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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Victims are blamed, pressured into keeping quiet, and whistleblowers are pursued. In short, after an initial flurry of activity, we have taken the Rotherham vaccine and become inured to the plight of our young girls, who are foolishly looking to us in hope of salvation, imploring us for help and daily praying for justice – a vain yearning in today’s Britain.
Mentioning the scandal carries a “branding” sentence, which an increasing number of people feel unable to bear, preferring to throttle the source of the sound of suffering than to deal with the root of the problem.
One thing is for sure: it is for us, not the authorities, to judge them on their record.
The mother in Wakefield lived through two-tier policing, as have many thousands of other desperate souls. That is a fact.
– Alex Story
Never say “no more debate”.
Fluoride in drinking water at twice safe limit linked to lower IQ in children, the Guardian (yes, that Guardian) reports.
Probably many of those who were against fluoride were against it for irrational reasons. But a great many people were against them for irrational reasons. If this report pans out, look again at hydroxychloroquine.
We are witnessing a kind of unwitting absolution of Hamas. It seems the West’s cultural elite, drunk on woke, can only interpret this war through the warping prism of identity politics. So ‘white’ Israel is seen as the only true, conscious actor in the war, while ‘brown’ Hamas are the victims, or at least hapless players whose actions are not worth dwelling on for long. In this twisted vision, Israel acts, Palestine is acted upon – even though it was Hamas’s acting upon Israel on 7 October that started the entire thing. It’s time to stop blaming Israel for everything. It’s time to talk about Hamas’s culpability. It’s time to give evil its due.
– Brendan O’Neill
We’ve all heard the prevailing narrative in recent weeks. The riots that hit our towns and cities were the consequence of a mix of ‘inflammatory rhetoric’ and ‘disinformation’ from malicious actors. Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate, Nigel Farage – all these individuals have been depicted as the James-Bond-style villain responsible for the mayhem.
This misguided theory has repeatedly been advanced by various liberal sophisticates on social media – people who always appear so desperate to flaunt their ‘progressive’, high-status opinions (the better to win kudos from their peers, of course).
[…]
What it all shows is that if you scratch a member of the liberal intelligentsia, an anti-democratic authoritarian will bleed. We see time and again that, when it comes to the crunch, the liberal ‘good guys’ are as illiberal as the worst despots.
– Paul Embery
Media reaction to the National Wealth Fund has, in general, been positive, though (predictably) The Economist was critical. Interestingly, The Guardian did not appreciate the fund’s misleading name. Probably the most glowing responses came from the Financial Times. Many might think that this, as well as the various big names involved in the formulation of the policy — including former Bank of England governor Mark Carney and the Chief Executives of Aviva, NatWest, and Barclays — reflects the fact that this policy is well-formulated and fundamentally sensible. They would be wrong. As we have seen, there is nothing sensible about the majority of the ‘preliminary’ sectors chosen.
– Pimlico Journal
I have given this BBC story the “Health & Medical” tag due to its description of traumatic events:
‘Trauma’ as Pride flags vandalised for fifth time
Pride flags vandalised for the fifth time in north-east London have left residents “traumatised”, a local LGBTQ+ organisation says.
The flags, which are on the pavement near Forest Gate railway station, were covered with white paint on Monday.
They were also vandalised on 9 March, as well as on 23 and 26 June and 19 July.
Rob DesRoches, founder of Forest Gayte Pride, external, said the organisation would work with Newham Council to repair or replace the flags, adding: “We feel that people have been traumatised by the repeated vandalism, which needs to be sorted out now. The healing process needs to take place.”
The Metropolitan Police previously said it was treating the vandalism as a homophobic and transphobic hate crime.
I send my good wishes for the progress of this deeply necessary “healing process” to the traumatised people of Forest Gate, especially to the approximately 25% of them who are Muslim. Despite my view that we would all be better off if there were no such thing as public property, I do not approve of individuals taking it upon themselves to inflict criminal damage on public property. But the line taken by the left since the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston is that it is fine to destroy street furniture of which you disapprove. So – anyone taking odds on how long it lasts till next time?
