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]
|
I wanted something light-hearted for my first post of 2025. Instead, you get this list of Samizdata posts going back more than eleven years. The topic of all of them is the same: rape gangs in Britain whose ethnicity has been described variously as “Asian”, “South Asian”, “Pakistani” and “British Pakistani”. Their religion is Muslim.
From 2022: Rotherham 1400, Telford 1000
From 2020: “With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.”
From 2018: Grooming gangs in Rochdale and Rotherham raped with impunity and you won’t believe why!
From September 2014: Want to blame someone for Rotherham? Lets start with the Guardian…
From August 2014: Politically correct evasiveness fails on its own terms
From 2013: If you do not want to see the BNP vindicated, try not proving them right
And I will finish by quoting the late Niall Kilmartin from a 2022 post that was mostly about something else:
People did not just fear to discuss whether islamicism could have any statistical relationship to grooming in Rotherham; they felt obliged to deny it and hide it. That fact, that cancelling and criminalising of free speech, explains much of how it was that a larger gang had victimised some 1400 girls, not a smaller gang some 14 or so, before people dared to say it was happening. Making it an islamophobic thought-crime to notice didn’t just delay discovering the crimes that an existing gang were committing anyway. It helped the gang grow and persist – helped more of the corruptible rally to the corrupt. It helped the crime rate grow – taught more of the law-abiding to look away. It made the very thing that it forbade you to say more statistically true – because it forbade you to say it. It ensured that Lord Ahmed of Rotherham (who was finally convicted last month of pedophile assaults on two boys and a girl) would be more representative.
…it’s now illegal to build reasonable sized houses on a decent garden. Minimum density rules mean you just can’t. What was considered a “Home for Heroes” in the 1920s is illegal to build in the 2020s. Sorry, but that really is it.
– Tim Worstall
… with minimal government involvement.
The last day of the year is often a time for regrets.* However great our achievements, there are always things that we could have got done during the year but just – somehow – didn’t. Or we did them, but embarrassingly late. Peter Hague extends the idea to humanity as a species:
Silver chloride and ammonia have been produced since antiquity, and the camera obscura is similarly ancient. The only real tech barrier to photography was a lens to allow enough light in to form an image – and Europe has been able to make them for about 800 years. Medieval science just overlooked the idea.
If the right knowledge had been found out, we could now have photographs of Tudor soldiers displaying the body of Richard III, Columbus and his crew ready to depart, and London before the great fire.
Mechanically powered moving pictures may well have followed, and you might be able to see silent film of the US founding fathers.
That the available technologies were not combined for centuries is to me a catastrophic loss of information.
The comments to that tweet add stirrups, wheelbarrows, moveable type, long-distance signalling and many other inexplicably delayed technological advances to the list of missed opportunities.
Bah humbug to the lot of ’em. A load of pointless whining about trivialities. If you ask me what things humanity has to reproach itself for not having invented earlier, I robustly answer, “Zero!”
*Or it bloody well ought to be, anyway. If you are capable of going to a New Year’s party and drunkenly singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again too few to mention” and not immediately mentioning a long list of regrets, buzz off back to your home planet and leave us humans to enjoy ourselves in our own fashion.
About a week ago or so the Reform Party (est. 2022) claimed that it was about to overtake the Conservative Party (est. Mists of Time), in terms of membership. It even put up a ticker to demonstrate this. On Boxing Day, the ticker ticked over to the magic number of whatever it was and Nigel Farage, drank some beer in a field.
I was rather cynical about the numerical accuracy of this – political party membership is a weird and wonderful thing – but I had to admire the low cunning involved. The Conservative Party is in deep trouble. It governed very indifferently for a very long time. It made promises it not only did not keep but had no intention of keeping. And the result was that at the last general election the electorate gave it a thoroughly deserved kicking. But despite all this it has one thing going in its favour: size. It is very difficult for a new party to succeed in British politics. They get squeezed out by the big boys. This is a reason – perhaps the only reason – Steve Baker is still a member. So for Reform to be able to claim that in one respect – and it need only be one – that it is in fact bigger than the Conservative Party matters. It chips away at the edifice.
And there it might have ended. But Kemi Badenoch – the Conservative Party’s new leader – just had to stick her oar in.
This just may win the award for the world’s worst tweet. In less than 140 characters she has:
-
- Kept the story alive.
- Demonstrated that she is worried about Reform.
