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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Got that? Britain is a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and the government has to show it has a plan to address people’s concerns and provide opportunties for everyone to flourish. And, er, there is a link between concerns people have about (checks notes) ‘where the government is acting on their behalf and on their interests with a range of factors’.
You have to laugh, even through the tears: these are the people who are in charge. Britain is a successful country? And this government has a…plan? But the important point to emphasise here is that Rayner, and the people around her, are simply constitutionally incapable of recognising the problem itself, or the solution. They actually think that ‘immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services’ is just one of a ‘range of factors’ destabilising society, alongside ‘economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, technological change and the amount of time people were spending alone online, and declining trust in institutions’. And they actually think that the remedy for this is just ‘investment’ in ‘deprived areas’ so as to allow people to ‘flourish’.
British readers are familiar with this mindset: typically what it means is that money gets funnelled into regeneration schemes that kit out otherwise forgotten places like Newport, Dundee or Middlesborough with nice new shopping precincts and art galleries nobody visits. The idea, more or less, is that opposition to uncontrolled immigration is really just a feature of economic insecurity and, perhaps, a lack of civic pride. And if government can therefore just press the ‘grow’ button a bit harder, people will feel better off and pride will re-emerge, and our ‘successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country’ will simply become more successful yet.
– David McGrogan
“This [anti-abundance] mentality ultimately stems from the 1970s `Limits to Growth’ report, which predicted that natural resources would run out, prices would shoot through the roof, and there would be mass starvation.
“Reality has shown this to be bunk. Yet it lives on in decision-takers’ minds, reinforced by the belief that climate change requires a reduction in our global footprint as human beings and use less of everything. And it’s strengthened by a fundamentally elitist, snobbish mindset about economic growth, the view that growth is all about the hoi polloi buying more `stuff’ they don’t need, rather than what it is: the advancement of human possibility for all of us during our limited time on the planet.
“Look hard – actually you don’t need to look hard – and you see it everywhere. Consider the disdain for `cheap food’ and the moral panic about UPFs, surely a fabricated concept, and one whose principal benefit is psychological, allowing well-off politicians and campaigners to play Lady Bountiful telling ordinary voters how to eat. Think of the sneering at big cars, or worse still, people with more than one car, the suburban lifestyle, houses with gardens instead of egg-box flats, package holidays instead of leisurely eco-travel.
“Contemplate all the tedious lifestyle preaching, the hectoring of supermarkets about packaging, the determination to build houses with tiny windows and small rooms and then to ban air conditioning as it’s too damaging to the environment.”
– David Frost, Daily Telegraph.
Note: “UPFs” are ultra-processed foods, which now seem to have achieved the same Voldemort status as tobacco and booze.
Regarding the “abundance mindset” approach, I recommend this book, Fossil Future (2022), of a year or so ago by Alex Epstein. Another is Merchants of Despair, by Robert Zubrin. Last but not least is this book, written more than 25 years ago – The Intellectuals and The Masses – by John Carey. He shows how, from the 19th Century and into the 20th, a lot of supposedly clever people hated the rising prosperity of the broad mass of the public, not simply out of some concern for the natural world (much of which was sentimental bullshit), but because they hated people, and ultimately, themselves.
The result of [Argentina’s] shock therapy has been a stunning recovery. Milei has brought monthly inflation down from 13 percent to 2 percent. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7 percent. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks—indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42 percent, when Milei was elected, to 31 percent. There is much work still to be done, but a new program from the IMF will provide $12 billion of new lending upfront and potentially another $2 billion, which should enable Milei to remove the remaining capital and exchange controls without reigniting inflation.
Most governments that cut their fiscal deficit by five percentage points of GDP pay a heavy political price for the resulting pain. Margaret Thatcher took nearly all her years in office to get the British public sector borrowing requirement down from 4.5 percent of GDP when she was elected in 1979 to −1.1 percent 10 years later.
– Niall Ferguson
In December 2023, I asked “Non-sarcastically, why am I so sure that this image is generated by AI?” and listed the reasons why I thought that a picture purporting to show gleeful Israeli soldiers in Gaza was a fake.
In July 2025, I must modify my question. Why am I mostly sure that this image, also purporting to show events in Gaza, is generated by AI?
