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]

How will you be celebrating International Women’s Day?

The name of the woman being led into captivity in this picture is Naama Levy. The photo was taken to celebrate her capture.

Sadly, this was not a namecheck

Matt Taibbi: “America enters the samizdat era”

It is a sobering description of how the world went from this:

Ten years ago PBS did a feature that quoted a Russian radio personality calling Samizdat the “precursor to the Internet.” Sadly this is no longer accurate. Even a decade ago Internet platforms were mechanical wonders brimming with anarchic energy whose ability to transport ideas to millions virally and across borders made episodes like the Arab Spring possible. Governments rightly trembled before the destabilizing potential of tools like Twitter, whose founders as recently as 2012 defiantly insisted they would remain “neutral” on content control, seeing themselves as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.”

to this:

The Internet, in other words, was being transformed from a system for exchanging forbidden or dissenting ideas, like Samizdat, to a system for imposing top-down control over information and narrative, a GozIzdat. Worse, while the Soviets had to rely on primitive surveillance technologies, like the mandatory registration of typewriters, the Internet offered breathtaking new surveillance capability, allowing authorities to detect thoughtcrime by algorithm and instantaneously disenfranchise those on the wrong side of the information paradigm, stripping them of the ability to raise money or conduct business or communicate at all.

(Hat tip: Instapundit. Like us at Samizdata, Glenn Reynolds has watched this change happen over the time he has been blogging.)

UK is trapped inside the Road Runner cartoon

Even if by some highly improbable miracle Sunak/Hunt & their coterie of Blue Blairites snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, things will continue to get worse, and root causes of that will not change one iota. Why? Because the direction of travel is exactly what Sunak, Hunt, Starmer etc all agree on and want. They all want a technocratic regulatory state & that’s what we have, a technocratic regulatory state.

Under Labour, it will just become much more obvious, the rainbow makeup brighter, the clown shoes they are destined to keep tripping over more polished, particularly given they will have a triple digit majority. We must end the fiction that the fraudulently named Conservative Party circa 2025 is an alternative to Labour as opposed to much the same thing, just more lubricated and with a better wine list. They had a big majority and could have systematically attacked and undone what Blair did, but they did nothing, because a critical mass of the Tory grandees don’t actually want to. Blair is one of them. What will it take for the last Tory loyalists to see that? Probably nothing and I can easily imagine the photogenic but inane Penny “women-with-cocks” Mordaunt becoming leader when Sunak rides off into the sunset.

We passed the point of no return the day Truss was deposed, that was when we went over the cliff edge. We are a nation of Wile E. Coyotes and a great many of us have yet to look down to grasp the truth. It is pointless and counter productive to call for the brakes to be applied because we are mid-air, there are no brakes. The only thing we don’t know is how long it will take us to hit the bottom. We just need to start thinking about how to survive the impact and what comes next after that.

Samizdata quote of the day – How Labour wants to make another people’s revolt impossible

Starmer, we are told over and over again, is just ‘a normal bloke’ who likes to play football and wants Britain to be well run. He’s just a bland technocrat who rejects divisive ideological narratives in favour of sound government.

But, in truth, Keir Starmer and the people around him do have a radical vision of politics and our democracy. It’s a vision of a country where people who think and act like them are in power forever and where the populist revolts against the new elite which erupted over the last decade, through UKIP, Brexit, the Brexit Party, and then the reassertion of popular sovereignty in 2019, are made impossible.

Labour want to do this by taking political power away from elected governments and giving much more of it to an assortment of unelected civil servants, regional assemblies and spurious quangos.

Matt Goodwin

Take a chainsaw to rent control, watch rents fall

I cannot add to this article by Fran Ivens in the Telegraph: “How Argentina’s ‘chainsaw man’ Javier Milei slashed rents by 20pc”

Rents in Argentina have fallen 20pc since President Javier Milei scrapped a “destructive” cap for landlords in December.

Under four-year rent controls, landlords fled the market in their thousands and rents increased 286pc, fuelling an even deeper housing crisis.

Since the legislation was scrapped, rents have fallen and the number of properties that are available for rent has increased significantly, according to industry body the Argentine Real Estate Chamber.

The drastic change in outlook for the country’s rental market adds further weight to arguments that even with the aim of reducing the burden on renters, rent caps often have the opposite effect.

The rules, introduced in 2020 by then-president Alberto Fernández, included a mandatory lease term of three years and a limit on rent to an average growth rate of the consumer price index and the wage index. This cap was set by the central bank.

Even before the new legislation came into force, the effect was significant. Unsure of how much and when they would be able to increase rents, landlords hiked their pieces to try and avoid being caught out.

Worsening the situation, 45pc of landlords decided to sell their properties in the wake of the announcement significantly reducing the amount of accommodation on offer and further pushing up prices.

In the 12 months to February 2024, rents increased 286.7pc in Buenos Aires, according to rental platform Zonaprop. There was also a currency aggravation. While many use dollars in Argentina as a hedge against the peso that has been losing value, the law mandated that rental payment must be in the local currency.

