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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Both in France and internationally, the increasing alignment of Right-wing politics with voters’ key concerns leaves more moderate, centre-right politicians caught between a rock and a hard place. They can’t criticise Le Pen’s policy programme without downplaying the issues that voters care about most. But to express support or admiration for a campaign promising “rebirth” would amount to recognition of the abject failure of a decade of centrist rule.
Le Pen’s is hardly the first challenge to the centre-right of this kind, with Meloni again a key precedent. Ahead of Italian elections in 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen took an overtly threatening tone, suggesting that the EU was preparing “tools” for punitive action against a future Meloni government. Meloni’s eventual victory showed that voters wouldn’t be intimidated; France’s much greater heft within the EU would make a similar “Project Fear” approach even riskier.
– William Nattrass
People seem to be widely unaware of the scope of UK indecent images law. This is exacerbated, I submit, by the activist-prosecutorial language of “Child Sexual Abuse Material” in discussion shortened to ‘CSAM’ which in Britain covers any arguably indecent (undefined, indecency being a fact for the court, hence “arguably”) image, however generated, of a minor, real or entirely fictional. Despite connoting in the public mind the most horrific crimes that are included, no actual child, nor representation of sex, nor actual physical or psychological abuse, is required for images to be deemed CSAM in Britain.
– Guy Herbert
Now look at his list. Black English, Asian English, Mixed English, “etc.” Every item is a prefix bolted onto English. English on its own never appears, and White English, the one I asked him about directly, is left out. I don’t think that was a slip. It’s what happens when a clever man has absorbed the official grammar of British ethnicity, the grammar in which English is not a people but a suffix, a flavour that attaches to the real categories. In that grammar the one group with no prefix is the one group that never gets named, because to name it would be to concede that it exists as a people at all rather than as the plain paper everyone else is printed on. Something that cannot, ever be allowed.
– Gawain Towler
I am not the first person to question the arrangements as they currently stand. The Labour peer and former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote, in his review of UK citizenship for the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008, that “I do propose that government gives consideration to making a clear connection between citizenship and the right to vote by limiting in principle the right to vote in Westminster elections to UK citizens”, adding “it is right in principle not to give the right to vote to citizens of other countries living in the UK until they become UK citizens.” Unfortunately Gordon Brown ignored the report. So did David Cameron’s government and all its successors. But Lord Goldsmith was still correct.
– David Frost (£)
Sir John Cowperthwaite ran Hong Kong’s finances from 1961 to 1971 and treated regulation like a tax on discovery. Nobody in government can know which business will work, so he refused to pick, plan, or protect.
Whitehall sent officials to Hong Kong to push for economic statistics, and he sent them home. When Milton Friedman asked in 1963 why he collected so little data, Cowperthwaite answered: “If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.” Numbers give planners a reason to act, and every plan arrives as a rule that tells entrepreneurs what they may not try. Asked what poor countries should do to grow, he said they should abolish the office of national statistics.
– Handre van Heerden
This is not a change of heart. A change of heart is permitted to an honest man, and he announces it, and he takes the consequences. This is something else. It is a man who held one view in the pub in Ashton and holds the opposite in the Berlaymont, and who will not say rejoin and will not say no, because either word would cost him somebody.
– Gawain Towler
Oxfam started out as famine relief – a good, Godly, righteous thing to be doing. Get food to the starving – bonzer.
Then two things happen. One, we find out that shipping food to the starving – except in the most obvious cases of outright famine – isn’t really the way to do it. Because that bankrupts all the farmers for the next year, we make the problem permanent. Instead, we should ship money to poor people so they can buy food.
This requires fewer bureaucrats in aid agencies.
– Tim Worstall
Before 7 October 2023, the English-language Wikipedia article on Zionism opened by describing a movement that emerged to “espouse support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Since then, the opening has been reworded to say that this homeland was to be established “through colonization,” immediately followed by a new sweeping claim: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” The sentence is backed by an unusually large bundle of 17 citations, drawn from historians including Benny Morris, Rashid Khalidi, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé, and to the casual reader it looks like the settled verdict of scholarship. It is not. The editor who introduced it in August 2024 has since been banned from the entire Palestine-Israel topic area for non-neutral editing. Yet the sentence survives, and for a year Wikipedia formally barred its editors from even discussing whether to remove it.
– Mark Zlochin
For their part, Russian commentators and politicians today seem to have an absurdly exaggerated idea of Britain’s power, the puppet-masters behind American global domination, still pulling the strings, rather than a country run by naive humanities graduates who place our ‘international standing’ above national interests. Rabid threats to nuke London by tipsy Russian politicians are the last crumbs of dignity and self-respect we have left, for which thank you.
– Ed West
The ASI published a paper that recommended the wholesale privatization of local government services, starting with bin collection. Thatcher liked it so much that she had it photocopied 10,000 times and sent a copy to every Conservative councillor in Britain.
Thatcher didn’t like the word ‘privatization’, because it sounded new and strange. She wanted to call it denationalisation. But we pointed out that we were going to apply it to industries that had never been nationalised in the first place. We still insisted on spelling it with a ‘z’ to make it look like something new.
The first to go was Cable and Wireless, then BP, but the first big public flotation was of the Post Office telephone service, a state monopoly. Rather than sell it to a private company, the government decided to sell it to everyone, with a flotation in which the public were invited to apply for shares. To keep the telephone workers on side, they were offered 200 free shares if they bought 200. The union ran a hostile campaign showing a telephone cable being cut with scissors, but 96% of the workforce took the money instead.
– Madsen Pirie, recalling how Margaret Thatcher turned things around.
The subject of public disorder seems strangely topical, as I’m writing as rioting in France quietens down. Events in Paris and elsewhere have, inevitably, prompted a number of “what if?” comparisons with the UK. Our tradition of protest is significantly different from that of continental Europe, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to be complacent. On the other hand, nor is it necessarily a reason for panicky chief constables and sly mandarins to litigate for mega-forces, national police services and gendarmeries.
– Dominic Adler, discussing Blighty’s recent history of crowds kicking off. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.
One is we’ve just let state spending drift up too high. It’s 10 percentage points higher as a share of GDP than it was in the early Blair era. That in itself is enough to take 1% off growth, probably. Second, the markets are all gummed up. All our markets of all kinds are simply gummed up, over-regulated massively compared to where we were 20 or 30 years ago. The third bit of it, I think, is less economic and more cultural. I think it’s about the erosion of the sense of the British nation state’s political project – that we are all one country together, all pulling in the same sort of direction.
– David Frost
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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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