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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The actual argument being made is that British actors, tax breaks, directors, scriptwriters, lovely Cotswold villages (and in the case of Bridgerton, the street outside my flat) are just such wonderful places to film, film with, that prices are rising. Therefore we’ve got to subsidise all this.
The only reason we listen to fuckwits like this is because they’re pretty. Now, honestly, hands up. Who has ever known a pretty bird, handsome man, who can actually think? Even, actually has the base data to be able to think with?
No, no, it’s not that the leavening of IQ and looks equals out over genes. Quite the opposite. Dullards in the sense of actual cretins and morons tend not to look good either. But the good looking have never had to think now, have they? So, they don’t.
– Tim Worstall
“My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.”
– regular BBC contributor Samer Elzaenen.
A report in the Telegraph says,
A BBC spokesman said: “International journalists including the BBC are not allowed access into Gaza so we hear from a range of eyewitness accounts from the strip. These are not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team. We were not aware of the individuals’ social media activity prior to hearing from them on air.
Er, why not? Given that the Telegraph article says that he made more than thirty posts on social media over the last decade that celebrated Palestinians killing Israeli civilians, including one post where he delightedly said that two murdered boys aged six and eight would “soon go to hell”, was it really beyond the power of the Arabic service of one of the biggest media organisations on Earth to do a simple internet search for his name? If the task of excluding self-identified Palestinian Nazis from giving regular commentary under the BBC name is too difficult for BBC Arabic, then BBC Arabic is a waste of public money. I hope that is the case, because the other possibility is that the BBC’s Arabic-speaking staff knew of Mr Elzaenen’s wish to exterminate the Jews but kept inviting him back because they want to do the same themselves. It’s not a universal opinion among Palestinians, but it’s not uncommon either.
A song from the late 90s by Len. But this request (not to) was in vain, the UK government has announced £50,000,000 of funding to ‘dim the Sun’, in a bid to counter climate change, reports the Manchester Evening News, on the back of a paywalled report in the Daily Telegraph.
Scientists are planning on ‘dimming the Sun’ in a bid to curb global warming. The UK government is set to announce funding of up to £50m of funding for Sun-dimming experiments in the coming weeks, the Telegraph reports.
Does no one remember our wise Danish King Canute? He showed, over 1,000 years ago, that the State is all but powerless in the face of Nature. Of course not. Here is more on the plans.
It comes as the National Environment Research Council (NERC) announced on April 3 that it will invest £10 million of new funding to study these solar radiation management schemes (SRM).
According to Professor Mark Symes, the programme director for the Government’s advanced research and invention funding agency, known as Aria, there would be “small controlled outdoor experiments on particular approaches”. These experiments could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere or brightening clouds to reflect sunlight.
Crucially, there is an acronym ‘SRM’, so this is one of those funding streams that will take on a monstrous life of its own. One might think that the Manchester Evening News (think Seattle but without the glamour) might have something to say seeing as it is a notoriously rainy city, but not a peep about the absurdity of it. Nor has there been any comment on the impact on solar energy generation, which provides ‘carbon neutral’ energy (but what about the deuterium lost in solar energy production?).
The UK government seeks to control the Sun, and how much it shines on you. Chairman Mao and the four pests comes to mind.
To be fair, these proposals have generated plenty of online ridicule, but that won’t stop it. That the UK is circling the drain is perhaps better shown by this Icarian hubris than anything else.
And of course, once you accept their premises, you are only arguing about tactics and strategy, not the ends.
We live in an age when politics trumps science, and the choice of verb is deliberate. Remember “Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory Of Pandemic Emergence”? How about “Social justice matters more than social distance”? During the Covid-19 pandemic, the frequency of scientists and doctors issuing passionate debunkings of any vaguely scientific idea that Donald Trump happened to mention that day, only to issue equally passionate rebunkings the minute the wind changed, became so great that even the New York Times winced.
Science has always been politicised, but it was not always this bad. Cast your mind back to the turn of the century – 1998 to be precise. Antivax sentiment was not completely unknown but in general vaccines were seen by almost everyone as the means by which smallpox, diptheria and polio had been banished to the history books. I still see them this way. Here is a graph taken from the website of the Office for National Statistics of life expectancy at birth in the UK from 1841 to 2011. As the accompanying article says, the fairly steep rise in the second half of the time period was probably due to health improvements in the older population, but the ASTOUNDINGLY steep rise between 1890 and 1950 was probably due to health improvements in the younger population. Take a bow, childhood immunisation. We have forgotten how lucky we are to have been born in the age of the vaccine.
