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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Europe has spent decades believing that you can regulate prosperity, tax innovation, and distrust entrepreneurship, while Silicon Valley and Shenzhen built the future.
Now, European Commissioner Virkkunen “Spuit11” warns that Europe is dependent on American and Chinese AI for digital security. As if that were a natural disaster. It’s not a natural disaster. It’s policy.
The EU produces rules. The US produces companies. China produces scale. Europe produces commissions that explain why we’re falling behind.
– Roald Schoenmakers
That government can be scarcely deemed to be free where the rights of property are left solely dependent upon the will of a legislative body without any restraint.
– Joseph Story
No Government has the right, whether to flatter fanatics or in mere vagueness of mind, to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used.
– William Butler Yeats, written in 1928 in opposition to censorship legislation in the Irish Free State
There is a never ending number of biscuits, not finite. Socialists think there is a biscuit tin under the bed, everyone has to share, 1 for you, 1 for me. They fail to learn how to make cookies with their granny who thought grandad was talking sh1t. Families 😂😂
– Jean McMillan
“Mathematics will need to develop a research culture that can accommodate AI as a partner. This will involve journals that require verification, hiring and tenure arrangements that reward exposition and checking, and collaborative practices for the verification of proofs. Checking and explaining AI-generated mathematics must count as original intellectual labor. The stronger AI becomes, the more valuable this human expertise will be.”
– Daniel Kipnis, Wall Street Journal ($)
Sir Keir Starmer is set to announce sweeping reforms tomorrow banning under-16s from 10 major social media platforms, including X, but not the Left-wing platform Bluesky.
– Toby Young
The huge influxes of research funding for compliant scientists have made it difficult to oppose the fable of a threatened planet. Any scientist who speaks up against the cacophony of nonsense about a climate threat is treated like Dr Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People. Rather than being thanked for discovering that the water of his town’s popular spa is contaminated with deadly disease organisms, Dr Stockman and his family are viciously ostracised by most of the town’s citizens, who are making a good living by promoting the supposed health benefits of the spa.
Climate nonsense will eventually end and will be dumped onto the ash heap of history where it belongs. But the longer the cult goes on, the more damage is done. We should all do what we can to stop the madness as soon as possible.
– William Happer
But let us take the question seriously, because it deserves to be. What does it actually mean, to be fit to govern?
It is not, I think, what the managerial mind supposes. It is not a glossy CV, nor a safe pair of hands, nor a tidy communications grid. Strip away the cant and ask the question the common Englishman (and our Scots, our Welsh, our Ulstermen will forgive me the shorthand, for the inheritance is theirs every bit as much as ours) has always put, plainly, to anyone who would rule him: what is government actually for?
The answer is older than any party in this room, older than this Union itself, this Union, our great Union. It is this. Defend the realm. Keep the peace. Hold the law level over the head of the richest man and the poorest alike. And then, having done those few hard things well, leave us our liberty and our property, and get out of the way. That is the whole of it. That is the inheritance of the common law, the law that stood here before Parliament and will stand here after it, the law that William Blackstone, Oxford’s own, took down out of the air and set in order so that every man and woman in these islands might know their rights. Measured against that standard, fitness to govern is not a question of experience. It is a question of spine.
And that is precisely where the parties opposite fail, and Reform does not. For fitness, properly understood, is the willingness to say what you want and to mean it, and to bring with you a team ready to put its shoulder to the national wheel and push.
– Gawain Towler giving an absolutely stonking speech.
Our leaders usually condemn the disorder and violence that follows, but will refuse to discuss the triggers in any depth. Anyone who asks what can be done about horrors like that inflicted on Stephen Ogilvie will be accused of stoking division, exploiting a tragedy and courting the far right.
But something can and must be done. It is simply no longer sustainable to force working-class communities to endure such levels of terror, to bear the brunt of the elites’ open-door experiment – to pay the ‘blood price’, as Brendan O’Neill describes it, of the establishment’s virtue-signalling. Practically every day brings new horrors that ordinary folk are simply expected to put up with. On the very same day as the Sudanese suspect was charged with attempted murder, four Afghan nationals appeared in court, all charged with the alleged rape of a Bristol schoolgirl. From gang rapes in Brighton and grooming gangs in Norwich to child rape in Warwickshire, countless British citizens continue to suffer at the hands of men who shouldn’t be here. Yet this barely seems to trouble our cloistered political class.
– Fraser Myers
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.
– Signal official statement
Some note-worthy observations and comparisons in no particular order:
– Sikh leaders have come out to condemn the behaviour of the offender and his family and to show their support for the victim. This contrasts noticeably with Muslim leaders after a Muslim atrocity, where the emphasis is on disowning the perpetrator and pretending he wasn’t really one of them
– The murder does not appear to religiously inspired. This was a murder by someone who happens to be Sikh. There is no suggestion that he thought his actions were justified by his religion.
– That Sikhs have cover for going about armed is largely irrelevant to most knife crime. Removing daggers from law-abiding Sikhs is not going to stop murderers from carrying knives.
– The lack of concern by the police for the victim is palpable. Derek Chauvin, however, had already called for the ambulance before he and his team had to restrain George Floyd. They continued to beg for the ambulance to arrive all the way through the incident.
– The resulting angry crowds are not burning down shops and looting. Sikh temples are not being attacked: their anger is directed – correctly – at the police.
– No-one in authority has taken the knee.
– The Pedant-General summarising the situation rather well.
To which I would add to anyone saying this horror should not be politicised: the incident is intrinsically political.
Why? Because the incident centres not just on the murder itself and murderer’s use of the word-of-power ‘racist‘, but also on the subsequent actions of the police, who responded to that word-of-power as the user intended them to.
So, this is all political because the police are the literal enforcers of the state’s will, responding as they have been trained to respond. This is a consequence of decades of establishment policy decisions by both Labour and ‘Conservative’ governments, a product of politically directed institutional police culture.
“When one your tribe is murdered, I call for calm and unity because that is according to your principles; when one of my tribe is murdered, I call for protests and riots because that is according to my principles.”
– Alice Smith on the stark difference between reactions to the deaths of Henry Novak and George Floyd. She’s paraphrasing Frank Herbert.
But tell me, there’s no “National White Police Association” in the UK, so why is there a “National Black Police Association” and a “National Association of Muslim Police” in the UK?
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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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