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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Once upon a time there were Progressives who actually believed in progress, who despite their flaws did believe in a brighter and better future. These were supplanted c. 1970 by a new Left with the new motto “Learn to live with less, you hate-filled greedy bastards!” The Apollo program was the last hurrah of the old Progressives and Earth Day environmentalism was a manifestation of the new Left that supplanted them.
Now those actually-for-progress Progressives had some major flaws. One was a willingness to bulldoze people’s personal plans in favor of their own Big Plans For Society. Another was to seriously underestimate just how poisonous socialism and government regulation are to an economy. But they still favored a better, brighter, more prosperous future in a way the “Learn to live with less!” Earth Day leftists did not.
– Deep Lurker
On this particular day, I will commemorate St. George with a picture I took in Kyiv a few years ago, the symbolism of which is even more apt.
“Boris Johnson has said any peace talks over Ukraine are likely to fail as he compared holding talks with Vladimir Putin to negotiating with a crocodile.”
BBC reports that Boris Johnson made crocophobic remarks today, with LGBTQIAC activists decrying this blatant display of Tory prejudice as “triggering”. A Tory spokesman dismissed the criticism as “a complete croc”.
Michael Gove stands accused of bullying his civil servants. According to The Sun, he “was said to have been visibly angry with a string of officials” over the abject state of the visa scheme for Ukrainian refugees.
This has led Jeremy Rycroft, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, to complain to Jeremy Pocklington, his counterpart at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). … when Priti Patel was accused of the same, the report into the incident concluded that: “Her approach on occasions has amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying in terms of the impact felt by individuals”. … If they feel bullied, it’s bullying
One would not expect Conservative Home to be overly sympathetic to the whining permanent secretaries, or harsh to Gove. That said, I think a new series of ‘Yes, Minister’ would see Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby sobbing “How can you bully me like this?”, then behind-the-scenes fixing the ‘enquiry’, as another way to block whatever Minister Jim Hacker was pushing him to do. Whether it’s Priti Patel ‘bullying’ a permanent secretary to bar illegal immigrants the higher civil service is happy to see enter the UK, or Michael Gove ‘bullying’ a permanent secretary to admit Ukrainian refugees the higher civil service is happy to see kept out of the UK, it’s a great way to ensure that if the minister ever reaches the point of banging the table and demanding that orders be carried out, yet another obstacle to that can be put in place.
The WWII Jewish Brigade was formed when Churchill banged the table and stated that of course it would be, putting an end to the meant-to-be-endless delays of certain advisors. The Jewish Brigade spent the last six months of WWII killing Germans and learning everything the British army knew about military technique (by the end of WWII, that was a lot). Historians of the wars of Israel’s formation say Israel would not have survived without the Jewish Brigade. It was lucky Churchill banged the table then, not today, when the brigade’s creation could have been delayed yet longer by a ‘bullying’ enquiry.
We need successful people in frontline politics. Indeed, there should be more of them. I’d take Sunak any day over a person filled with resentment and spite who imagines Westminster to be a forum to carry out revenge attacks on anyone who has been successful in life.
– Douglas Murray, writing about UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. He has been getting heat over how his wife, who is an Indian citizen, is very rich via her family, and who has benefited from the entirely legal status known as being a resident non-domicile. Whatever else I might write about Sunak (his tax rises, such as for National Insurance Contributions, are indefensible), attacking a legal tax status of a spouse because the spouse is “rich” is nothing more than a mob baying over someone who has more than they have. It is ugly for various reasons. If Brexit is to to succeed, being a country full of resentful socialists is unlikely to work.
From an anonymous article in Tuesday’s Guardian called “My pupils have been badly set back by the pandemic. ‘Catch-up’ lessons aren’t what they need”:
In my school, some children are now struggling to articulate what they need or want, answer simple questions or follow short instructions. This has a knock-on effect on their social skills. Those who haven’t had much practice taking turns in conversation or sharing with others find playing and using school resources difficult. Many children have missed out on physical development opportunities; it has been eye-opening to witness four- and five-year-olds choosing to crawl down the corridor into the toilets rather than walk.
I take a fairly forgiving view of the actions that our government and others took when the pandemic hit. As an immediate strategy lockdown may well have been the right thing to do, and even if it wasn’t, it is easy to be wise in hindsight and when it is not you who has to make the decision. Boris & Co. were faced with a type of crisis they had never faced before and a cacophony of conflicting advice, all of which claimed to be expert.
But it was clear quite early on that the slight risk that Covid-19 presented to young children was far outweighed by the harm done to their development by masks and lockdown. That is difficult to forgive.
