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 have been teaching, practising and writing about criminal law for 60 years. In all those years, I have never seen or heard of a case in which the defendant has been criminally prosecuted for failing to disclose the payment of what prosecutors call “hush money”. Alexander Hamilton paid hush money to cover up an affair with a married woman. Many others have paid hush money since. If the legislature wanted to criminalise such conduct they could easily enact the statute prohibiting the payment of hush money or requiring its disclosure. They have declined to do so.
Prosecutors cannot simply make up new crimes by jerry-rigging a concoction of existing crimes, some of which are barred by the statute of limitations others of which are beyond the jurisdiction of state prosecutors.
and
If the defendant were not Donald Trump and the venue were not Manhattan, this ought to be a slam dunk win for the defendant. Indeed, this extraordinarily weak case would never have been bought.
I am not a Trump political supporter. I voted for Joe Biden in the last election and I have an open mind about the coming election. But I want it to be fair. Whoever loses the election should not be able to complain about election interference by the weaponisation of the criminal justice system for partisan advantage.
All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, should be appalled at this selective prosecution.
I am curious as to whether Professor Dershowitz’s article will be appearing in any of the American papers as well as in the Telegraph. It is very common for British papers to reprint articles about American affairs, but a quick Google showed no sign of this one other than in the Telegraph itself. One would think an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School would have American newspapers queuing up to publish his views on one of the top U.S. legal stories of the day. Maybe the layers of editors and fact-checkers for which the American media are famed are just taking their time on this one.
This interview is fascinating and I think Truss come out rather well in that she identifies the problem UK faces with great precision. There are many things she clearly can’t say for obvious political reasons (but the hosts say for her anyway 😀 ) & the endless advert interruptions are annoying, but this is well worth watching.
The article is framed around the decline of Scientific American but branches out into discussion of the decline of the scientific American, and, indeed the decline of the scientifically-minded citizen of the world.
You used to read about such people everywhere. You used to meet such people everywhere. Every nation had them, not that they set much store by nations. They were not scientists themselves, but they were scientifically-minded. They knew how to make a “crystal set” out of old bits of junk so they could build a clandestine radio in Stalag Luft III, and how to build a copper still if they fell through a timewarp. Their heroes were the scientists they read about in Scientific American and New Scientist, the ones who would not fudge an error bar to save their lives, the ones whose dogged refusal to let an anomaly go unexplained led to great discoveries.
They were good chaps, these not-quite-scientists. Well, most of them were chaps. I declare myself a sister of the brotherhood by repeating that the hypothesis that men are on average better at science was not disproved when Larry Summers was fired as president of Harvard for saying that the possibility should be considered. That was the point Summers was making: the true scientist is not afraid to follow the facts wherever they lead. And just behind the actual scientists in this quest came the journalists and popularisers of science and just behind them came the scientifically-minded men and women who thought the future would be full of people like them – but the future turned out differently…
One of the few science journalists who did take the lab-leak question seriously was Donald McNeil, Jr., the veteran New York Times reporter forced out of the paper in an absurd DEI panic. After leaving the Times—and like several other writers pursuing the lab-leak question—McNeil published his reporting on his own Medium blog. It is telling that, at a time when leading science publications were averse to exploring the greatest scientific mystery of our time, some of the most honest reporting on the topic was published in independent, reader-funded outlets. It’s also instructive to note that the journalist who replaced McNeil on the Covid beat at the Times, Apoorva Mandavilli, showed open hostility to investigating Covid’s origins. In 2021, she famously tweeted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” It would be hard to compose a better epitaph to the credibility of mainstream science journalism.
Scruton gave a lecture on Wittgenstein to a private circle of intellectuals. He was quick to notice, however, that “they were far more interested in the fact that I was visiting at all”, rather than deliberations on the rather impenetrable Austrian thinker. The sense of togetherness was, according to the recollection of a Czech dissident, “the most important morale booster for us”.
It wasn’t just intellectuals who were in peril. The country, Scruton discovered, contained a sophisticated network of secret agents and snitches. Denunciation was prolific and social scrutiny omnipresent. No one, including the most inconsequential citizens, could feel safe from the Big Brother of the state and social pressure of their peers. The Czech author and playwright Václav Havel made this atmosphere famous when describing the deliberations of a greengrocer, who had to place a pro-regime slogan on display in his shop to avoid being denounced or judged unfavourably by his neighbours.