- Suggested that she – or someone acting on her behalf – has been engaging in hacking. Or that she doesn’t understand what a “back end” is which is a little embarrassing for someone who not only was once a software engineer but keeps reminding people of the fact.
- Given Farage the opportunity to show that his number was independently verified.
- Given Farage the opportunity to demand an apology.
- Given Farage a win.
I have been generally pro-Kemi since she first gained attention on this blog. She quotes Thomas Sowell. She seems to be prepared to confront the blob. But her first few months as Conservative leader have been… underwhelming. She hasn’t outlined a bold new vision. She hasn’t sidelined the crypto-communists in her own party and my understanding is that there is very little to write home about when it comes to confronting the Prime Android in Parliament. This is not necessarily the end of the world. I once asked one of Margaret Thatcher’s staff what she had been like as leader of the opposition. “Dreadful” came the answer. But then the Labour government of the 1970s with its strikes, inflation and financial crises did most of her campaigning for her.
But this time is different – well, not in the dreadful Labour government sense. There is serious competition for the position of Alternative Government. And that competition has only got more intense.
Richard Sennett’s article in the Guardian, “McCarthyism stalked my family. Its paranoia contains a lesson for Trump’s second term” is well titled, but, as usual, the lesson is not the one the Left thinks it is.
Professor Sennett’s article treats the Second Red Scare as if it were simply an eruption of irrational hatred. This treatment of the McCarthy era was the standard one when I was young, but feels quaint now. The Venona Project established that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed that many senior people in the American federal government were Soviet agents, he was right. The link takes you to a 2015 post by Patrick Crozier that I recommend you read. I also recommend you read Niall Kilmartin’s comment – McCarthy was right, but he was not a nice man. Professor Sennett is correct to say this about how McCarthy and Roy Cohn chose their targets:
They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets. People such as the playwright Arthur Miller repelled McCarthyite charges through vociferous counterattacks, while more compromising ex-commies such as the choreographer Jerome Robbins suffered sustained persecution. My uncle, threatened by the FBI, turned the tables by conjuring up personal injury lawsuits naming the agents who menaced him; the FBI then lost interest in his case. Cohn thought of commie-hunting as a matter of profit and loss, pursued only so long as there could be a benefit to the persecutor. If not, ideology did not drive him to persist.
“They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets.” Well observed mate, but you didn’t have to wait until the eve of Trump’s second term before making the parallel. Trump did nothing McCarthyite when he was president the first time, and I see no good reason to suppose he will be any different when he becomes president a second time. Professor Sennett, where were you in 2020 when your observations about how political witch-hunts work might have helped people who actually were being targeted in the same way as your parents were? What you are describing – the orgiastic yet opportunistic denunciations of individuals, with their degree of guilt a secondary consideration; the digging up of long-abandoned political flirtations; the way that apologies only excite the mob further – that is not Trumpism. That is Wokism.
We also paid a visit to the pages of Scientific American, where assistant professor Juan P Madrid indulged his urges to police other people’s speech, while wasting the time and energy of those more obviously productive. “The language of astronomy,” we were told, “is needlessly violent,” with the word collision being singled out as particularly brutal and masculine. An astronomer carelessly referring to a planet being stripped of its ozone layer by a gamma-ray burst, would, according to Dr Madrid, be using “misogynistic language” and should therefore be subject to the sternest of hands-on-hips chiding and an official reprimand.
– David Thompson
I’m not a huge fan of David Lammy, but when the Foreign Secretary and MP for Tottenham sends a tweet on Christmas Eve saying, “To all of my constituents and everyone beyond, I wish you a joyful and peaceful break and a very merry Christmas,” I mentally return his good wishes. OK, I don’t have any constituents, unless you count oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus and assorted other elements, but you know what I mean.
His fellow Labour MP Zarah Sultana is having none of that. She replied,
“Does that include the Palestinian people suffering genocide and being killed with British-made weapons, David?”
To all our readers and everyone beyond, I wish you a joyful and peaceful break and a very merry Christmas.
“I’m BACK. I’m not as back as the Trump folks; they’re SO back. I’m just back.”
The senator from Kentucky is on fine form. Put the mince pies on to warm and read the whole thread.
“Build 1,000 new state of the art nuclear power plants in the US and Europe, right now. We won’t, but we should.”