I saw the picture in a Telegraph story written by Melanie Swan and called “More than 90 dead in UN aid truck massacre in Gaza”. The caption says, “Injured Palestinians are taken to hospital after over 90 were killed waiting for humanitarian aid Credit: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty”.
Here are some of the reasons why I think the picture is AI-generated:
I always start by counting their fingers and toes. The left foot of the guy holding his knee appears to have six of the latter.
The little toe of the left foot of the bare-legged boy sitting in the centre looks wrong; too wide, no toenail – just a wedge of flesh.
Staying with the boy, his legs seem malformed – the distance from knee to ankle too long, the thigh too short and too narrow.
His right arm is too short and floppy, like the vestigial arm of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The little finger of the hand of the guy with the beard seated on the right of the picture does not join up to the hand correctly – either that or he was unfortunate enough to be born with his left hand where his right hand ought to be.
The writing on that white bag on the shelf is blurred in a way characteristic of A.I.
Moving back to the left of the picture, where is the long, thin arm pointing diagonally downwards coming from? In what position would a person be lying or standing in order to have their arm come out at that angle?
Compare the thin arm to the arms of the other people in the picture. It looks too long and thin to be true; an adult’s arm would be thicker, a child’s arm would be shorter. And, though I strain to see it, the hand looks almost as if it has two thumbs.
If you look at the picture under high magnification, it looks almost like someone has drawn around the figures with a Sharpie. These black outlines are particularly noticeable with the long-legged boy and the man clutching his knee.
This one is more speculative, but do the interiors of Israeli or Palestinian ambulances actually look like that? The (oddly sparse) contents of the shelves suggest a medical purpose, but the shelves themselves look like they come from someone’s kitchen.
Taken separately, all of the above points could be explained away. Lenses distort. Human bodies vary. Hunger makes people thin. Perhaps I will end up deleting this post in shame at having questioned the suffering of real human beings. Perhaps, but, having been able to find at least eight oddities, I think that Getty Images would be justified in putting a few pointed questions to Ali Jadallah.
However, I was right to say in 2023 that “this image is a great deal more realistic than those of only a few months ago. My spidey-sense for fake pictures will not last much longer”. It is even more true now.
Added 22/07/2025: Reading the comments to the Telegraph article, a lot of the commenters are saying, like me, that one of the photographs the Telegraph has used to illustrate it is fake. Only they are talking about a different picture. This one:
It shows a boy running away while a cloud of smoke rises from the buildings behind him.
With the picture of the men in the vehicle that I talked about above, my suspicions were raised the instant I saw it. The hyper-defined outlines and sharp colours gave a sort of slick, sweaty appearance to the flesh of the people depicted that I have often seen in A.I. art and noticed on that picture even before I started counting their digits. There is nothing like that in this second picture. The strange things about it suggest Photoshop rather than DALL-E or Midjourney. The border of the smoke cloud is at a suspiciously neat 45 degree angle. There is also something suspicious about the way the buildings to the left of the boy merge into the smoke. But the main problem is the running boy himself. The photographer appears to have caught him in mid-air – fine, that can happen when taking a photo of a person leaping or running, and catching that moment is usually considered the mark of a successful, dramatic picture – but he is too high off the ground to be plausible. And he has no shadow.
Or does he? There are two darker almost-horizontal lines or one slightly bent line below and to the left of him that could be his shadow. And before anyone brings up the similar horizontal lines to the right of him, those could be the shadow of a tree or pole just outside the picture. He is still suspended at an unlikely height, though. All in all, I am less convinced of the fakeness of this picture than of the other one – and the whole point of this post was that it is getting harder and harder to tell.
We are entering an age in which decisive authentication of a photograph will no longer be possible. The question will be whether one trusts the source. I do not trust anything coming out of Gaza.
It has almost become a feature of the English sporting calendar, like the Epsom Derby and the FA Cup final, to watch a local heavyweight lose to Oleksandr Usyk in a packed football stadium or on prime-time television. Five Englishmen, on eight separate occasions, have tried and failed across two different weight divisions to beat the Ukrainian champion. None has succeeded. When Daniel Dubois was knocked out in the fifth round on Saturday night, before a sold-out crowd of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium, it seemed like a sporting affirmation of Einstein’s definition of stupidity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
– Hugo Timms
Also this is amusing.
