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]
|
Kudos to the Guardian for not soft-pedalling this:
Chomsky had deeper ties with Epstein than previously known, documents reveal
The philosopher and the sex trafficker were in contact long after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, documents reveal
The prominent linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky called it a “most valuable experience” to have maintained “regular contact” with Jeffrey Epstein, who by then had long been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, according to emails released earlier in November by US lawmakers.
Such comments from Chomsky, or attributed to him, suggest his association with Epstein – who officials concluded killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges – went deeper than the occasional political and academic discussions the former had previously claimed to have with the latter.
Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages, though the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor has insisted not “one penny” came directly from the infamous financier.
That is not much of a defence. Money is fungible.
Later, the article quotes from a letter written by Chomsky praising Epstein:
“The impact of Jeffrey’s limitless curiosity, extensive knowledge, penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals is only heightened by his easy informality, without a trace of pretentiousness. He quickly became a highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation.”
In fairness, all that stuff about penetrating insights and thoughtful appraisals was probably true. Epstein would not have been able to rise as high – or sink as low – as he did without being able to read people. Epstein’s forte was befriending famous people, introducing them to each other, being at the centre of the networks of the global elite. My guess is that of the pleasures this position brought him, the status ranked higher in his mind than the money or the sex.
Added 23rd November: I am going to take the liberty of promoting a slightly edited version of something I wrote in the comments in reply to this excellent comment by Fraser Orr to the main post.
Fraser Orr writes, “FWIW, I find it a bit disturbing that mere association with this loathsome man (Epstein that is) that somehow convicts the associate”. I quite agree. Apart from the importance of the presumption of innocence in all circumstances, i.e. criminal or near-criminal wrongdoing needs to be proved, it should be obvious that a big part of the appeal of the sexual services that Epstein was offering was exclusivity. It wouldn’t have worked if everyone was invited. But I don’t think there’s any suggestion that Chomsky was involved in the sex stuff at all. My guess is what Epstein got out of associating with Chomsky was the feeling that he was an intellectual too, and one of the things Chomsky got out of associating with Epstein was a frisson of transgressiveness. He was above such bourgeois conventions as refusing to talk to someone who had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. But it looks very much as if the other thing Noam Chomsky got from his association with Jeffrey Epstein was money. “Chomsky, 96, had also reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds relating to the first of his two marriages” This sounds evasive. What does the thing about “sorting the disbursement of common funds” even mean? It sounds like something to do with calculating how the money should be split between him and his first wife. I can see how working out how to divide joint earnings after a marriage ends might be complicated, but why did Noam Chomsky doing whatever he was doing regarding money from his first marriage require Jeffrey Epstein to send him more than quarter of a million dollars? For an intellectual to take money from a disreputable but very rich patron is not a crime, but all those who laud Chomsky as a fearless social justice advocate and opponent of abusive power might like to reconsider their tributes.
Corbyn and Sultana at War Over ‘Your Party’ Membership Launch, Guido Fawkes reports.
Jeremy Corbyn has just released an “urgent message” claiming today’s membership launch for ‘Your Party’ routed to an unauthorised domain and “legal advice” is now being taken. Which is odd, because Comrade Sultana told everyone to sign up using that very domain this morning…
“URGENT MESSAGE TO ALL YOURPARTY.UK SUPPORTERS
This morning, an unauthorised email was sent to all yourparty.uk supporters with details of a supposed membership portal hosted in a new domain name. Legal advice is being taken. That email should be ignored by all supporters. If any direct debits have been set up, they should be immediately cancelled.”
It appears that Sultana and Corbyn have now split.
“Whatever happened to the Popular Front?”
“She’s over there.”
Update: Someone I know alerted me to this:
It’s genuine. Here’s the link to Companies House:
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16619803/filing-history
Note that the “Cessation of Jeremy Bernard Corbyn as a person with significant control” did not happen today but on 15th September, three days ago.
Back when the world was still damp from the Flood and Peter Davison was Dr Who, I was in the University Officers Training Corps. I don’t know if the term is still used by the British Army, but back then a green, typewritten piece of paper headed “Part One Orders” was always on display on the unit noticeboard. Well, I think it was green. It was certainly typewritten, because everything was at that time – that’s how I knew at once that the people saying that the “Rathergate” documents that purported to have been written by an officer of the Texas Air National Guard in 1973 were fake had a very good case. The big thing about Part One Orders was that they were orders. You had to obey them, which meant you had to know what they were. You were under orders to read the Orders, specifically to check whether they had changed since you last read them. Reading a short document once a week was not an onerous requirement for Officer Cadet Solent but I gather that proper soldiers had to check ’em every day and woe betide them if they did not. On the other hand, the existence of Part One Orders meant that if some almighty balls-up happened because someone did not realise that circumstances had changed, the tide of woe could be diverted away from the immediate ballser-upper if he could show that the change had never been announced on the P1s.
Poor lefties. They are under at least as strict a requirement to keep abreast with changes to their orders as that imposed by Section 5.121 of the Queen’s Regulations (1975) but nobody will ever openly tell them that the orders have changed. Not even on Bluesky. Maybe on WhatsApp if they are very high ranking, but the foot soldiers of the progressive movement just have to know by osmosis.
