexit, even if it falls short of formal re-entry into the EU.
The idea that the British government should subsidise an American mine is pretty weird. Very weird even. But it does seem to be about to happen.
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To the extent that we’ve got a scandium expert lying around I’m it. Niocorp isn’t going to work. But the British government, using your and my money, is eager to invest in it?
Why can’t they leave us just to piss away our own money in our own ways? Why this insistence upon doing it wholesale on obvious disasters?
– Tim Worstall
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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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