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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The captain of the Australian women’s football team, Sam Kerr, is awaiting trial in the UK on a charge of “racially aggravated harassment” for allegedly calling a London police officer a “stupid white bastard”.
Craig Foster, a prominent former player for the Australian national team, the Socceroos, intially said that Kerr should resign if convicted, because racism is bad.
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“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.”
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“Craig Foster apologises to Sam Kerr after arguing her alleged remark to UK police officer was racist”, reports the Guardian.
Foster last week urged Football Australia to strip Kerr of the Matildas captaincy if the allegation was proven, to make a stand against racism. He said: “Interpersonal racism against a white person … is still racism.”
But on Saturday he explained that he had changed his mind.
“Like many, I mistakenly thought that comments that referenced any colour and were discriminatory, demeaning or hostile were a form of racism. I apologise to Sam for that mistake,” Foster wrote on X.
“Judging from the coverage, comments and conversations we’re all having, every day, there were major gaps in knowledge about how to deal with situations where the descriptor ‘white’ is used in a derogatory way.
“As many experts and leading anti-racism groups have pointed out, interpersonal comments can be offensive, abusive or inappropriate, however, racism can only be perpetrated against a marginalised person or group, which anti-racism frameworks are specifically designed to protect.”
Four points:
1) Anyone believe Craig Foster’s claim that he thought calling someone a “white bastard” was racist until “experts and leading anti-racism groups” told him otherwise? His apology was so obviously made under pressure that it came across almost as parody.
2) Calling someone a “white bastard” is racist. Obviously.
3) Calling someone a “white bastard” is not “racially aggravated harassment”. It was just words. It must be annoying being a cop and having people insult you quite often, but the only difference between this and a thousand other drunken outbursts is that the presence of the word “white” enabled the cop concerned to slap a ridiculous charge on Kerr.
4) I have a low opinion of the conduct of all of Sam Kerr, Craig Foster and the police officer.
There is something special about this government having enacted some of the most socialist policies of any UK government ever and still being loathed as right wing Tories.
In doing this, they have alienated many of those who would normally vote for them and failed to attract any of those who would never vote for them.
Hence they are deservedly in deep shit.
– Hugh Osmond
Tim Newman, making sure that the EU’s work is appreciated as it should be:
The “DMA” to which Pauline refers is the EU’s Digital Markets Act. There is more commentary from Kevin A. Bryan here.
I have voted for the Conservative Party in every election since 1979 bar one (I voted Brexit Party in the final Euro elections). However, I have told anyone who asks that I will be voting Reform in the next general election.
This often provokes a response along the lines of: “Reform cannot win, all that does is let Labour in.”
To which my reply is: “Yes, I know. But you clearly misunderstand my motives. If Reform wins a few seats, that’s great. But getting some Reform MPs in Westminster in the next general election is not why I am voting for them, that would just be the cherry on top. I am voting Reform because I don’t just want the ‘Conservatives’ to lose, I want them to be utterly destroyed. I want the ‘Conservatives’ as currently understood to be completely discredited, to collapse, to end. And the beauty of it is, Reform can do that to the Tories without winning a single seat themselves.”
As G.K. Chesterton aptly put it:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
For all her flaws, Liz Truss was the last chance to save the party, to actually nudge it in kinda sorta the right direction. But she was defenestrated with indecent haste, proving that whilst the Tories were once a ‘broad church’, that is no longer the case. The Blue Blairite Wets will tolerate no challenge to the orthodoxy, that of an ever deeper technocratic regulatory police state, albeit one in which the technocrats are self-referential buffoons, the regulations are self-defeating, and the police are partisan, cowardly and inept. For there to ever again be an actual small-c conservative party in the UK, the capital-C ‘Conservatives’ need to burn, only then is there any chance something better can arise from the ashes, a movement to correct those mistakes the Tories rejoiced in preserving.
A Tory voter declining to vote in the next general election sends a message: “I am disgusted.”
A Tory voter voting for Reform in the next general election sends a slightly different message: “I am disgusted and fuck you.”
The name of the woman being led into captivity in this picture is Naama Levy. The photo was taken to celebrate her capture.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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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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