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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We are responsible for emissions, we consumers. For it is our consumption that creates the emissions.
And, of course, yes this is important. For by framing the problem as being that of the capitalist bastards it’s then possible to think that if we just eliminated the capitalist bastards then we would have solved the problem. Which does rather obscure the point that if the capitalist bastards did not sate our desires then we’d be nibbling our frozen turnips by moonlight in our winter shack.
That is, the placing of the responsibility upon the fossil fuel firms removes it from ourselves. Which is the lyin’ bastardry going on here. In order to beat climate change it is us that has to change our ways.
That’s also the reason why this lyin’ bastardry is attempted. Because when presented with the actual choice – either Greenland melts and the mangrove swamps flood or you get no hot food nor crib – the actual people, us out here, are going to say bugger Greenland and the swamps.
Which is why people lie about it.
– Tim Worstall
Can someone explain to me why the Tories opened negotiations with Mauritius over the control of Chagos, which was never part of Mauritius and whose inhabitants have never wanted to be part of Mauritius? And can someone explain why Labour wants to pay Mauritius to take over territory it never previously owned at any point in history?
Although the pandemic response is much too late to fix the medieval plagues used to justify it, it remains of great relevance to Pharma investors who see unbeatable advantage in converting taxation dollars into rising share valuations. Governments supporting the CEPI 100-day vaccine initiative are giving public money to support the research and maintain manufacturing readiness of private companies who will then sell their products back to the very same taxpayers, ideally mandated by those governments. This will occur in response to disease surveillance that the same hapless taxpayers are funding. A whole army of global health bureaucrats is positioning to run this – these officials only need a theoretical risk to recommend lockdowns. The 100-day mRNA vaccines will return freedom. The business case here is simply irresistible.
– Dr. David Bell
Since Israel’s military response to the October 7th massacre by Hamas, news organisation of the world could not get reporters into Gaza. And yet, we have seen a constant stream of reportage and commentary.
But since the outbreak of mass civil resistance resistance to Iran’s repressive Islamic regime, we have seen an order of magnitude less in the media about the ongoing horrors there. News organisations have often stated this was due to their inability to get reporters into Iran. Strange that.
Truly… no Jews, no news.
The way to win the point is to flatly refuse to have anything to do with these parasites. One of the benefits of self-publishing is that you can bypass the publishing world and its hangers-on, such as sensitivity readers. In a few weeks, my latest novel, Railroad, will go live. It is set during the American Civil War, and it isn’t very sensitive. Okay, I did tone the language down a bit, but there is still language that would make sensitivity readers break out in a fit of the vapours. Too bad. It’s a historical novel, not modern-day. It is set during a period rife with violent racism, so the language and behaviours reflect that.
I would never let a sensitivity reader anywhere near my work. Ever. If readers are triggered, then they are probably reading the wrong author.
– Longrider
The highest* criminal court in England & Wales, the Court of Appeal, has come up with a judgment holding that what is called ‘jury nullification’ isn’t permitted, it’s called ‘jury equity’ by some here. The duty of the jury is to return a verdict on the evidence, jurors (who are compelled to serve and take an oath to deliver a true verdict according to the evidence) must follow the law and the judge’s directions. The proceedings arose from some environmental criminals who vandalised a bank and sought to defend their actions on the basis of something like that the bank’s shareholders would have consented to the damage if they’d known it would protect the environment. This is technically a defence in English law, but on the facts, none of the accused mentioned this in interview, all raised it in court and it may well have been found to have been a contrived defence, we don’t know why, because juries do not give reasons or discuss the case afterwards.
The case considered the landmark decision of Bushell’s Case from 1670, the juror who refused to convict Quakers William Penn and William Mead and his writ of habeas corpus was granted, after the trial judge fined and imprisoned him for not returning a guilty verdict.
Since Mr Bushell wrongly did porridge for saving Quakers, the law has moved on and in England, it is forbidden to mention jury nullification in court.