It is 2024, and in many ways the positions of Britain and Czechoslovakia (now Czechia) have reversed. It is now in Prague where freedom of speech and thought is tolerated, and it is in Britain where it is under assault – sometimes on the social level, but increasingly on the legal level as the recent legislation in Scotland shows. True, people seldom go to prison for expressing their opinions – like Havel did in Czechoslovakia – but lives have been destroyed nonetheless. Sackings, cancellations and character assassinations have proliferated in the country that was once hailed as the cradle of liberalism.
Fifty years ago this week, Lord Hailsham laid the foundation stone for the University of Buckingham. Even back in the 1970s, eminent scholars feared the increasing encroachment of the state on higher education, with deleterious consequences for academic freedom if it was allowed to continue. If a university could be created that did not receive government funding, they argued, then it could escape the need for state regulations. Buckingham was born as a beacon for independence, a bastion of free speech and freedom of thought.
Fast forward 50 years. Our founders would be shocked to see the all-encompassing regulations emerging from the Office for Students (OfS), the higher education regulator in England which took over university regulation in 2018. There are 25 sets of regulations covering an enormous range of topics, including its current major foci, equality of opportunity and quality.
Thank goodness that the University of Buckingham is exempt from this interference! Wait a minute, it’s not:
A private university like Buckingham, which doesn’t receive any direct government funding, has to satisfy all but three of these 25 sets of regulations – known as “Conditions of Registration” – even though ostensibly the regulations are to ensure taxpayer value for money. If a university is found to be in breach of any of these conditions, then the OfS has a variety of sanctions at its disposal, including removal of a university’s title and status, even if these were awarded through a venerable Royal Charter.
The Sage of Kettering and I have been on another trip, this time to Copenhagen, obliging the self-loathing poster of that poster, with flits over the Øresund to Malmö and to Helsingborg in Sweden. On landing in Copenhagen’s pleasant airport, we immediately leave Denmark for Sweden by train, taking in the well-known bridge, onto which we emerge after a few minutes in a tunnel. It is an impressive piece of engineering. Bizarrely, well, to anyone from the UK, it was finished in time and within budget despite them finding over 20 WW2 bombs. At our first stop just over the bridge, the sign announces a check by the Swedish border guard, but nothing materialises.
We then emerge into central Malmö late lunchtime. It is all rather pleasant, none of this violence one hears about. Malmö, soon to host the Eurovision Song Contest, is a fine enough city, thinking back, reminiscent of Liverpool in some ways but without the decay seen today. There are many fine buildings, testament to a prosperous late 19th century.
We have a lunch of meatballs and beer at Gustav Adolphus square, outside in April,
before going to pay our respects at the Raoul Wallenberg park.
On the way back, we see a group of four police officers challenge some youths in the middle of a square.
The architecture here is mainly modern, but with lots of little gems.
In the Old Town core (Gamla Stan) it certainly has a nice feel to it.
Wokeism. Climate extremism. Kindly authoritarianism. This is now the operating system of Western, ‘centrist’ politics. Take Joe Biden, America’s somnambulant president. At the 2020 election, even anti-woke liberals insisted this scion of the old Democratic establishment – a man so old he can’t even be slurred as a Boomer (he’s actually Silent Generation) – was the man to return America to normality, before the BLM riots and MAGA mania. ‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden’, declared a piece in the Atlantic, arguing that Trump is to the culture war what kerosene is to a dumpster fire, fueling the woke extremes. That take has aged like milk. On his first day in office, Biden signed sweeping Executive Orders on ‘racial equity’ and gender ideology. He later tried to apportion Covid relief on the basis of race. He’s a Net Zero zealot. He has allowed the justice system to be weaponised against his opponents. He invited Dylan Mulvaney to the White House, FFS. Biden’s return to ‘normalcy’ has been so successful millions of Americans are starting to wonder if Donald Trump might actually be the saner choice.
Take a look around you (you don’t have to live in the UK to play this trick, of course): does it strike you that you live in a country in which ‘freedom of speech, assembly, religion, privacy and much more’ are guaranteed? And does it strike you that those freedoms – ‘and much more’ – have been given greater protection since 1998, or less? It strikes me rather that they are becoming ever more contingent, and ever more subject to suspicion. And this is absolutely no accident; it is in part because when the HRA came into effect in the UK, it ushered in the notion that most rights are ‘qualified’ rather than absolute, meaning that that they can be constrained where ‘proportionate’ to the achievement of some legitimate aim of government. The result of this is that rights such as those to freedom of speech or assembly, which were once more or less absolute in the UK except where subject to clear constraint in the form of statutory or common law rules, are now in large part dependent on the whims of judges’ determinations about whether or not interference with the right in question would be legitimate and proportionate. (This is often framed, with respect to freedom of speech, around the rubric of what would be ‘acceptable in a democratic society’ to say – in the eyes, of course, of the judge.)