– Marc Andreessen
A writer going by the name “Gurwinder” produces a popular Substack blog. In the following piece Gurwinder writes thoughtfully about the experience of discovering that one of his fans was a cold-blooded murderer:
“The Riddle of Luigi Mangione: My interactions with the alleged CEO assassin”
Quote:
We interacted on social media several times afterward, and each time he seemed as polite and thoughtful as he’d been in our chat. As the summer ended, I largely withdrew from social media to focus on my book, so I didn’t notice Luigi had vanished.
And then, a few months later, Brian Thompson was shot dead.
Many people celebrated the murder, mocking the victim and lionizing the killer. Some were frustrated that health insurance cost so much, and some were outraged that they or a loved one had been denied medical claims. For this they blamed Thompson, the CEO of the US’s largest health insurance company.
But while thousands reacted with laughter emojis to Thompson’s murder, and with love-heart emojis to his alleged murderer, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenceless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You in fact advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.
The murder would’ve been shocking even if I didn’t know the murderer. But when Luigi was revealed as the suspect, everything became surreal. My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues he could’ve done this. The only thing that stuck out was when Luigi briefly mentioned healthcare in the US was expensive, and said we Britons were lucky to have a socialized National Health Service. But even this statement, by itself, gave no indication Luigi was capable of what he was being accused of.
When someone is found to have committed murder, friends and relatives will usually say things like “I can’t believe it, he seemed like such a nice guy.” I instinctively said the same thing about Luigi. But as the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be surprised. I’ve long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity. It’s why many of the people celebrating the murder are those who self-identify as “compassionate” leftists. And it’s why most of history’s greatest evils were committed by people who thought they were doing good.
(Emphasis added by me, although Gurwinder himself has chosen to highlight this passage.)
The Observer view on Labour’s plans to reform education is that the “government needs to go further on pay and workload if it is to retain high-quality teachers in schools”:
“. . . schools in England have been facing a worsening teacher for over a decade, and pupil to teacher ratios have risen, particularly in secondary schools. Last year, the teaching workforce grew by fewer than 300 teachers. Too few teachers makes it harder for those in the profession to do their jobs well – further adding to workload and behaviour management pressures, and undermining retention even more.”
I was once a teacher. I have been married to a now-retired teacher for decades. I have met a lot of teachers. The view of almost every teacher, and, equally relevantly, every former teacher that I have ever met was that pay and workload scarcely mattered in themselves. The pay is quite good. The uworkload for a conscientious teacher can be heavy during term time, but, as someone rightly points out every time teachers whinge about how long they spend marking homework and planning lessons, the workload is close to zero during school holidays. What really drives teachers out of the profession is the thing that the Observer editorial mentions as an afterthought, “behaviour management pressures”.
The House of Commons report to which the Observer article links says this:
Pupil behaviour
We recognise that teachers feel pupil behaviour has worsened in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic and we are concerned that this is driving teachers away from the profession as well as dissuading prospective teachers. Valuable work is now being done by Behaviour Hubs to help schools and teachers address pupil behaviour and we recommend that the Department expand this programme to increase capacity. The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance
I expect the work of Behaviour Hubs is of some value, like the work of the Behaviour Units, Behaviour Centres, and other Behaviour Things that preceded them over the decades. I truly admire those teachers who choose to deal with the most badly-behaved children, and spreading the word about better techniques can make some difference. But none of these initiatives solved the teacher retention crises of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s or 2010s, as these Hubs will not solve the crisis of the 2020s.
As for “The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance”, I think it would be better if the Department reinforced the importance of dissolving ineffective partnerships. End them at the request of any party. If a so-called partnership between school, pupil and parent is not working, let it die. In no other area of life is an association maintained by force on one or more of the parties called a “partnership”.
In an ideal world, I would like that philosophy of voluntary association to apply across the education of all but the youngest children, but even in this world, it would do a hell of a lot of good for it to apply where the so-called partnership between school, parent and pupil is obviously a rotting corpse.
Pupils behave better if they know their schools can expel them for bad behaviour. We used to know this as a society, but the threat of expulsion has been neutered by making the process so difficult that schools instead strive to pass the bad kids around all the local schools like counterfeit money. Teachers behave better if they know their pupils can leave. Private schools still do know this, and self-employed teachers know it very well.
Most humans enjoy helping others to learn. Those who join the teaching profession do so because they want to do this good thing even more than most people do. But there can be no joy in teaching without a willing learner. It doesn’t have to be constant happy-smiley-type willingness for years on end, just a basic willingness to be there.
|
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.
|
Recent Comments