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.
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However, what followed was an extraordinary one-sided item. Newsnight’s presenter, Victoria Derbyshire, proceeded to hold a three-way discussion between herself, a Just Stop Oil activist, Indigo Rumbelow, and, er, Rupert Read, formerly of Extinction Rebellion. Read now leads an embryonic organisation called the Climate Majority Project, whose web page suggests it has a strikingly similar outlook to Extinction Rebellion.
There were obvious questions to ask Rumbelow: namely, who do you think you are, thinking you have the right to ruin a sporting event that is enjoyed by millions, either as participants or spectators? And why target a running event, which is surely all about doing something of which you ought to approve: getting about on foot?
There were questions to be asked of Extinction Rebellion, too – given that it has offered to ‘police’ the event. Are climate pressure groups now operating as a kind of protection racket, to which we are also supposed to go and negotiate before we are allowed to go about our day-to-day business?
None of these questions got asked. Rather, Newsnight first ran a short video in which it asserted that ‘violence’ was being shown towards climate protesters; it illustrated this partly with a police officer doing his job and arresting a member of a mob vandalising a building with red paint.
– Ross Clark
Android users (may be somewhat different on different makes of phone).
iPhone users.
Because if the Covid years have proven anything, only a crazed conspiracy theorist would believe governments would think nothing of using heightened fear to induce mass formation psychosis, thereby hugely increasing its power over every aspect of life, right?
I predict it will eventually be illegal to turn off such ‘warnings’ and phone makers will make it impossible, but then I am just a crazed conspiracy theorist 😉
“Two men admit removing body parts in ‘eunuch maker’ case”, reports the Guardian.
Two men have admitted removing body parts of a man who is accused of carrying out castrations and broadcasting the footage on his “eunuch maker” website.
Nathan Arnold, 48, a nurse from South Kensington, west London, admitted the partial removal of Marius Gustavson’s nipple in the summer of 2019.
Damien Byrnes, 35, from Tottenham, north London, admitted removing Gustavson’s penis on 18 February 2017.
Gustavson, who is originally from Norway, is said to have been the ringleader in a conspiracy involving up to 29 offences of extreme body modifications, the removal of body parts, the trade in body parts and the uploading of videos.
Given that these people were all consenting adults, I do not understand why their actions (other than the theft of the anaesthetic) should be a criminal offence, particularly as surgical operations to remove people’s penises are legal in male to female sex change operations. Does it make a difference in principle whether the appearance aimed for when surgically removing a penis is female or eunuchoid?
My question is not designed to provoke the reaction “Of course it should be legal to do this, just as it is legal to perform sex change operations”. Nor is it designed to provoke the reaction “Of course it should be illegal to perform sex change operations, just as it is illegal to do this.” I can see reasonable justification for saying that changing someone’s body to be like lots of other people’s bodies is much more likely to go well than changing their body to a form few others have. By “go well”, I mean be likely to increase the wellbeing of the person upon whom the operation is performed, or be less likely to decrease it, and also to go well in the same ways that any surgical operation is judged a success or a failure.
Related earlier Samizdata posts:
Discussion point: circumcision from October 2013.
Discussion point: can children consent to puberty blockers? What about other drastic treatments? from October 2020.
If you feel moved to comment, please seek neither to be offended nor to offend, and try not to get hung up by questions of terminology.
In the beginning there was Perun. He referred to there being Russian “mil-bloggers” on Telegram. For those who don’t know Telegram is essentially Twitter without “community guidelines”. Seeing as I was on Telegram following Ukrainian “mil-bloggers” it didn’t seem such a great leap to include a few of their Russian counterparts. Coz balance is really good isn’t it?
I eventually found 3 Russian mil-bloggers to follow. The first I found was Donbass Devushka. This was maybe a couple of months ago.
And now she’s hit the headlines.
It is claimed that she claimed to be a Russian living in Luhansk when in fact she is an ex-US Navy sailor living in Washington state. I never saw this claim; at least not on the Donbass Devushka – DD as I shall now refer to her – channel. Jake Broe has a good video about this.
It is claimed that she solicits donations ostensibly for Russians affected by the war and the donations have not reached any Russians, affected by the war or otherwise. I cannot recall seeing any such solicitation. If solicitation there be it certainly isn’t a regular occurrence. And anyway, where would you prefer money donated by gullible pro-Russians to end up?