In summary, then, the idea that human rights law is a body of rules which are necessary to constrain the State, and that the ECHR and its incorporation into UK law by the HRA represented a new era of increased ‘dignity and respect’, is simply not true. What is rather true is that law will tend to follow politics, and indeed will be bent to serve political interests – and human rights law is no different.
“Enough is enough. It’s time to stop this nonsense. Students should be expelled and acts of violence should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Foreign students who harass Jewish students or commit acts of violence and vandalism should have their student visas revoked and be deported immediately. Colleges and universities that cannot or will not protect their Jewish students should suffer consequences as well, having their federal funding suspended. Alumni should suspend donations to their alma maters. And under no circumstances should universities cancel graduations or force students into virtual classrooms. There should be thorough investigations, and university presidents should be forced to resign, or be fired.”
So how do we protect democracy in the area of social media? There are five approaches:
Ideally, we should agree to ban bots and to make the use of fake profiles a criminal offence.
There is also the matter of requiring people to use their real names, because freedom of expression should not be hidden behind pseudonyms.
Then there’s the question of whether we should create revocable social media licences for every user, so that dangerous people have no place online.
We need to consider how we can regulate algorithms so that we can revitalise the diversity of opinions in social networks.
And we also have to improve media skills.
For all that Björn Höcke is supposed to be a “populist authoritarian” opposed to representative government, I’ve never heard him say anything this crazy. Voigt, meanwhile, is a leading politician for the officially “democratic” Christian Democratic Union (you know they are democratic because the word is in their name), and he’s actually dreaming of requiring Germans to obtain state-issued licenses for permission to post their thoughts to the internet.
I added the emphasis to show that the bit about diversity of opinion wasn’t just me or Eugyppius being sarcastic. Mario Voigt really did advocate for revocable social media licences to get those people he deems dangerous off the internet and in the next breath say that he wants the people still allowed to be on the internet to have a greater diversity of opinions.
I received an email asking me to contribute to Yale for my class reunion. My response: "Last year I faced suspension and a trespassing charge if I returned to campus without proof of a 5th COVID shot. Perhaps you can ask one of the fine Yalies bravely harassing their Jewish…
AJ Edelman, OLY, MBA
@realajedelman
I received an email asking me to contribute to Yale for my class reunion.
My response:
“Last year I faced suspension and a trespassing charge if I returned to campus without proof of a 5th COVID shot.
Perhaps you can ask one of the fine Yalies bravely harassing their Jewish peers instead. They’re easy to find; they’re hosting a Jew hatred festival in the middle of campus and calling for violent intifada.”
12:30 AM · Apr 30, 2024
Now that’s what I call an effective non-violent protest.
Another day, another fatuous ‘fact’ check from Reuters. This time the news agency accuses the Daily Sceptic of “cherry-picking” Arctic sea ice extent data to provide a “misleading” story. Being accused of “cherry picking” by an outfit that funds a course for journalists that encourages them to pick a fruit such as a mango and discuss why it isn’t as tasty as the year before due to climate change is beyond ridicule. Taking lectures on responsible journalism from a Net Zero-obsessed operation that has promoted a course speaker who has suggested “fines and imprisonments” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science is laughable, if also a tad sinister.
One of the activists called to admonish the Daily Sceptic with a ‘straw man’ argument was Walt Meier, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, who said: “Comparing two specific years is not an indicator for or against long-term changes”. The Daily Sceptic did not do that. Interestingly, this would appear to be the same Walt Meier whose comments on ”mind blowing” low winter levels of Antarctica sea ice last year made headlines around the world. Meier claimed at the time that it was “outside anything we have seen”. Happily, the Daily Sceptic was able to remind Meier that he had been part of a team a decade ago that cracked open the secrets of early Nimbus weather satellites and found a similar sea ice low in 1966. At the time, Meier commented that the Nimbus data show there is variability in Antarctica sea ice “that’s larger than any we have seen” since 1979.
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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