The High Court in England & Wales has handed down a judgment declaring that the Chief Constable of Northumbria Police – a force covering Northumberland, Newcastle and Sunderland, (basically the upper part of north-east England) acted irrationally in letting her officers participate in and support a ‘Pride’ event in 2024.
In short, the issue was that the Claimant (‘Plaintiff’ to our friends over the Ocean), a ‘gender-critical lesbian’, objected to members of the local Police Force Force and/or members of the Force associating themselves with the views of supporters of gender ideology and transgender activists by actively participating in the ‘Northern Pride Event in Newcastle in July 2024. The Claimant’s belief is that as a person who is ‘gender-critical’, she believes that a person’s sex is an immutable characteristic and that “gender ideology”, which recognises a person’s gender identity, is “wrong and dangerous“. To cut a long story short, the learned judge, Mr Justice Linden, upheld the complaint. Putting it simply, the judge looked at the Chief Constable’s reasons for authorising her officers to participate in the Pride Event and found them to be irrational, i.e. there was no way that the decision could have been taken by a rational Chief Constable.
The crux of the case was that police officers have a duty to be impartial and to appear to be impartial, the Chief Constable decided that the duty to be ‘impartial’ was subject to the ‘public sector equality duty’ (a general duty used wrongly here as a ‘catch-all’ to justify any deviation from the norms of acceptable conduct), but the judge said that it was the other way around, the duty to be impartial is an absolute duty, and the ‘public sector equality duty’ is a duty to have regard to the need to achieve equality, rather than the need to achieve it. The Equality cart was put before the Impartiality Horse. At the end of the judgment is a rather stinging finding about the Defendant, the Chief Constable, in paragraph 136:
I have already explained that the Defendant’s reasoning did not provide a rational basis for her decision. After careful consideration I have also concluded that the effect of the activities challenged by the Claimant was sufficiently obvious for the Defendant’s decision to be outside the range of reasonable decisions open to her.
I should point out for our readers that in England & Wales, judges are appointed by a commission, and the notion of a judge being akin to an ‘Obama judge’, a ‘Biden judge’ or a ‘Trump appointee’ is alien here, but of course the exalted echelons of higher legal circles contain in the main the sort of people who, holding a conference on law to all comers, would see nothing untoward in sneering at a Conservative government’s legal difficulties or Brexit, and the ‘Overton window’ in the legal community is more like a pinprick hole in a camera obscura, but that is not the point. What I would say is that in England & Wales, the more senior judges will tend to stick to the law and this may produce apparently surprising results, like this case.
So what happens now? Well in respect of last year’s event, nothing other than this court’s finding. However, this judgment, although from a judge who is in the first-level of the English courts, amounts to a legal ‘slap in the face with a wet fish‘ to activist police officers and will no doubt embolden those who seek to reduce or dilute the endless stream of ‘agitprop’ we see coming from our police forces, and to an extent in the wider public sector. It also helps to show that there is a difference between the activist version of the law and reality. Will the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria take any steps like asking the irrational Chief Constable to resign? Well, I’d be more surprised by that than the Second Coming.
Now the thing is:
You can gatekeep in Europe
You can gatekeep in the United States
You can gatekeep in every single economy of the West
But you absolutely cannot gatekeep in China, for there are no tools at all, that would allow you to do that
Like what would you even do to restrict the new entrees?
Intellectual property? lmao
Some other lawfare? Again, just like the enforcement of intellectual property rights, that would ultimately rely upon the cooperation of state, and the state in China – unlike in the West – just would not cooperate.
High profit margins in the West are ultimately based upon the artificial restraints upon the new entrees, and upon the state-sponsored gatekeeping. You keep your prices high, because any new entree on the market will be scared away by the force of the state machine. And in China, the state machine just wouldn’t do that. That is why Chinese competition is getting so close to perfect, and that is why prices (and profits margins) in China, can be getting so low.
– Kamil Galeev
But since October 7, 2023, it feels as if the entire informational ecosystem has collapsed under a tidal wave of noise. I’ve never seen so many people scream and tweet and chant and repost without any regard for logic, facts, or history. Emotion has not just trumped reason, it has obliterated it.
