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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“President Trump appears to be annoyed that trade negotiations with the European Union are dragging along too slowly. Join the club, pal. The biggest victims of Brussels’ indecision and sloth on trade are the Europeans themselves. Even if Mr. Trump’s tariffs fall to U.S. courts, it won’t liberate the Continent from trade war. The bloc is too good at doing damage to itself.”
– Joseph C Sternberg, Wall Street Journal ($)
This, by the way, is part of why I voted for Brexit nine years ago. I saw little chance that the bloc would reform, become more accountable, and make it easier to roll back red tape, and replace one-size-fits-all with mutual recognition of standards.
“Robert Jenrick turns vigilante in bid to tackle London’s fare dodgers”, reports the Guardian in a valiant effort to make tackling fare dodgers look like a bad thing.
Tory MP claims ‘law breaking is out of control’ in video in which he accosts travellers on the underground
Robert Jenrick is perhaps best known to the public as the former government minister who unlawfully intervened in a planning decision involving a billionaire Conservative party donor.
To others, he may be the Tory MP that parliament’s spending watchdog said was centrally involved in wasting nearly £100m on a botched plan to house asylum seekers.
Now, however, Jenrick has a new claim to fame: as the man who released a video of himself delivering “vigilante justice” to people he accused of fare dodging in London.
The failed party leadership candidate posted a video online on Thursday morning in which he accused the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, of “driving a proud city into the ground”, adding: “Lawbreaking is out of control. He’s not acting. So, I did.”
The problem for the Guardian’s Kevin Rawlinson is that Jenrick’s video has indeed brought him fame and admiration, which has only been augmented by the sneering responses from various left wingers. Jenrick’s video has had 11.6 million views. The Secret Barrister’s response, “This is the most spectacularly Alan Partridge thing that has ever happened, and I include Alan Partridge”, has had 1.4 million views and a ratio for the ages.
The alternative media outlet “The London Economic” has been busily putting out anti-Jenrick arguments that exemplify how left wingers miss the point, and which contain the word “akshully” even when they don’t:
“It’s been pointed out that Jenrick’s constituency of Newark actually has a higher crime rate than London”
So the Shadow Justice Secretary isn’t allowed to care about crime outside his own constituency?
and
“Robert Jenrick broke TfL rules in video complaining about Tube fare-dodgers”
Oh no, won’t somebody please think of the poor Transport for London rules – since TfL itself evidently does not.
I came across this tweet a week ago and bookmarked it because I knew it would soon be relevant:
One of the fundamental operating modes of the British state is that it will make everyone’s lives worse in numerous small ways rather than properly get to grips with the people who actually cause the problems.
So, President Macron’s wife appeared to push him in the face.
A flood of analysis immediately followed. Here is the Guardian‘s offering: “Brigitte Macron’s push has reverberated around the world. Why was it met with a shrug in France?”
The standfirst to Pauline Block’s article is: “Whatever the explanation for the incident, the reaction points to backward French attitudes – including from the president himself”. Although Ms Bock probably did not write those words, they are a fair reflection of her article. It casts its net wide, and among the fish brought up from the depths are the age gap between the Macrons, the convention by which the French press says nothing about the romantic relationships of French politicians, how would we feel if it was a man pushing a woman, and…
That Macron doesn’t see the potential problem in the video points to a narrow, obsolete understanding of couple dynamics and domestic violence. He has twice proclaimed gender equality to be the “great cause” of his presidential mandates before refusing to properly fund it; he has spoken in support of the French actor Gérard Depardieu, who has recently been found guilty of sexual assault and is soon to be on trial again for rape; and to this day, the former interior minister and current justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, who was accused of sexual assault (the case has now been dismissed), has remained in Macron’s cabinet.
It would have been easy enough to turn this moment into a public health message. He could have simply said that he’s all right, thanks for your consideration, but that men who do experience violence should feel no shame in seeking help, using it as an opportunity to discuss domestic violence prevention. Instead, he mocked the “fools” who thought anything could be amiss.
But why should he turn it into a “public health message” if he and his wife really were only larking around? There is something very cavalier about the Guardian‘s “whatever” in “Whatever the explanation for the incident”. The true explanation of the incident is the only thing that matters. If it was play, even play mixed in with annoyance (and such pretended fighting moves can be used to defuse quarrels as well as to escalate them), then it is nobody’s business other than the Macrons’ own, and the demand that he – or she – use it as a teaching moment is intrusive. How would Mme Bock like it if a similar demand for an impromptu sermon were made of her after some innocent but embarrassing incident in her private life was accidentally caught on camera?