In 1998 something happened that caused trust in vaccines to slip. The following is an extract from the Wikipedia page for Dr Richard Horton, who was then and is now the editor of The Lancet, probably the world’s pre-eminent medical journal:
“On 28 February 1998 Horton published a controversial paper by Andrew Wakefield and 12 co-authors with the title “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children” suggesting that vaccines could cause autism. The publication of the paper set off a sharp decline in vaccinations in Europe and America and in subsequent years globally.”
I want to make clear that there was nothing wrong in the Lancet publishing Wakefield’s paper. How else is science meant to advance, other than by putting forward hypotheses and inviting all comers to replicate them or refute them? The wrong lay in sticking to this particular hypothesis long after it had been disproved. Horton only retracted Wakefield’s paper in February 2010, after Wakefield had been struck off the register of the General Medical Council for financial and medical misconduct.
There have been at least two switches in the political coding of Wakefield’s theory since it came out. Stereotyping madly, in the first few years after 1998 antivax sentiment was seen as a belief held by low-status Christian hicks in the American South. From about 2005 onwards antivax views also became popular among West and East Coast hippies, practitioners of alternative medicine and the like, most of whom were left wing, and a good deal more media savvy than the former group. Dr Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet who published and defended Wakefield, is, without exaggeration, a Marxist. Back in 2006, I posted about his view that, “As this axis of Anglo-American imperialism extends its influence through war and conflict, gathering power and wealth as it goes, so millions of people are left to die in poverty and disease.”
One of the many evils of the scientific and medical censorship practised during the Covid-19 pandemic is that people whose attitudes ranged from belief in David Icke’s shape-shifting lizards to having doubts about specific Covid-19 vaccines that might be right, wrong, or a bit of both, but which are certainly reasonable, were all lumped together under the heading of “vaccine denialists” and condemned en masse. That meant that people who might have been open to argument were never argued with. Persuasion in either direction cannot happen if people cannot discuss a subject. Science cannot happen if people cannot discuss a subject. I remember commenting to this effect to the Times in late 2021. My comment lasted about five minutes before being deleted.
It is 27 years since 1998, 15 years since 2010, and five years since the start of the pandemic. Time for another burst of news stories about autism and vaccines. The script is much the same but many of the actors have swapped roles.
“RFK’s statements prove autistic people and their families everywhere should fear Trump and his allies”, writes John Harris in the Guardian’s Sunday sister, the Observer. The initials “RFK” refer to Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. There is a video of the speech made by Kennedy on April 16th to which Mr Harris is objecting here and I found a transcript of it here.
→ Continue reading: Two different types of irrationality over autism
Apple is doing the public a service in challenging the government on this important matter of principle. Encryption enables more than just ‘secure’ communication – it ensures freedom from government snooping, too. That’s why privacy and freedom of expression have long been considered mutually reinforcing rights. Encryption protects not only personal data, but also the ability of journalists and human-rights activists to operate without fear of surveillance or reprisals. Compelling companies to pre-emptively weaken those protections risks chilling users’ ability to communicate freely, share sensitive information or challenge the powers-that-be.
– Freddie Attenborough
LOL Remember this?
Like most people, I haven’t tuned in to Have I Got News For You for years. But when I heard of a staggering omission in last Friday night’s edition, I just had to see it – or, rather, not see it – with my own eyes. The biggest news story of the week – the momentous ruling by the Supreme Court on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act 2010 – was not covered at all, even obliquely. You’d think that the absurdity of the highest court in the land being called to adjudicate on one of the most basic facts of observable reality – that there are two sexes, and that the words man and woman mean, er, man and woman – would be a rich source of mirth, the kind of glorious nonsense that’s a satirist’s meat and drink. But no. Not a word. Zilch.
‘We begin with the bigger stories of the week,’ said guest host Katherine Parkinson, as is traditional. These turned out to be steel nationalisation and the bin strike in Birmingham. We also heard about the Blue Origin ‘mission’, gambling on the election date, Liz Truss launching her own app. But the thing everybody was actually talking about? No. That just hung in the air like a vicar’s fart, with everybody pretending it hadn’t happened.
– Gareth Roberts (£)
In the Guardian, April O’Neill writes,
The Online Safety Act is now partly enforceable. Paul might make you think a bit harder about it. Understandably, much of the conversation surrounding it has been focused on protecting children, but there is a glaring hole in this legislation regarding the protection of adults. Despite a 2022 report for the Ministry of Justice finding that the role of the internet in radicalisation pathways “was most evident for older rather than younger individuals”, the Tory government backed out from provisions that would have prevented adults from seeing “legal but harmful” content online over fears about freedom of speech.
April O’Neill holds that the people who need to be forcibly protected from hearing bad opinions are old people who distrust left wing media sources. Ms O’Neill is the winner of The Guardian Foundation’s 2025 Emerging Voices Awards (19-25 age category) recognising young talent in political opinion writing.