Over the past five years, the Argentinian peso’s value against the dollar has decreased by around 95pc.

What happens when a “social contract” breaks down?

In political theory, an idea that got going in the 18th Century was that of the “social contract”, and to this day, writers can sometimes raise the idea that there is an implicit/explicit “deal” that we enter into (stay with me, dear reader) to give up certain qualities or freedom of action in return to some greater overall result. An example used to justify the “Nightwatchman State” of minarchist dreams might be the “contract” in which citizens give up the ability to go after criminals, or those they think are criminals, and instead submit to the powers of policemen and women to do this, or to sub-contract this role to approved private police, etc, and with all the due process of a legal system (details don’t matter, it could have juries, or not, investigative magistrates, or not). The police, so the argument goes, go after suspected wrongdoers and also deter wrongdoing, and the citizens pay a tax to the police, and the territory in which this operates is safer and more tranquil than would otherwise be the case. (Not all liberals/libertarians like the social contract theory, such as Jacob Levy. Robert Nozick did not show much time for it in his Anarchy, State and Utopia, if I recall.)

Well, like all contracts, there can be a point at which one side has so abandoned its side of the deal that the contract loses its legitimacy.

Example from today’s Daily Telegraph (£):

Police have failed to solve a single burglary in nearly half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales in the past three years despite pledging to attend the scene of every domestic break-in to boost detection rates.

It’s unsurprising that those who can afford it are buying more elaborate security, that domestic household insurance rates are rising fast, and so on. As with the dysfunctional National Health Service, I wonder at what point the penny drops on a lot of the public that they are being defrauded on this “contract”, and demand change?

Here is an explicitly libertarian take on policing.

Slightly off-topic from policing, is a reminder of this book from more than a decade ago, by Joyce Lee Malcolm, about the UK, US, and the very different approaches to handguns and self defence over the decades.

Another reminder of why anonymity is sometimes necessary, this time from Sweden

I missed this article when it came out in the Observer (the Guardian‘s Sunday sister-paper) three weeks ago: ‘People are scared’: “Sweden’s freedom of information laws lead to wave of deadly bombings”

In a night in September, as summer was turning to autumn, Soha Saad dozed off on the sofa as she stayed up late studying. The 24-year-old, who lived in a quiet village near the Swedish university town of Uppsala with her parents and siblings, had recently graduated as a teacher, a career she was passionate about, and had big dreams for the future.

But in the early hours of the morning, all of that hope came to an end. An explosion ripped through their home, removing the windows and walls, and ending Soha’s life.

She is not thought to have been the intended target of September’s bomb attack – reports at the time said it could have been a neighbour related to a gang member – but was an innocent victim with no connections to gang violence.

With typical cowardice, the Observer article does not mention that the sharp increase in violence in Sweden is almost entirely driven by immigrants, mostly from the Middle East, and to a lesser extent from the Balkans. How does anyone think a problem can be solved if it cannot even be mentioned? In other respects, Miranda Bryant’s article was a good piece of journalism, highlighting how something that was for centuries considered a valuable freedom in Swedish society has become dangerous for many:

In recent years, Sweden has been caught in the grip of escalating gang conflict involving shootings and explosions – largely driven by drug trafficking, involving firearms and bombs. September was the worst month for fatal shootings in Sweden since 2016, with 11 deaths, and 2023 saw the most explosions per year to date.

The Moderate party-run coalition – supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats – have pledged to take action by sending more young people to prison and giving police more powers to search people and vehicles. But with younger and younger people being pulled into crime, turning them into “child soldiers”, the violence is showing little sign of stopping.

The explosions – usually targeting rival gang members and their families – often contain dynamite or gunpowder-based substances, according to police. Hand grenades have also been used.

In most countries, tracking down the address of a potential victim could be a laborious process. But not in Sweden, where it is possible to find out the address and personal details of just about anybody with a single Google search. Experts say criminals are being greatly helped by a 248-year-old law, forming part of Sweden’s constitution.

The 1776 freedom of the press act (tryckfrihetsförordningen) – a revered feature of Swedish society that gives everyone access to official records – marked the world’s first law regulating the right to free speech; the documents are protected on Unesco’s Memory of the World register.

“Public access to information is a fundamental principle in Sweden’s form of government,” according to the Swedish Institute for Human Rights (SIHR). “One of the fundamental laws, the Freedom of the Press Act, contains provisions on the right to access official documents. According to this rule all documents available at an authority are in principle open for the public.”

I can see why Swedes want to keep their traditional tryckfrihetsförordningen. My previous post mentioned the “Streisand Effect” with very little sympathy for Barbra Streisand’s famously counter-productive effort to keep information about her residence out of the public domain. Maybe I should have shown more. Being a libertarian does not oblige me to defend to the hilt everything which has the word “freedom” on it, and it does seem to me that, given how much easier it is for a criminal to track down a victim nowadays than it was in 1776, the freedom not to have one’s name appear in public government records ought be given more weight in Sweden and elsewhere.