The Court of Appeal’s judgment held that whilst jurors have to give verdicts according to the law and the evidence, there is no mechanism to punish them if they do not do so (provided they actually follow the rules and are either split with no verdict, or acquit). The Court said this:
Bushell’s Case may be best understood as recognising an immunity from punishment in respect of their decision as to what verdict to return, rather than a right to return verdicts in defiance of the evidence.
A distinction that might be lost on some, but it means that the concept of nullification cannot be raised in court as part of a defence.
And would it be wrong to think that in the States, ‘jury nullification’ is seen as a pro-liberty stance as a check on an overly powerful State, whereas ‘jury equity’ in the UK is seen as a way to undermine property rights and allow socialist violence to go unchecked?
* The Supreme Court is based in England, but it sits as a ‘UK’ court. It could yet hear an appeal from this case if an appeal were brought.
The UK’s electricity crisis is not caused by “System Failure”. It’s caused by Net Zero
– Tilak Doshi
Well, I suppose one of several silver linings of the current arguments about whether the UK should transfer ownership of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius (the legal case is weak, the strategic case is absurd) and the USA should buy Greenland from Denmark, is that those of us who are a bit off the pace with our geography have had a chance to remind ourselves where these places are, and why they matter.
The Chagos Islands have been what are rather grandly called a British Indian Ocean Territory. The UK government, claiming that it is required to do so under international law (debatable), is to hand the islands to Mauritius – which is hundreds of miles away to the west of Chagos – and will pay Mauritius (a tax haven, by the way) for the ability to have control of said islands for a leasehold period of several decades. That means the UK can no longer decide if other countries – such as China – should be excluded, for example, from putting listening posts in the vicinity. The US military uses the Diego Garcia military base to operate long-haul flights, such as of the B2 stealth bomber and B52 bomber varieties, often to vital strategic effect.
In 2025, when the Starmer government was pushing this arrangement to pass over the islands to Mauritius – and pay Mauritius billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money for the purpose (which is itself a disgrace) – the newly elected Trump administration appeared to be content with the deal, although some in the defence establishment appeared to be worried about the geo-strategic implications of opening a potential door to China in that part of the Indian Ocean. The Chagos transfer remains caught up in UK parliamentary wrangling, but I fear that it will go through – but maybe not if Trump’s comments in the past 24 hours have an impact.
Mr Trump, who is angry at the UK for things such as allowing the Chinese to build a massive new embassy in London (with enhanced spying capabilities, no doubt), and about the UK’s criticism of his Greenland purchase demand (the UK is on firmer ground, if not entirely) has hit at the UK for the Chagos situation. Arguably, Trump’s move gives Starmer, if he is wise enough (is he, ed?) an “off-ramp” excuse to axe the Chagos transfer and put it down as a bad idea. (That would be the smart course, in my view.) Maybe even a smarter course would be for Starmer to let the US buy a stake in the Chagos Islands with a promise to let the UK still use the base on a joint basis. That would deal with America’s concerns about long-haul base access in the Indian Ocean and countering Chinese mischief-making, and perhaps take a bit of sting out of the Greenland issue.
I haven’t space to go into the Greenland case, but suffice to say that I think a US invasion of land that is under Danish rule (Denmark is in NATO) is unlikely to happen and would be outrageous if it did. I think Trump will pull back and over time, some sort of arrangement will be reached once tempers cool. Greenland, given some icecap melting etc, is going to be easier for surface ships and submarines to navigate around, and that makes it an important place for the US/Canada/others to want to protect, given where it is on the map.
But where the Greenland case is relevant in the Chagos case is that the US has a lease of a military base there (signed in 1951 – there were several attempts by the US to buy the place). And Trump has said that leaseholds aren’t enough – the US must own it. The logic he uses is similar to the logic that critics of the Chagos transfer have used – leaseholds aren’t enough because you must have the ability to exclude. Exclusion is the key issue here.