It is claimed that she was the first person to publish images – doctored images no less – of the US intelligence documents which have been such a big story in the last couple of weeks. I don’t recall seeing any such post. If it were posted and I didn’t see it there are good reasons why I might not have done. DD has a bad case of blogorrhea. Every day she – I say “she”, she claims the channel has multiple authors – posts something like 170 entries. Getting through that takes time. It is not helped by a bug in Telegram for Mac which means that page down doesn’t work. Fortunately it is helped by another bug in Telegram for Mac which from time to time will skip 50-100 entries.
Not that it matters much. Even if I had seen it I wouldn’t have paid a great deal of attention. The published images don’t look like an intelligence assessment to me. Colour! Flashy fonts! Large pieces of paper! In an intelligence document! Get away! And, anyway, I wouldn’t have had the skills to make sense of it.
So, if I managed to miss the big story what did I learn from following DD? A few things. I should point out that from the very beginning I was very sceptical about the things she said. I rapidly came to the conclusion that the channel was pure Kremlin propaganda. There was at no point any departure from the Kremlin line or criticism of Russia or Russian performance in the war. I was more interested in what sorts of stories she was promoting and what arguments she was making. Anything unverifiable – like a headling-grabbing intelligence report – I mostly ignored. So, a list:
- The “Ukrainians are Nazis” is an incredibly important line for the Russians.
- Syria – for some reason – is a big deal to the Russians
- …as is the idea of a “multi-polar” world
- Russia uses drones. Fewer than Ukraine but the best quality footage I have seen is Russian.
- While Ukrainians refer to their enemy as “orcs”; the Russians refer to their enemy as “Khokhols”
- There are occasional claims of Ukrainian brutality
How’s about that for an anti-climax?
Saturday, the German government closed its last four nuclear power plants, finally fulfilling Angela Merkel’s Fukushima-era promise to destroy her nation’s most abundant source of safe, clean, cheap power — in the middle of an energy crisis. To fill the giant hole in the nation’s energy portfolio, the famously “environmentally conscious” Germans will be burning more coal, a degree of stupidity almost impossible to fathom. In America, this specific genre of Clown World policy was last observed at the Diablo Canyon power plant, which the state attempted to shut down in the middle of its own series of energy-related crises. At the last possible moment, following a tremendous groundswell of counter activism, that decision was reversed. But today, with the activist group “Friends of Earth” trying to override this rare California flirtation with logic, and with activists around the world celebrating the end of German nuclear power, rational policy is once again on the wrong side of political momentum. So let’s just break it down: poverty and global warming are both real, and they exist because of “environmentalism.” If you stand opposed to nuclear, you are either 1) too dumb to comprehend the risks inherent of the technology, 2) dedicated to some nefarious ulterior motive, or 3) pseudo-religiously obsessed with the belief mass murder is not only inevitable, but necessary to keep the human population “in check.” There is no steelman for these positions. The debate is over. Nuclear is the way.
– Mike Solana
The race lobby would have us believe that Britain’s minority population is oppressed and victimised. An entire industry now exists to sustain and perpetuate this claim. Many in that lobby seem to believe they will be rendered irrelevant if they ever acknowledge the undeniable progress made by Britain on matters of race and integration. This is one reason why this survey’s data has been given such an overwhelmingly negative spin. A mature anti-racism movement would acknowledge the good news, while working to tackle discrimination where it still exists.
What a shame that these academics felt the need to trash Britain’s record on race relations – especially when their own research tells us that there is so much to be proud of.
– Rakib Ehsan
Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales will not be called that for much longer. The Wikipedia edit war has already begun.
“Brecon Beacons: Park to use Welsh name Bannau Brycheiniog”, reports the BBC. Few would have a problem with both the Welsh and English names being used in parallel, as is done now, but there does seem something a little… monocultural about insisting that only the Welsh name is used. The park is not in a majority Welsh-speaking area. As anyone who has spent more time in Welsh shopping centres than council chambers knows, there is, sadly, considerable hostility to the Welsh language from the English-speaking majority of Welsh people. This high-handed action will increase it.