That is why I can find some pity in my heart for the teachers at Bilton School in Warwickshire who sent home a twelve year old girl called Courtney White for wearing a Union Jack dress on Diversity Day, and then found themselves being condemned by a Labour Prime Minister. Not a lot of pity, but some. Nobody told them that the world had changed since 2022. Obviously, they should have been able to work it out from the fact that Reform are leading in the polls but maybe they were too busy putting up posters to notice.
An hour ago the Twitter account “NHS Nurses”, @SocialistNHS, posted a video to Twitter that shows a fat White British man with a can of Stella in his hand and a Union Jack painted on his belly complaining about immigrants.
“They’re taking all our jobs,” says the man.
“What qualifications do you have?” asks the female interviewer.
Our man replies with a choice piece of nonsense: “None – they are taking all our qualifications as well”.
The NHS Nurses mock this reply with the words,
“They’re taking all our jobs and all our qualifications”
Jesus wept… Our NHS and social care is made up of highly skilled migrant workers
How can this ever be a bad thing?
It is in fact possible to conceive of circumstances in which this would be a bad thing. There is an obvious conflict of interest between migrant workers and native born workers – or would-be workers. To observe this conflict of interest is not to take a side, but it is stupid to pretend it does not exist. A commenter called Robert Ferguson raises another way in which “Our NHS” being made up of migrants is not necessarily a good thing when he says, “Stealing other countries healthcare workers is not a good look.” I think Mr Ferguson’s belief that workers belong to their states of origin is fundamentally mistaken on moral grounds – and states which try to keep “their” workers by force are poorer than those which do not – but, still, the question of why this transfer of labour from Africa and South Asia to the UK takes place needs to be addressed rather than treated as a law of nature.
I found the tweet via this comment from a group called “Labour Beyond Cities”, who said:
A large swathe of the left is both too thick to realise this is an AI video and also too thick to realise that class hatred towards white working class people is strategically very poor, divisive and alienating.
So the stereotypical fat, white, useless, racist Brit in the video is not real. He was a little too exactly like a socialist’s idea of a Reform voter to be true. As one of the comments a proposed Community Note says, if you need confirmation, look at the gibberish written on the pub sign. And one can just about still tell it is A.I. by something “off” in the way the man moves.
In a few months we won’t be able to tell.
What difference, if any, does the man’s nonexistence make to the arguments involved?
For a few hours today the lead story on the front pages of both the Guardian and the Telegraph was about the untimely demise of a plant. The Sycamore Gap Tree was a mildly famous old tree next to Hadrian’s Wall. I don’t think I ever consciously saw it in person, but I had heard of it. The tree’s Wikipedia article – it has its own Wikipedia article – says,
The tree was felled in the early morning of 28 September 2023 in what Northumbria Police described as “an act of vandalism”. The felling of the tree led to an outpouring of anger and sadness.
That last sentence is certainly true. It was one of those news stories that is of little consequence by the normal measures of the importance of news stories but which packed a surprising punch emotionally. I’d heard of that tree. It had a node in my brain, not a big node but one in a nice area near to the ones dealing with history and nature and charming old guidebooks, and now some scumbags had cut it down, apparently for the fun of making me and people like me feel bad. I was glad when said scumbags were arrested and gladder still when earlier today they were both found guilty of criminal damage and told to expect custodial sentences. I was even a little bit glad to read that both men had been remanded in custody prior to sentencing for their own protection.
Am I justified in thinking that the two men who cut down this particular tree deserve more serious punishment than other people who cut down trees that do not belong to them in order to steal the wood or something? I would not go quite so far as the readers of the Telegraph, who would be quite happy to use the wood to build a gallows and recover the costs by selling commemorative slices, but I am definitely in a vengeful mood.
Why? It was not my tree, except in the feeble sense that it belonged to the National Trust, of which I am member. My suffering at its demise was not zero but was not great either. It didn’t ruin my life. It didn’t even ruin my morning. Presumably the same goes for all the other people who felt bad reading about the vandalism in the paper or hearing about it on the news. They suffered, but not greatly. The tree didn’t suffer. All agree that the criminal damage was a straightforward crime and should be punished, but why do so many people, including me, feel that this was a more serious crime than most instances of criminal damage because it upset people? The post below treats the idea of blasphemy laws and a so-called right to be shielded from offensive speech with a scorn that I fully share. I have an uneasy feeling that I am coming close to setting up an offence of tree blasphemy.
Credit to the Guardian for discharging their duty to report this story:
Couple who ran Swedish eco-retreat fled leaving behind barrels of human waste
A Danish chef couple who attracted international acclaim with a “forest resort” in Sweden have been tracked down to Guatemala after apparently going on the run from tax authorities, leaving behind 158 barrels of human waste.
Flemming Hansen and Mette Helbæk founded their purportedly eco-friendly retreat, Stedsans, in Halland, southern Sweden, after claiming to have “felt the call of the wild” in Copenhagen, where they ran a popular rooftop restaurant.