I have seen the light. The man who convinced me of the truth of MMT was someone called Daron Medway, who replied to a tweet by Richard Murphy that said,
The government can never run out of money https://youtu.be/2m3BXdkDJYI?si=cjSA5MJ5AcDWkKgJ
Politicians, commentators and journalists all like to claim that the UK government could run out of money, but that is total nonsense. The UK government can always create the money it needs to pay its debts. It is the one and only organisation in the UK that can never, as a result, run out of money.
with this extremely persuasive point:
This is great! I guess I can keep all of mine then?
Government anti-terror ban forces closure of UK model steam train firm
A historic British firm which produced model steam trains for 87 years has been forced to close its doors after getting hamstrung by red tape.
Mamod this month closed down production in its factory due to dwindling sales and spiralling overheads, in an era of gaming consoles and social media.
The firm was also hobbled by a government ban on the ‘dangerous’ hexamine fuel tablets that had long been used in the models to heat water and set the intricate engines chuntering.
Founded in 1937, Mamod’s steam trains quickly became a favourite of children across the country, boasting static generators which powered models with wire loops and scaled-down traction engines.
While it is true that model steam engines of this type had all but disappeared as toys, there is a considerable market for them among dangerous men with names like Kenneth and Stanley who might convert their garden railways to hexamine-powered rail-mobile nuclear missile launch systems.
“Speech is not violence. Words cannot injure or compel a person to hate or riot. Consequently, the state has very little business policing it, and the outcomes are usually dire when it tries.”
– Institute of Economic Affairs, in an emailed newsletter it sends out. It refers to recent commentaries such as here and here.
The BBC reports,
SNP MSP John Mason has been stripped of the party whip after “completely unacceptable” social media posts about the conflict in Gaza
Mr Mason said he was “disappointed” by his suspension, which came after he wrote on X that the country’s actions in Gaza did not amount to “genocide”.
In response, a spokesperson for the SNP Chief Whip said: “To flippantly dismiss the death of more than 40,000 Palestinians is completely unacceptable.
“There can be no room in the SNP for this kind of intolerance.”
The spokesperson added the SNP Group would now meet to discuss the matter, with a recommendation of a fixed period suspension, for what they described as a “utterly abhorrent comment”.
The withdrawal of the whip means Mr Mason is effectively expelled from the SNP with immediate effect and must sit as an independent MSP until it is restored.
His “utterly abhorrent comment” was this tweet:
John Mason
@JohnMasonMSP
There is no genocide. If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed many many more.
If the Scottish National Party wants to eject Mason for having a different definition of the word “genocide” to the one the party favours, that is its prerogative. I am not clear on how it helps anyone in Gaza, or indeed Scotland, but the decision is not mine to make.
What interests me is the way that this type of political thinking shrinks the parties and political tribes that practise it. The three steps are: (1) Take an existing word. (2) Change its definition. (3) Throw anyone who does not accept the change out of your in-group.
Redefinition – the first two steps – is a standard political technique, common on all points of the political compass. Many American campaigners for gay marriage dropped the “gay” and spoke of themselves as campaigning for “marriage”. It worked. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit often prefaces links to stories about gun rights with the general term “Civil Rights Update”. The good version of the idea is that the reader will do a double-take at seeing something they had never previously thought of as being an example of [marriage / civil rights / whatever] so described, but will then think, “Is there really any reason it shouldn’t be?” The manoeuvre can veer off into being annoying or even deceptive, and I think that some politically involved users of the technique such as the American LGBT advocacy group called the “Human Rights Campaign” do not appreciate how confusing the use of a general term for a much more specific purpose can be to those who are less politically aware, but as a rhetorical technique, it’s fine.
I can also think of things to praise about Step (3). A party – or a doctrine – that does not define itself is pointless. “Vote for us! We’ll do everything!” If the definition concerned is a clear distillation of what that party believes and the other parties do not, it is right and necessary to eject dissenters. No party is obliged to host its opponents. This remains true if the party changes and the opponents being ejected are those who were orthodox yesterday, although I do feel sorry for the Old Believers in this situation.