Samizdata quote of the day – How radical leftist activist groups have captured the British Government

Fourteen years in government and what have the British Conservative Party got to show for it? The highest tax burden since World War II, radical anti-freedom green policies, and critical race and gender theory being applied throughout all institutions.

Some simply blame this all on government incompetence. Others doubt the politicians actually believe what they’re advocating and suspect they are just doing it to appease special-interest groups. While these may play a part in it, one largely overlooked factor is that the British government itself is funding left-wing activism.

Jess Gill

The Rochdale by-election and postal voting increase

Nothing to see here sir, please move along:

From Richard Tice’s X/Twitter feed. Tice is leader of Reform, the right-of-centre party started a few years ago:

To suggest that a parliamentary election in this country has not been truly free and fair is a very serious allegation indeed.

Unfortunately however, the behaviour of certain candidates and their supporters in this contest fell very far short of this our traditional democratic standards. What we have witnessed and experienced in Rochdale is deeply disturbing.

In recent weeks, Reform UK’s candidate and campaign team has:

– been subjected to death threats
– suffered vile racist abuse
– been refused entry to hustings in a public building
– had to be relocated for their own safety
– suffered daily intimidation and slurs

In one incident, Reform UK business supporters were threatened with a firebomb attack if they distributed our leaflets. Menacing behaviour was a feature of the entire campaign, including outside polling stations on the day of the election itself. In this ugliest of contests, we are also concerned by the sudden increase in the size of the postal vote, which has jumped from 14,000 to some 23,000 in this constituency since the last general election.

The results of the Rochdale by-election should act as a stark wake up call to those in power – and the entire electorate. This is Britain. We are supposed to be a beacon of democracy. This shameful contest has been more characteristic of a failed state.
Unless something dramatic changes, our fear is that it will be repeated in dozens of constituencies across the UK at the general election. By Christmas, we face the prospect of numerous extremist anti-Semitic lawmakers in the House of Commons.

I thought the existence of voter ID was supposed to render the need for postal voting less necessary, or something. I have performed jury duty in London, and I recall that I had to submit a fair amount of information in order to be eligible. Voting is, or should be, a serious business.

The UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, did something he should have done a long time ago about where public life in this country is going.

The new Rochdale MP, George Galloway, is one of those PT Barnum chancers in public life who has a most interesting history, as demonstrated by this Reuters (yes, Reuters) story about his involvement in Iraq.

Rochdale has, in a way, sent a guttersnipe to Westminster, bad even by the often flaky standards of MPs.

Samizdata quote of the day – US election year edition

“Power doesn’t often age gracefully. It clings and expires in a labored rush, devoured by another generation, hungry for its time in the sun. Washington can’t long remain a country for old men: Democrats will either replace Mr. Biden in a putsch at their convention in August, or voters are likely to do so in November.”

Alex Castellanos, Wall Street Journal ($).

As an added point, it is worth reminding ourselves that Mr V. Putin of Russia is not getting younger, either, although he appears to remember what day it is – at least for now.

Samizdata quote of the day – Hong Kong’s slide into darkness edition

“It is telling that Beijing and Hong Kong are more afraid of their own people than Hong Kong’s British colonial government ever was.”

Wall Street Journal, editorial comment. ($)

Samizdata quote of the day – Know your enemy

It is commonly said that the problem for the Tories is that they don’t know what they stand for. There is a certain element of truth in this: the Parliamentary party is an almost absurdly broad spectrum comprising at one extreme people who wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of Tony Blair’s cabinets, and on the other, traditional religious conservatives – with an awful lot of Thatcherites, One Nationers, old-fashioned ‘shire Tories’, ‘wets’ and libertarians in the middle. But the bigger problem, it seems to me, is that the Tories don’t really know what they stand against. This is a particular problem for the Tory party in particular, which since the early 20th century has had the main raison d’etre of keeping Labour out of power. In order to do this, it should go without saying, you have to know what Labour stand for, and provide a clearly discernible alternative. That is the Tory party’s main duty, but it is badly shirking it.

Some readers of this substack will raise their eyebrows at the idea that the Tory party’s existence is mainly justified on the basis of keeping Labour out, so let me explain. And let me make no bones about it: while I have plenty of time for Labour voters (I come after all from dyed-in-the-wool Labour-voting stock) and even some Labour politicians, I despise the Labour Party and more or less everything it stands for. I don’t think there is an institution in contemporary Britain which exerts a more baleful influence. And this is because it is imbued with – indeed, it is the very political manifestation of – what Dostoyevsky might have called the morality of the Grand Inquisitor: a morality that positions itself always against freedom and agency in the name of comfort and ignorance.

David McGrogan.

Read the whole thing. I heartily commend this article to you and suggest subscribing to David McGrogan’s substack.