Of all the most pointless organisations in history, the Soviet Union’s Central Election Commission must be amongst the funniest. In the run-up to election day, CEC would be tasked with the important job of formally approving candidates. Fortunately for them, the Communist Party was happy to take on most of the work. On election day, the Commission would ensure that all processes were properly followed, dutifully noting down the names of any dissenters or abstainers. And, in the wake of the election, the CEC would rigorously audit the conduct of the election, invariably concluding that each poll was an unrivalled triumph of Soviet democracy.
It was striking to read the Home Affairs Committee’s recent report into the Southport riots, which adopted much the same tone. The report condemned fears about two-tier policing as “disgraceful”, denying outright the notion that officers were more heavy-handed when responding to right-wing protests. This will raise eyebrows for anybody who can remember the summer of 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests turned violent in cities across the UK, following the death of George Floyd. Often, the police stood by and watched the disorder — a far cry from their response to post-Southport rioting.
– Sam Bidwell
In the comments to my previous post, Zerren Yeoville was inspired by the Pogues’ 1987 classic Fairytale of New York to pen the following lines for Birmingham in its current travails:
‘They’ve got rats big as cats
They’ve got rivers of mould
The smell goes right through ya
You’d best have a cold
When you first took the bins out
On a cold winter’s eve
You promised me dustcarts
were “waiting, you’ll see”….’
The rats as big as cats were also mentioned in the Sun‘s headline today:
NO END IN SIGHT Huge blow for locals in UK’s ‘third-world city’ where Army called in to tackle cat-sized rats & 21k TONS of rubbish
A major incident has already been declared by Birmingham City Council
Lest anyone think the Sun is being melodramatic, the BBC’s headline does not merely feature cat-sized rats but cat-sized rats who have begun their insurrection against humanity:
‘Cat-sized rats are attacking our cars’
NickM also provided commentary in verse on the Birmingham bin strike, but, unless I have misunderstood, that one was written by A.I. so it doesn’t count.
Gosh, ChatGPT is getting alarmingly good.
‘Rayner calls in Army to tackle Birmingham bin crisis’, the Telegraph reports:
Angela Rayner has called in the Army to tackle the Birmingham bin crisis.
The Local Government Secretary has used formal powers known as Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (Maca) to summon Army experts after a strike by bin workers, which has lasted over a month, left more than 17,000 tons of waste rotting in the streets.
It is understood a small number of military personnel with operational planning expertise are offering logistical support to tackle the crisis. Sources said there were contingency plans in place to scale up the number of soldiers involved if necessary.
If such a scaling-up does prove necessary, Ms Rayner can cite the example of one of the most revered of Labour leaders:
The London dock strike of July 1949, led by Communists, was suppressed when the Attlee Government sent in 13,000 Army troops and passed special legislation to promptly end the strike. His response reveals Attlee’s growing concern that Soviet expansionism, supported by the British Communist Party, was a genuine threat to national security, and that the docks were highly vulnerable to sabotage ordered by Moscow. He noted that the strike was caused not by local grievances, but to help communist unions who were on strike in Canada. Attlee agreed with MI5 that he faced “a very present menace”.
OK, the parallel between Attlee’s summoning of the Army and Rayner’s is not close, and I made it mostly to poke fun at present day lefties, whose hymns of praise to Attlee usually leave out the verse about him using the army to break a strike, and always omit the one about him being the father of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent.
A better historical parallel to explain Ms Rayner’s distinct lack of solidarity with the striking binmen would be the 1978-9 “Winter of Discontent”.
In the future, people will study propaganda like “Adolescence” in the way they study “Triumph of the Will” as a way to understand Germany in 1935.
– Perry de Havilland
As Matthew Lynn, a columnist writing in the Sunday Telegraph (£) puts it, the compulsion on car firms to build more electric vehicles (EVs), on pain of large fines, was already causing great damage to the UK and European economy. With the US now imposing blanket 25% tariffs on car imports from the UK, the Net Zero obsession is suicidal for the UK-based car industry, home to brands such as Jaguar Landrover, which has just paused shipments to the US:
“It would be ridiculous for the Government to start fining the car companies for not selling enough cars that no one really wants at the same time as the Trump administration is hitting them with huge new levies in their main export market. None of the car companies is in exactly great shape to start with. The combination may well prove fatal.
The [UK] government should announce an immediate one-year suspension of the EV target, and then start a consultation on postponing it for another five or even 10 years. If it was scrapped immediately no one would miss it.”
Tens of thousands of car workers could lose their jobs, unless there is a drastic change in policy in the UK – never mind what the Trump administration chooses to do – and they live in those famed “Red Wall” seats that the insurgent new party, Reform, is targeting at the next General Election.
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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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