But if it was a real attack, there are indeed things to discuss. Does anyone have the right not to have their act of domestic violence investigated because their spouse or partner has not officially complained? Does anyone have the right not to have an act of domestic violence against them investigated because they have made no official complaint? Does it make any difference whether either party is male or female? Does it make a difference if either party is a political leader?
If it was real. But we don’t know if it was. Looking at the video at quarter speed, I still couldn’t decide. So all the questions above are repeated with “act of domestic violence” replaced with “what looks on the face of it like an act of domestic violence”.
In favour of the push crossing the threshold into being an assault, albeit not one intended to cause injury, is the fact that Mme Macron looked angry and refused to take her husband’s arm as she descended the steps, and that the Elysée Palace initially lied and said the video was fake. In favour of it being mere bickering horseplay is that the plane was full of bodyguards specifically charged with protecting the President of France.
What do you think?
Triggered by the political shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, the EU Commission launched a campaign to reassert control over Europe’s political narrative. Central to this is the rhetoric of ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, framed as threats to democratic stability. The Commission presents these programmes as public-interest research initiatives, but they constitute a form of soft authoritarianism, enshrining speech codes and narrowing acceptable opinion through bureaucratic manipulation. This is a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.
The Digital Services Act (DSA), which should be relabelled as the ‘Digital Surveillance Act’, is the crown jewel of this strategy. The legal framework enables the EU to regulate online speech under the guise of protection.
The MCC Brussels report underlines a disturbing fact: the Commission spends 31 per cent more on narrative control than on research addressing cancer, despite cancer causing nearly two million deaths annually in Europe. This prioritisation signals that Brussels fears the cancer of free speech more than the disease. Public funds are being funnelled unaccountably into a disinformation narrative designed to shape, limit and manage the terms of public debate.
– Norman Lewis
My point is: to anyone who understands the reality of Putin’s regime, the idea that he has “gone CRAZY” and is killing people is… well, CRAZY. Vladimir Putin is in power and retains power precisely because he has always been someone who is prepared to lie, manipulate and kill to achieve his objectives. That is literally what the KGB trained him to do.
In his post criticising Putin, Trump went on to add: “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right”. Finally, it seems, our American friends are beginning to understand who they are dealing with.
– Konstantin Kisin (£)
So, why did we stop this taxation of “excessive” pensions pots? Because it lost revenue. It took tax rates well over the Laffer Curve peak if you prefer.
So, what’s Ms. Rayner, Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister, suggesting today? That we reimpose a policy that we already know fails.
Idiot’s a bit mild really, isn’t it? Also, it’s rather a pity that Googlebombs don’t work these days.
– Tim Worstall
Millennials are an ultra-conformist generation. If you tell them that something is “cringe”, they won’t go there. If you tell them that it’s “cringe” to say that 2+2=4, they’ll think that this somehow stops 2+2 from being 4.
It was with this style that the Left managed to distance itself from Venezuelan socialism a few years later. They couldn’t delete all their old articles fawning over Venezuelan socialism, but they could make it “cringe” to mention it. And so, people stopped mentioning it.
– Kristian Niemietz
“Kneecap rapper charged with terrorism offence over alleged Hezbollah flag at London gig”, reports the Guardian:
Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs with the Irish rap trio Kneecap, has been charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig in London, police said.
The 27-year-old, of Belfast, was charged after an investigation by the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command and is scheduled to appear at Westminster magistrates court on 18 June.
Kneecap, named after the IRA’s favourite type of mutilation, are a rap group who sing in the Irish language. They’ve had it all, the award winning biopic, the laudatory coverage in the Guardian, the visit from Jeremy Corbyn. And now they’ve had the visit from the counter-terrorism police.
In these cases I never know whether to wrap myself in the mantle of libertarian righteousness and defend even these terrorist fanboys – it was only a piece of patterned cloth, FFS – or to say with Ulysses S. Grant that “I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”
The late Niall Kilmartin examined this dilemma in this post, “The equal oppression of the laws”. He gave a characteristically fair hearing to both sides, but concluded:
We will not lack for mind-broadening frenemies to defend even after tolerating ‘equality before the law’ arguments against the loudest “I can say it but you can’t” enforcers of the double-standard. The woker-than-thou of today love purging the woke of yesterday – they will supply.
Equality before the law is good in itself. Demanding equality of oppression before the law is a way to expose a dishonest process. Think carefully before judging it a betrayal of our war against the hate speech laws’ evil goal, rather than a way – that can be both honest in itself and effective – of waging it.