Step (3) leads into a quagmire when the definition in question is as distant from the party’s main purpose as, well, Gaza is from Scotland. Or, worse yet, when a new Step (3) pops up every week.
As with the Gaza “genocide”, a pattern of making acceptance of a newly-altered definition a condition of continued membership was followed – indeed pioneered – by the SNP with regard to the meaning of the word “woman”. That went very badly for the party, and also for the Scottish trans women it was meant to help. It did not have to be this way. Cast your mind back seven or eight years. Theresa May was Prime Minister. The Equalities Minister was Justine Greening. When Greening announced a bill to enable transgender people to choose their sex more easily, the standard view was mild satisfaction that this reform was being proposed by a Conservative government.
It started to go wrong for the SNP when they reduced their position to four words: “Trans women are women”. Just as John Mason balked this week at accepting that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide, while still expressing sympathy for the people of Gaza, so quite a few SNP politicians balked at that definition of “woman” while still stressing that they remained “committed to human rights, equality and dignity for all people”. Several of the MPs and MSPs who signed that letter in 2019 have since left or been thrown out of the party. Things came to a head in 2023 when a double rapist now called Isla Bryson was remanded to a women’s jail. Faced with a wave of popular anger, the then First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, backed down and effectively introduced a third legal gender to Scottish law, that of “rapist”. Once punctured, the four word rule “Trans women are women” soon deflated entirely in Scotland, and I think the same is happening across the English-speaking world. The new dominant four word rule is “Transwomen are men”. It would have been better to let people agree to differ.
Having seen how well insisting on a novel definition of “woman” worked out for Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney appears to have decided to see if insisting on a novel definition of “genocide” is going to work any better for him.
Why do parties nowadays so often try to force an immediate yes-or-no answer on an issue, proudly insisting that there should be “no debate”, when it is obvious that in that case many of their own supporters are going to answer “no”? Why do they compound the error by doing it on issues that most of their supporters did not previously care about?
One should aim to seek out good expositions of arguments with which one usually disagrees. I found an example via the UK Politics subreddit, this piece by James O’Malley: “No, the government isn’t planning to introduce ID cards”.
The article made me think slightly more kindly of the previous Conservative government and slightly less apprehensively about the plans of the new Labour government. Or have I been misled, and Labour’s resurrection of a failed Conservative policy is exactly as sinister as I always thought it was?
A young cosmopolitan such as I did not need the foreign terms explained. When well-meaning people tried to tell me that the “Cookie Monster” was equivalent to a “Biscuit Monster”, or that the “trash can” in which Oscar the Grouch resided was the same as a dustbin, I responded, with some hauteur, that I already knew these things. There was, however, one thing that I did not understand about Sesame Street, and that was why on earth at some point in every episode the announcer would say something along the lines of, “Today’s show is brought to you by the letter P and the number 6”.
Oh well. I liked the puppets.
I remain a fan of the letter P and the number 6. But when it comes to the American media I consume nowadays, I no longer like the puppets.
Oh, I can sympathise a little with the American newspapers for dutifully hastening to parrot every Word of the Week that the Harris campaign gives them. It is human nature to follow the herd. Although, as Glenn Greenwald put it in this tweet, “Not even herd animals are this flagrant about it. You tell me how and why corporate media constantly speaks from the same exact script this way, verbatim.” “Not happiness, not glee, not delight, not jubilation.” The cue card says JOY.
Until Kamala’s JOY expires and the next card comes up. The next card is Donald Trump’s dress sense, or lack of it.
As I said, I can understand, if not admire, the obedience of the American press. But why do British newspapers feel the need to immediately follow suit in complying with the “TRUMP’S SUITS” order?
Cue the Telegraph: The meaning behind Trump’s ill-fitting suits
Cue the Guardian: Donald Trump’s weird clothes: from shoulder pads to extremely long ties, what do they mean?
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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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