Maybe, therefore, a way forward for Trump and other NATO powers is to insist that US/Western leases in Greenland must involve no such leases for China, Russia and others potentially hostile to NATO members, and that such leases should be reviewed, such as once every 10 years to account for changing geopolitics.
The ability to show a measure of maturity on all sides – including ours in the UK – is critical. I worry that the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact between the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia is likely to end unless matters change. Starmer, who has been a clanking disaster of a Prime Minister, should stop goading the US by foolishly, and in my view fecklessly, giving every impression that the UK is becoming a useful idiot for Beijing. Whatever criticisms one might make of Trump’s recent foreign policy moves, on this occasion, he is more on the side of the angels than some might admit.
Recently, I flicked through James C Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge, written more than 20 years ago, a few days ago. Reading it in light of recent events show what’s changed in the world, and what hasn’t. Recommended.
“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.
“Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”
– Shabana Mahmood (£), Britain’s Home Secretary, explicitly states she wants to turn the country into a panopticon, quite literally a prison.
Jeremy Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher and social theorist, promoted the Panopticon as a circular prison with a central inspection tower from which a single guard could observe all inmates all the time while unseen.
Britain is also eerily emulating a pattern of democratic backsliding; from India to Mexico, authoritarian governments “test-drive” what they can get away with at local level first. By conveniently delaying elections at a time when council tax is set to rise, Labour risks setting a wicked precedent for “taxation without representation”.
– Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph (£).
Away from the perma-misery of politics, wars, regulatory nonsense and so on, I came across this article on the Substack of the Rational Optimist Society (with a name like that, it is not a place to go for the doom-scrollers):
“Housing is arguably the most broken industry in the world, with tough competition from healthcare and education. It’s a gigantic market that affects us all,” writes Stephen McBride.
He argues that firms such as Cuby Technologies are doing for housing what shipping containers did for transportation and global trade, with massively positive effects.
Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM). It’s a standardized, portable factory that turns homebuilding into a predictable manufacturing process. I can see that acronym MMF, in this context, getting the same visibility as SMR for “small modular reactors”, and tapping into the same idea of using economies of scale, mass customisation and fiendishly clever computer tech to produce lots of useful, not eye-wateringly expensive things for our homes, power generators, whatever. And I can see, in time, how this fits with still-developing tech such as 3-D printing (which has been around a while). It will of course give some folk the vapours, such as those in the construction trades, much as happened with other disruptive changes. But if, for example, ageing and other forces squeeze labour market supply of people in such trades, then business models such as the MMF one, able to churn out homes, will have a lot of appeal. Plus new jobs can be created around design and all the associated, value-add opportunities that can arise.
One aspect of all this is that if it lives up to the billing, the precision with which homes are built will be very high.
Also, there is an appeal, is there not, for the likes of Elon Musk in figuring out how to efficiently produce things for spacefaring and the settlement of Mars. I can bet he is following all this closely.
Final thought – for places that have suffered a devastating loss of housing (such as Southern California exactly a year ago because of the fires), being able to produce attractive homes at scale for people seems to have a lot of appeal. And, er, that’s where the horrible politics comes in. To date, only a fraction of the number of houses lost have been replaced. That is a shameful state of affairs, and one for which the local politicians deserve to pay a high price.
I can’t kid myself any more. The party hasn’t changed… and it won’t. The bulk of the party don’t get it. Don’t have the stomach for the radical change this country needs. In opposition, it’s easy to paper over these cracks, but the divisions – the delusions – are still there. And if we don’t get the next Government right, Britain will likely slip beyond the point of repair. Everything is on this. I cannot, in good conscience, stick with a party that’s failed so badly, that isn’t sorry and hasn’t changed. That I know in my heart won’t… can’t… deliver what’s needed. That’s why I resolved to leave.
– Robert Jenrick
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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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