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]

If you need censorship to get people to vote for the right causes and politicians, they are the wrong causes and politicians

Today’s Guardian has up an article with the title “Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says” and the strapline “False claims obstructing climate action, say researchers, amid calls for climate lies to be criminalised”.

Quote:

Climate misinformation – the term used by the report for both deliberate and inadvertent falsehoods – is of increasing concern. Last Thursday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, called for misinformation and greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry to be criminalised. On Saturday, Brazil, host of the upcoming Cop30 climate summit, will rally nations behind a separate UN initiative to crack down on climate misinformation.

“It is a major problem,” said Dr Klaus Jensen, of the University of Copenhagen, who co-led the Ipie review. “If we don’t have the right information available, how are we going to vote for the right causes and politicians, and how are politicians going to translate the clear evidence into the necessary action?

Samizdata quote of the day – they all knew

First, that as the Casey report acknowledges, the crimes really are mostly committed by ethnic minority men, mostly Pakistani, against white-majority children. And Labour are, far more than any other party, the standard-bearers for “diversity”. On this front, Helen Lewis spelled out the problem with commendable clarity earlier this year: no one on the Left wants a “national conversation” about the rape gangs — because so many of the possible solutions are, from this perspective, prima facie unacceptable:

“Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent Right want? […] Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.”

And second, it’s not just about race relations. It’s also about the public sector, of which Labour has long presented itself as a champion. And the extent of institutional complicity, already clear, is reiterated in Casey’s report: they all knew.

The police, especially, knew. Victims were blamed, or even arrested: in one notorious incident, a father arrived outside the house in which his own daughter was being raped, called the police, and was then himself arrested. In other incidents, girls would press charges only to be immediately contacted by their rapists with threats: events strongly suggestive of police corruption. One officer in Rotherham told a desperate father that the town “would erupt” if the crimes were exposed; another, according to the 2014 Jay report, admitted these atrocities have been ongoing for 30 years but “with it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out”.

Care homes also knew. One Bradford girl reported all the way back in 2014 that the home where she ought to have found safety and respite didn’t just look the other way — when the men who raped and sold her arrived outside the home, the staff would tell her to “go out and see them”. Councils knew, too: Birmingham was suppressing reports into looked-after children being raped and trafficked 30 years ago. In Oldham, the notorious leader of one rape gang was appointed “Welfare Officer” after a girl had already come forward with allegations against him. How many teachers knew? If Dominic Cummings is to be believed, the Department of Education knew.

Mary Harrington

Read the whole thing. Nothing less than a counter-revolution will fix this.

Taking the dis out of the information

Nice one Eyal! This is great work and genuinely hilarious 😀

Samizdata quote of the day – All aboard the ‘far-right bandwagon’

Labour spent decades denying the grooming gangs, now it dares to pose as on the side of victims.

Tom Slater

The financial state we’re in and the “doom-loop” problem

Andrew Lilico, on CapX

“Our fiscal situation is hopelessly beyond the capacity of our politics to address it. Tax and spending is so high, and so concentrated in unproductive activities such as NHS spending, that it is bearing down on growth, creating a doom loop of insufficient tax revenues to keep our debts from rising leading to increased tax rates leading to lower GDP growth leading to lower tax revenues. The only ways out are fiscal crisis, inflating away our debts or brute luck. What’s my guess? I’m still betting on luck, with new technologies boosting growth enough for us to escape, but crisis is getting nearer and nearer with every month that passes.”

When people start holding out for the whizz-bang potential of tech, or just plain luck, to take us away from the brink, things aren’t good. Plan for the worst, and hope for the best is a smarter strategy. At the moment, the UK, like all too many other developed countries, appears to be stuck in what Lilico refers to the “doom-loop” of sluggish growth, an ageing population, falling revenue, higher borrowing, and so forth. The term “doom-loop” got used a lot, I recall, during the pandemic, when some of our present discontents took a turn for the worse. Breaking free of such a “loop” will require a level of brute courage and honesty that, unfortunately, will be a tall order. I am not even sure how far down this path Nigel Farage of Reform can go – particularly if he is trying to woo disgruntled, “our NHS” Labour voters in the north, Midlands and other parts of the UK. As for the Tories…they appear for the moment to have gone on a sabbatical.

Where to turn for ideas? Well, I’ve started to read the books (here and here) on the UK’s economic plight by Jonathan Patrick Moynihan, who is a member of the House of Lords (“Baron Moynihan of Chelsea”), and a businessman and venture capitalist. The books are superbly written, and rather lovely items in their own right with the cartoons of famous politicians and pundits on the dust covers. They seem to chart a way forward. But at root the message is hard: cut spending, and shed a lot of functions.