We have had laws against ‘inciting racial hatred’ for 60 years. It’s the settled, apparently inviolable position of British law that there are some things so dangerous they cannot be allowed to be said. We have taken, in effect, the precise opposite path to the United States. It was in the 1960s that the US Supreme Court gave the First Amendment its teeth, following a slew of high-profile cases brought by silenced civil-rights leaders. Where America came to see free speech as the answer to bigotry, Britain came to see censorship as essential to multicultural harmony.
– Tom Slater
No one with a shred of humanity could fail to sympathise with Leanne Lucas. On 29th July 2024, she was hosting a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance and bracelet-making workshop in Southport when Axel Rudakubana walked in and started attacking the children, killing three of them. In trying to protect the children Ms Lucas herself was stabbed five times.
When people suffer terrible things, they often throw themselves into searching for a means to help others avoid the same fate. Ms Lucas thinks she has found her cause. The Daily Mail reports:
Southport survivor calls for ban on pointed kitchen knives – as she says she’s not been able to use one herself since the attack that left three girls dead
[…]
After her horrific experiences, the teacher had assumed there would be tighter controls around kitchen knives and was shocked to find there weren’t.
She said: ‘Every time I learnt something new, I’d think, “That doesn’t sound right. Surely there are laws in place so that couldn’t have happened.” The more my eyes have been opened, the more I’ve been able to formulate an idea.’
She does not seem to be entirely clear in her mind whether that idea is a cultural change or a legal one. If my only source had been the BBC’s article on the same topic, I would have thought she was only advocating that people voluntarily adopt a different style of cooking that employs knifes with rounded tips rather than traditional knives with sharp tips.
This idea will not work. The sort of person who would take her proposed pledge to commit to exchanging their pointed knives for round-tipped ones could have a nuclear weapon in their cutlery drawer and still be no threat to anyone. But I have no objection to her proposing it as a desirable cultural change. I do have an objection to her proposing to ban pointy kitchen knives, as if the existing ban on murder lacked only this finishing touch to be effective.
As I said in an article for the Libertarian Alliance written five years after another massacre of children:
When the parents of the Dunblane children spoke there was every reason for the world to hear about their terrible experience. There was never any particular reason to suppose that their opinions were right. In fact their opinions should carry less weight than almost anyone else’s should. This point is well understood when it comes to juries. It goes without saying, or, at least, it once did, that guilt or innocence must be decided by impartial people. Decisions of policy require the same cast of mind as decisions of guilt and innocence.
We want to comfort those who have suffered unfairly. One way you comfort someone is by agreeing with them, by allowing them emotional license for any outburst. In the ordinary course of life and death, though, even as we say, “yes, yes” to a distraught person we discount – not ignore, but discount – the content of what they say. Phrases such as “He didn’t know what he was saying” or “She was mad with grief” illustrate this. Then, after a while, they are expected to get back to something like normal.
[…]
However it came about, nowadays we give the bereaved parents at Dunblane, the survivors of rail crashes, and similar groups both the license to say anything due to the distraught and the intellectual consideration due to experts. They can’t have both. Not because I’m too mean to give it to them, but because the two are logically incompatible. The press and public have handed power to those least able to exercise it well.
“Labour seems to think the British economic renaissance is going to be rebuilt on minor changes to a food and drink trade that amounts to 2-3 per cent of our exports, yet if it really believed this, why is it killing family farms and making them erect solar panels instead?”
– David Frost, former chief Brexit negotiator in the former Tory government, writing about the sellout deal that UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer agreed with the EU at the weekend. The deal effectively puts the UK back into the EU Single Market on farming and food; it also gives a number of concessions that, even if they don’t completely reverse the UK’s independence from the EU, make a number of steps in that direction. This is one of those cases where the devil is in the detail. Like Lord (David) Frost, I want the UK to go for mutual recognition of trade standards, which is what sovereign nation states, such as New Zealand, already do without fuss. Apparently, this is outside the mental universe of Brussels negotiators and the UK government.
The reference in the quote above is to the policy of the current Labour government to impose inheritance tax on family-run farms, a measure that will force a number of these farmers’ families to sell up, possibly selling out to energy companies instead.
From where I stand, it seems pretty clear that Starmer wants to reverse Brexit, even if it falls short of formal re-entry into the EU.
The idea that the British government should subsidise an American mine is pretty weird. Very weird even. But it does seem to be about to happen.
[…]
To the extent that we’ve got a scandium expert lying around I’m it. Niocorp isn’t going to work. But the British government, using your and my money, is eager to invest in it?
Why can’t they leave us just to piss away our own money in our own ways? Why this insistence upon doing it wholesale on obvious disasters?
– Tim Worstall
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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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