Stedsans, formed of 16 wooden cottages looking out on to nature, attracted praise from influencers and reviewers, who described it as “magical” and “enchanting luxury”.
But a few months ago it was discovered that the couple had vanished, leaving multiple animals behind and 158 barrels of human waste, an investigation by newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Politiken has found.
The Guardian reports,
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
The last day of the year is often a time for regrets.* However great our achievements, there are always things that we could have got done during the year but just – somehow – didn’t. Or we did them, but embarrassingly late. Peter Hague extends the idea to humanity as a species:
Silver chloride and ammonia have been produced since antiquity, and the camera obscura is similarly ancient. The only real tech barrier to photography was a lens to allow enough light in to form an image – and Europe has been able to make them for about 800 years. Medieval science just overlooked the idea.
If the right knowledge had been found out, we could now have photographs of Tudor soldiers displaying the body of Richard III, Columbus and his crew ready to depart, and London before the great fire.
Mechanically powered moving pictures may well have followed, and you might be able to see silent film of the US founding fathers.
That the available technologies were not combined for centuries is to me a catastrophic loss of information.
The comments to that tweet add stirrups, wheelbarrows, moveable type, long-distance signalling and many other inexplicably delayed technological advances to the list of missed opportunities.
Bah humbug to the lot of ’em. A load of pointless whining about trivialities. If you ask me what things humanity has to reproach itself for not having invented earlier, I robustly answer, “Zero!”
*Or it bloody well ought to be, anyway. If you are capable of going to a New Year’s party and drunkenly singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again too few to mention” and not immediately mentioning a long list of regrets, buzz off back to your home planet and leave us humans to enjoy ourselves in our own fashion.
“I’m BACK. I’m not as back as the Trump folks; they’re SO back. I’m just back.”
The senator from Kentucky is on fine form. Put the mince pies on to warm and read the whole thread.
I did not expect to see anything like this on a fairly mainstream site like “Conservative Woman”: “Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes” (Via Sara Hoyt on Instapundit.) Andrew Bridgen, for those not familiar with him, is the former MP for North West Leicestershire. He has had a chequered career. He was expelled from the Conservative Party after criticising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He then joined the Reclaim Party but resigned from it a few months later. He then lost his seat in the 2024 election – which in itself was no surprise, but the spectacular scale of his loss, dropping from 63% of the vote to 3.2%, was unusual.
I said I did not expect to see this piece on the CW website. I would not be entirely surprised if I am soon unable to see it anywhere but Twitter/X. After the US election of 2020, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (before it was owned by Elon Musk) had a policy of deleting any discussion whatsoever of the possibility of electoral fraud. Even arguments that fraud had not been significant were censored. Most of the UK media followed suit, as it usually does.
If anyone reading this has power or influence over the censorship policies of British media organisations, I humbly beg you not to repeat that mistake. My argument does not depend on taking any view on how many votes Andrew Bridgen got in the UK election of 2024.
When “Stop the Steal” and similar Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were deleted overnight after the American election of 2020, what effect do you think it had on the beliefs of members of those groups? Do you think they concluded that since they could no longer discuss their suspicions, those suspicions must be groundless?
Of course it had the opposite effect. A majority of US voters think it is “likely” that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election. That includes 45% of Democrats. The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and of the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory (the first of which is no longer contested and the second of which is accepted as a probable hypothesis by the US and UK governments) only reinforced this.
Censorship destroys trust, and the loss of trust is not limited to the subject being censored. Once people know they are being censored in one thing, they inevitably ask, “What else aren’t they telling us?”
And they can work out that if all accusations of a particular crime are censored, it makes it more likely that that crime will be committed in future.
Related posts here, here and here. In fact, that entire category of “Deleted by the Woke Media” is related.
Edit 25th September: The man who replaced Andrew Bridgen as Conservative candidate in North West Leicestershire, Craig Smith, has responded strongly to the Conservative Woman piece:
Mr Bridgen seems to overestimate the weight of any candidate’s personal vote. In elections most people vote for the party with a personal vote of – somewhere around – a couple of thousand votes for the candidate themselves. It’s arguably why I did marginally better than Conservative candidates in demographically similar constituencies elsewhere, because I had something of a personal vote as a truly local candidate. A personal vote is why Mr Bridgen received around 1,500 votes. To provide Mr Bridgen with a similar example to his own in 2015 Rochdale’s MP, Simon Danczuk, then standing for Labour received 20,961 votes. In 2017, expelled from Labour and and standing as an independent he received 883 votes. Using Mr Danczuk as a base Mr Bridgen could argue that he outstripped expectations!
Mr Smith goes on to say that of course he was not happy with the result – he lost to Labour – but he is convinced it was fair. He then makes some quite detailed observations about electoral procedures, both in general and specifically for that constituency. I thought he came across well. His use of Simon Danczuk in Rochdale as a comparator for assessing whether it is credible for an MP expelled from their party to have such a large drop in votes was reasonable.
That is how it should be done. That is how it should have been done in the US. Don’t forbid discussion, contribute to it. I repeat my plea for there to be no censorship of the claim that the election was rigged against Mr Bridgen.
“They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother’s knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.”
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
|
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.
|