The question, for me, is when and how does the work of pushing back against the current insanity start, assuming that Starmer, Reeves and the rest of these jokers see out a full parliamentary term.

At what point, for example, would an Argentinian-style chainsaw approach be required? Are we going to need a case of crisis treatment when all else has failed?

“They’re taking all our qualifications”: an AI video, possibly a parody, taken as fact by a socialist group

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?

Ironic, no?

Farage wants healthcare more like France, Netherlands or Switzerland, which all have a varying degree of insurance element. NHS was always a terrible way to do healthcare, which is why rest of Europe didn’t copy it

So, is it not ironic Reform party are open to at least exploring that kind of system, whereas the supposedly pro-European anti-Brexiteer elements who most depreciate Farage get the vapours at the notion of a more European healthcare system for the UK? 🤣

What on earth just came out of Tulsi Gabbard’s mouth?

“As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers. Perhaps it is because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to. So, it’s up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness.”

-Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence

Who are these “political elite warmongers” that are “carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers”? You know how it is. Rich people just love wiping out civilization. It is what rich people live for. And that is why we need socialism, so we can eat the rich and be done with them!

But seriously, Tulsi Gabbard is a demagogue ready to blame nuclear war on some imaginary bunch of rich people, appealing to envy and resentment. Meanwhile, our domestic socialists are ready to burn the country down because they had their heads filled with Marxist sewage in school. What idiot believes that elite Americans are threatening the world with nuclear war? But then, Tulsi Gabbard is part of the political elite, and she most certainly has a bomb shelter. Or did I miss something?

But wait! Tulsi Gabbard is also America’s Director of National Intelligence. Does her rhetoric belong to America and NATO, or does it belong to the socialist camp? What on earth just came out of her mouth?

J.R. Nyquist

Samizdata quote of the day – wilfully working towards a mass casualty event

The prevailing narrative in Net Zero ideology is one of a seamless “clean energy transition”. The reality is that their supposedly necessary transition is unlike any in human history because it represents a move down the energy density ladder. Properly understood, the proposal is terrifying.

It’s terrifying because it violates the “Iron Law Of Energy Transition”: successful civilisations always move toward more concentrated, more reliable power sources. Every historical example of a move down the energy density ladder has been involuntary. And every involuntary move down the energy density ladder has produced a mass casualty event.

Richard Lyons

Samizdata quote of the day – the pay gap that isn’t

If wimmins are currently underpaid in our capitalist bastardy patriarchalist society then it must be possible, today, to deliberately and specifically hire women and make a fortune.

So, is it? Anyone at all got any idea of where we might do that? Which sector etc? Anyone able to see anyone doing that?

Ah, then wimmins is not underpaid in our patriarchalist society of capitalist bastardry, are they? Because if they were the capitalist bastards would be doing a Dame Stevie.

Logic’s a lovely thing, no? So’s evidence….

Tim Worstall

Samizdata quote of the day – spaceflight, risk and safety edition

“We live with the risk of injury or death in every other human endeavor, from mountain climbing to skydiving, from driving to flying. But for some reason, space-related activities are held to a different standard. Why is it that we see the death of test pilots as an unfortunate consequence of their job, but not for astronauts?”

Rand Simberg, Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space. The book was published in 2013, around a time when Elon Musk and his SpaceX business, as well as others, was not quite as in our public consciousness as it is now. Published 12 years ago, the book retains much of its power and persuasiveness, and lessons apply far beyond spaceflight. Simberg is one of the early bloggers out there, like Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.

Samizdata quote of the day – This is Britain. So think before you think.

P.S. Before sharing this article with your friends and family, please be aware that the Government’s Prevent anti-radicalisation programme has recently declared that concern about mass immigration is “terrorist ideology”. A Prevent training course hosted on the Government’s website lists “cultural nationalism” as something that could cause you to be referred for deradicalisation.

Prevent, you’ll remember, is the programme to which the Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana was repeatedly referred from as young as 13. He went on to stab a number of children and adults, 3 of whom died.

Usman Khan, the terrorist who committed the London Bridge attack in 2019, was under Prevent monitoring when he carried out his attack in the middle of a prisoner rehabilitation event for which he had travelled to London. Prevent officers tasked with monitoring him had “no specific training” in dealing with terrorists.

According to the Prevent training guidance, if you believe that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups” you will be referred to the very programme which failed to deal with them.

This is Britain. So think before you think.

Konstantin Kisin (£)