Here is Angela Rayner MP writing in the website Labour List on 13th January 2020 and making her pitch to Labour members for the job of Leader of the Labour Party: “Leadership starts with listening – and I want to hear from you”
As a trade union organiser for most of my life, I know this isn’t done through top-down structures. Our movement’s story is of collective action to achieve change. I don’t have all the answers – no one person does. But I know a few million people who can help.
That’s why I’m asking members, affiliates, councillors, candidates and everyone across the movement what you think we need to do. It starts with the lessons to learn from the election campaign but it goes much deeper than that – we haven’t won an election since 2005 and have lost support in too many areas of the country.
How should we be campaigning as a party? Is there something your CLP or branch is doing that you think everyone should know about? What resources and technology would really get us moving? What frustrates you – but also what inspires you? To be blunt: what went wrong this time, what can we do better and where do we need wholesale change? You can tell me here.
She didn’t get the top job, that went to Sir Keir Starmer. However Ms Rayner is currently Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.
The slogan “Labour is listening” still gets plenty of Google hits, mostly linked to the websites of local Labour parties. However Angela Rayner has no time for that stuff any more.
Conor Clark of Gay Times reports, ‘Angela Rayner says discussion on trans rights “shouldn’t be debased into a debate”’
Angela Rayner said “debate” over transgender rights needs to be taken “away from commentators” as it “debases the serious issues” at hand.
During an appearance on Sky News on 29 March, Kay Burley questioned the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party on whether or not the world has “gone mad” because of people “struggling” to say whether or not a woman can have a penis.
Her question followed Sir Keir Starmer declining to answer the question during a radio interview a day earlier.
“This really upsets me because I think about a young person who’s struggling at the moment, who’s struggling with their identity, and when we’re having a social media or a debate around whether someone’s, what genitalia someone’s got, I think it really debases the serious issues that people face in their lives,” Rayner told Burley.
“There [are] protections for women and women that are in vulnerable situations, and we should also be looking after our young people who may be facing identity crises and making sure they get the help and support they need. When we debase it to whether or not what genitalia you’ve got, I think all that does is damage people and it doesn’t help us go forward on some of the real issues that people are facing.”
Trans rights are often the source of a so-called “debate” in the media, particularly when it comes to topics like self-ID.
Rayner called for these discussions to be taken “away from commentators” and handled by professionals instead.
She added: “Sure, we have to take everybody into account, and that’s why it shouldn’t be debased into a debate that is being had in media by people who are not qualified to discuss some of these issues.”
This tweet by Kay Burley contains a video clip of the words in question. Gay Times‘s summary of Angela Rayner’s words is fairly accurate – correcting her grammar in the first sentence of the quote did not change the meaning of what was said – but by presenting Angela Rayner’s words in a different order to that in which they were said, Mr Clark’s report makes them appear both more coherent and more benign than they actually were. Given that Mr Clark goes on to put scare quotes around the word “debate” in
Trans rights are often the source of a so-called “debate” in the media, particularly when it comes to topics like self-ID”
perhaps I should not have been surprised that he saw nothing wrong in Rayner’s suggestion that debate about gender should be “taken off” social media. However I am rather shocked that neither Kay Burley herself nor any other media outlet picked up on the implications of:
Rayner called for these discussions to be taken “away from commentators” and handled by professionals instead.
Her exact words at 0:35 were “I think we should be taking it off social media, taking it away from commentators and actually having…”
She never does say what “we” should be actually having, but abruptly changes course mid-sentence to saying that there are protections in place for “women in vulnerable situations”, which is another topic entirely. It sounds to me as if she started to say something nakedly authoritarian and then stopped herself. I would have liked to hear the end of the sentence. Who is the “we” that she thinks should be taking the debate off social media? Politicians? Labour politicians? The bosses of social media companies? The least alarming answer would be “we as a society should take the debate off social media”, but even that is a far cry from the egalitarian way she talked in 2020 when she sought the aid of “a few million people” to set the direction of the Labour party and hence, she hoped, the country. But that relatively benign meaning of Angela Rayner’s “we” – a call for us all to refrain from talking about the gender issue on social media – does not seem the most likely meaning. Later at 1:20 she says, “Sure we have to take everybody into account and that’s why it shouldn’t be debased into a debate that’s being had on media by people who are not qualified to discuss some of these issues.”