The tragedy is not that people are choosing sides; it’s that they’re doing so blindly, ferociously, and with such utter detachment from fact. The battle isn’t just on the ground anymore, it’s for the mind. And most people are losing that battle without even realizing they’ve been drafted into it.
What used to be propaganda is now performance art. What used to be journalism is now tribalism. What used to be analysis is now algorithm.
– Almen Dean
Never ever trust the French and I am not saying this to be mean or edgy.
Many seem to have fallen for Macron and France’s theatrics and rhetoric in recent years.
France has always seen itself as a superpower and always will, and it wants to wield influence and play a dominant role in European and global affairs.
It is not going on endlessly about Ukraine and Europe out of a sense of charity or a desire to do the right thing, but rather because it wants to exploit recent developments in order to take the lead and exert greater influence.
France wants a stronger European security architecture precisely because it believes it can exert influence over it to serve its own interests.
Historically, France has always been reserved about its NATO membership and American dominance in the alliance because it wants to do things its own way and, ideally, maintain its influence.
– ‘Terrorism Guy‘ – National Security Adviser to the Internet 😀
“Voting age to be lowered to 16 in UK by next general election”, the Guardian reports.
No, this does not mean you can leave school. You are too young and irresponsible to make such a big decision.
“Straight white author’s career finally takes off after he tells woke publishers he’s gender queer Nigerian”, reports the Daily Mail.
The artist formerly and now once again known as Aaron Barry is truly a bard for our times:
From 2023 to 2024, Barry had managed to fool 30 respected literary journals around the globe and got about 50 of his ‘nonsensical’ poems published.
He published dozens of pieces as Adele Nwankwo, a ‘gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,’ including one titled After Coming Out: A Wrestling Promo.’
‘The CisBoys thought they could gang up on me and put an end to my championship pursuit?’ the poem published in 2023 reads. ‘Hah! I’ve got Toni Morrison books that hit harder than those bozos.
‘Oh, and this would set the crowd ablaze, cause them to whisk in rattle homemade signs (“The Nigerian Nightmare,” “Nwankwo 11:16,” Step on My Balls, Kween Adele!)’
‘The first poem to ever get picked up was the “yah jah gah hah” one,’ Barry told The Free Press in an article published on Wednesday.
He was referring to one of Nwankwo’s poems that was published in the Tofu Ink Arts Press, which has a mission of ‘amplifying the voices of the under-represented.’
The poem kicks off with a Toni Morrison quote about ‘navigating a white male world’ and features lines such as ‘voodoo prak tik casta oyal drip drip.’
‘It was very obviously nonsense. Just fake bad Creole,’ Barry explained to the outlet as he chuckled, baffled that the poem was accepted to begin with.
Another one of Barry’s characters, b.h. fein, whose pronouns are ‘its/complicated,’ was actually nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net Award.
The intro of the award-worthy piece, titled Shakespeare’s C*msl*t, reads: ‘To ?️ or not to ?️ William Shakespeare’s ??? little c*msl*t ??? : that is the question.
A 2024 interview with b.h. fein appears in a magazine called “The Cry Lounge” here:
hi there, reader! i’m b. h. fein (they/them or it’s/complicated)~~! i write lots of stuff (mostly in lowercase), but my gluten-free bread and vegan butter is free verse poetry. i haven’t been sending my stuff out for too too long, but i feel like i recently cracked the code as to what i can offer the poetry world
They wasn’t wrong there.
-*-
I was going to add a “Related Post” link to my Samizdata post about Rahila Khan, whose short stories about the lives of Asian girls and women in a depressed English town were much admired in the literary world of the late 1980s until she turned out to be the Rev. Toby Forward, an Anglican vicar. Virago, the publisher, had all its unsold copies of Down the Road, Worlds Away pulped. The post I thought I remembered writing seems to have metaphorically shared their fate.
… no, of course not. It isn’t the IDF doing it so who cares?
However, I fully expect to read criticism in the MSM of IDF airstrikes aimed at mitigating Islamist attack on the Druze.
The only place the Druze are safe is… Israel.
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