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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Soon Brits will need Starlink + VPN to read the news. Like Iran
– Douglas Carswell
For the first time anyone can remember, in a contest for a Westminster seat in an English city, the two parties vying for power won’t be Labour or the Conservatives, but instead be two insurgent outsiders. This is a twin-pronged revolt against the political mainstream – against a clique that has become ever more detached and tin-eared since the advent of globalisation in the 1990s.
The concerns articulated by both outfits, Reform UK and the Green Party, mirror those seen in all developed countries around the globe. In Reform, we have a party that appeals to small-c conservatives and a disaffected working class who inhabit deindustrialised areas, who feel their homeland has been degraded by an aloof, footloose liberal-left who cares little for them or their country. In the Greens, we have a party that has enjoyed a surge in popularity by taking a sharp turn to the left, appealing to a graduate class for whom the ‘elites’ are instead neoliberal capitalists, who must be humbled through punitive tax hikes. The Greens have remained steadfast passengers on the woke bandwagon, still proud to fly the Progress Pride flag, while simultaneously making gainful overtures to Muslim voters. Time will tell how well that interesting marriage works out.
– Patrick West
And here is where Britain’s particular brand of suicidal virtue-signalling becomes lethal. The Liberal West, and Britain most zealously, has spent fifteen years chasing Net Zero with the fervour of a medieval flagellant. We’ve shuttered coal, dithered on nuclear, blanketed the countryside with unreliable windmills, and now face the grim prospect of energy rationing. The National Grid’s own forecasts admit that data centres alone could consume 7-10% of UK electricity by 2030, and that’s before the real AI boom hits. Microsoft, Google, and the rest are already scrambling for power purchase agreements that dwarf entire cities. Yet our political class still preens about “green leadership” while quietly preparing the public for blackouts and sky-high bills.
– Gawain Towler
First came energy: “We will ditch the insane net zero agenda,” he thundered, “and we’ll get the North Sea operating again.” A pragmatic pitch for sovereignty through self-sufficiency, part Thatcherite nostalgia, part defiance of metropolitan eco-piety. Tying this to a blast for agricultural sufficiency, backing our farmers whilst condemning the vast solar deserts to the slop bins.
[…]
And whether you loathe him, love him, or wish he’d just go back to LBC, you have to admit: Nigel Farage is once again setting the weather. The Birmingham speech marked the moment he stopped being a political meteorologist, and started auditioning to be the storm itself.
– Gawain Towler
For me, Reform setting itself unequivocally against Net Zero is a defining moment that had me cheering the telly. And unlike the Tories, with the Conservative Environmental Network being one of largest party associations, Reform will actually do it without being sabotaged by a Blue Blairite party within a party.
Officials with the lowest approval ratings in the world (Macron, Starmer, Merz, Sanchez) are the loudest champions of social media bans for teens and ‘misinformation’ crackdowns.
– Pavel Durov
I find it splendidly sensible that ‘ordinary’ people are able to see through celebrity endorsements. It was F Scott Fitzgerald who famously said, ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind, at the same time, and still retain the ability to function’. Regular people are able to admire, even idolise, a singer or an actor – and then totally do the opposite politically to what that performer calls for.
– Julie Burchill
So why was the UK, US and European media so obsessed with this one shooting? Because it was done by an ICE officer, and ICE has been painted as Donald Trump’s personal law enforcement agency, ignoring the fact that it was created by George W Bush in 2002.
I make no defence of Donald Trump. I make no defence of the violent actions of ICE in so many US cities, but to pretend that this one incident was more important than the nascent revolution going on in Iran is laughable. And that’s what too many media organisations were doing.
I can look myself in the eye because almost from the start of the protests, I was covering them on my LBC show. Indeed, we’ve devoted hours and hours to them – more I suspect that any of the 24 hours news channels up until the last couple of days.
If you wanted any real-time coverage of what’s happening in Iran you had to go to live Youtube channels, like Mahyar Tousi’s TOUSI TV, which has been brilliant at informing people about what’s really going on.
– Iain Dale
The future is choice.
The BBC hates choice — because choice exposes irrelevance.
No more reverence.
No more compulsory funding.
No more pretending this is about anything other than control.
– Russ
“The First Amendment doesn’t stop at the water’s edge just because a foreign bureaucrat sends a threatening letter. If you’re in Wyoming, you speak freely. Period.”
– Daniel Singh
It still boggles my mind that people can talk about the Holocaust without saying the J-word. It’s like holding forth on the transatlantic slave trade and not once saying ‘people from Africa’. Or lamenting the nuking of Hiroshima and forgetting to mention Japanese people. And yet here we are, 80 years after the Shoah, surrounded by Jew-free yapping about that most calamitous event in history.
– Brendan O’Neill
Surveillance states don’t drop from the sky. They emerge alongside seemingly reasonable excuses that do not ring alarm bells for the ordinary citizen, piggybacking on genuine issues that are of concern to the public. In this case, with breathtaking cynicism, labour are using people’s justified concerns about immigration and the rise in crime to impose what Mahmood unironically describes as a panopticon state upon law-abiding citizens, whilst – typically for this government – doing nothing to address the root cause.
– Eve Lugg
We are only, here in the UK, at the very beginning of the process of descent into tyranny. But it is helpful to frame our thinking with this in mind: that is our trajectory if we continue to imagine that state authority can be founded in political hedonism, or the unity of desire. And it is also helpful for us therefore to imagine how things can be different: what is the proper grounds for the authority of the state, and how are states indeed properly constituted?
The answer, for those who know their political theory, is the antithesis of tyranny: the rule of law. But it is the rule of law understood in a special way. It does not mean the ‘rule of lawyers’ (which we are now highly familiar with). It means something much more specific than that.
– David McGrogan (£)
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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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