Most commentary on social media – read it while you still can – has centred around Angela Rayner’s answer to the question “Can a woman have a penis?” As I have said before, there is no one answer to that question and “there would be more scope for respectful compromise if people could agree to differ on the definition and get down to questions of what to do in difficult cases.” But there is a world of difference between “agree to differ” and “be forbidden to express your opinion if it differs from that of ‘experts'”. If Angela Rayner does not believe that non-experts should debate these matters, it is difficult to see why she believes that non-experts should be allowed to vote on them.
“All right then,” some may say, “what should we do in difficult cases?” Actually there is a simple answer, with a proven track record of success in reducing conflict. It is called “freedom of association”. The difficulty arises in having the self-restraint to apply it. It is hard for human beings not to exercise power.
If Britain is to pay reparations for the African slave trade, why not Ghana as well? As a rather witty Ashanti chum of mine once remarked “my ancestors were deeply affected by the slave trade; but fortunately they got out and into the gold trade before the Royal Navy collapsed the market.”
– Perry de Havilland, commenting on Britain shouldn’t pay reparations for slavery (£) by Michael Deacon.
Yes, I am quoting myself, but seriously, the African slave trade was only possible because Africans were deeply involved capturing Africans from different tribes.
Well, I was in Brussels last week and, contra the mood on Twitter, Europe feels more buoyantly European than it has in a long time, and Britain is absolutely a part of it, sending weapons to Ukraine, beefing up Nato and generally putting some stick about. It is UK Remainers who now seem parochial, refusing to move on from yesterday’s hurt and even, in the case of that fake news flick Boris Does Brussels, reimagining contemporary events as a commentary on unrelated stuff that’s still grinding their gears six years later.
When President Biden said that meetings that bring America and the EU closer are a “victory for all of us,” Alastair Campbell added that they are also “a defeat for the UK. Which is why Brexit was a foreign policy goal for the Kremlin.” Bingo: a conspiracy theory and a contradiction all in one Tweet!
– Tim Stanley
“UK supermarkets accused of ‘bombarding’ shoppers with cheap meat”, whispers the Guardian’s Denis Campbell in shock:
Britain’s biggest supermarkets stand accused of “bombarding” shoppers with offers of cheap meat, despite pledging to promote more meat-free diets to improve health and tackle global heating.
They are using money-saving promotions, such as two for the price of one, as a way of “pushing” meat, at odds with moves in the UK and globally for consumers to eat less of it, research found.
Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons are each offering scores of deals every week on meat products such as burgers and sausages to drive sales and boost their profits, according to a report from the
Marketing directors of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons? Apparently not. This disturbing news comes from the…
charity Eating Better. It is an umbrella group representing more than 60 organisations including WWF UK, Greenpeace, public health bodies, dietitians, the RSPCA and food charities.
I was going to say the rot goes deep in Scottish politics, but it ain’t just Scotland.
It started with a minor story about a senior member of the Scottish National Party getting into hot water. Until this story broke Dr Tim Rideout was the SNP’s currency guy. Quoting the Times:
“Nicola Sturgeon ‘will root out racism’ in SNP after adviser Tim Rideout suspended”
Nicola Sturgeon has pledged to “root out and condemn toxic racist political discourse” in the SNP after a senior party member said that Priti Patel should be “sent back to Uganda”.
Tim Rideout, a member of the nationalists’ policy development committee, was suspended from the party after the controversial social media posts about the home secretary came to light.
Pam Gosal, the Conservative MSP and the first Indian Sikh member at Holyrood, urged the first minister to condemn the “appalling racist comment”.
Pam Gosal was right. It was a nasty bit of snide directed at the Home Secretary solely because of her ancestry. I already knew Rideout was a twit on financial matters – here he is speaking at some sort of Modern Monetary Theory conference – but I had thought better of him than that.
A Conservative MSP angrily saying that a Scottish National Party official has said something appalling, when he has, is normal politics. What shook me, because not that long ago it was not normal politics, was the remark from the (Labour) Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Murray:
Ian Murray, the shadow Scottish secretary, has called for police to take action against Rideout. He added: “These are truly horrendous and outright racist remarks from a key advisor to Nicola Sturgeon.
Once laws against “hate” unaccompanied by any clear crime are passed, as the SNP has done in Scotland, it does not take long for the policing of political speech to become literal.
It is telling that so many cosmopolitan liberal globalists now care about sovereignty for Ukraine, yet spent years telling Brits sovereignty was some kind of fascist fantasy. It’s now okay to be a ‘flag shagger’ if you’re from Lviv or [Kyiv], but not if you’re from Leeds or Kings Lynn.
– Commenter Martin
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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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