However, the change of language is not what is really annoying people. Snowdonia, sorry, Eryri National Park has already enacted a similar change with little controversy. Something more than the familiar jostling between languages in a bilingual country has driven this change of name. In a Telegraph article about how he wooed his wife on the Brecon Beacons, John Humphrys quotes, not favourably, Catherine Mealing-Jones, who is the chief executive of the national park authority which runs the Beacons:
“The more we looked into it,” she says, “the more we realised the name Brecon Beacons doesn’t make any sense. It’s a very English description of something that probably never happened. A massive carbon-burning brazier is not a good look for an environmental organisation.”
The gratuitous swipe at the English wasn’t very nice. More importantly, who is “we” here? What gave this group of bureaucrats, whoever they are, the right to have their amateur speculations on etymology taken seriously? Why should their views on the symbolism of the name of a national park be enacted? They were not elected. They don’t own shares in the place. Nor are they the heirs to King Brychan, whose realm this once was. That leaves right of conquest. You may smile, but there is something of “We are the masters now” in this change.
The best comment came from David Williams, a fine Welsh name, to another Telegraph article:
What a good idea and such intelligent insight. Can we please have the dragon taken from the flag as well, fire breathing animals should not be promoted in the spirit of net zero.
“The Soviet Union was world-renowned for maths and science instruction but that failed to translate into a strong economy. Similarly, the UK has some of the top universities in the world yet has experienced stagnant growth for the last decade. Prosperity requires creating the right institutional environment for entrepreneurship, not dictating curriculums from the top.”
Matthew Lesh, Director of Public Policy and Communications, at the UK-based Institute of Economic Affairs, the UK think tank. (The quote is from an emailed press release I was sent today.) He responded to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s comments on the case for extending the teaching of maths and how far too many people think it is okay to be poor at the subject. (I used to be poor at maths, but certainly did not wear that as a silly badge of pride.)
Lesh’s point, however, is certainly worth focusing on. Being good at certain subjects and having knowledge about subjects is not the same as having a flourishing economy, particularly if one has oppressively high taxes, heavy regulations, spending on flashy projects such as HS2 that crowd out private investment, etc. At the margins, having a more maths-literate population might have a positive effect if, for example, more people can get their heads around statistics – and how they can be manipulated – and important concepts for business and finance such as compound interest, for example. Of course, in an age when the teaching of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) gets more attention, this all fits.
Here is a paper from Stanford University about maths skills and economic growth.
I do worry that Mr Sunak, in his understandable and laudable desire to encourage teaching and better grasp of such subjects, can come across as assuming that this might be a sort of silver bullet to the UK’s economic woes. As the Lesh comment about Soviet Russia shows, having lots of maths whizzes in a country is no good if the underlying economics is poor. And by the way, a lot of those Russian maths aces, such as those of Jewish descent, emigrated to Israel as soon as they could, which explains, among other things, why Israel has been a STEM and start-up powerhouse.
On a final point, I remember some years ago (I cannot find the link, sorry) watching a televised talk by Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 and Gemini astronaut, given at MIT. He talked about teaching, and about why there needs to be another “E” in the STEM acronym: E for English. There’s no point in having all this knowledge if you are lousy at communicating it. He’s right. An example of how to communicate complex ideas brilliantly and clearly is that of Edward Chancellor in his recent book The Price of Time, where he writes about interest rates, and why manipulation of them is dangerous and a folly that goes back centuries. It is an outstanding case of clear exposition, fascinating facts and an enjoyable tone of voice.
I don’t know where to start. How much will the leaked information help the Russians and harm the Ukrainians? How much of it was not already common knowledge? How did Teixeira come to have access to information that neither his relatively low rank nor his role as an IT person justified him seeing? What about the role of the media? The New York Times tracked the leaker down then told the US government. Very 1950s.
If this were happening in the UK, I would not dare to ask the following for fear of prosecution, but since it is happening in the US and my tiny rivulet of speculation cannot possibly make any difference to the tsunami already crossing the world: which was he, or which was he more, a leaker, a whistleblower, a patsy for someone higher up, a braggart wanting to impress people online, a hero exposing US government lies, a traitor sending Ukrainians and fellow US servicemen to their deaths?
“When was the last time an American president included Ireland in their vocal – and justified – criticism of Europe for slacking on its commitments? The fact is, with so many American voters claiming Irish heritage, Ireland gets a free pass, something it shamelessly exploits.”
– Richard Kemp, Daily Telegraph (£).
I wonder if Ireland’s fairly low-key approach is a hangover from when, during WW2, it was neutral, presumably out of a reflexive hatred for the UK rather than some deep love of the other side. In the case of another country that gets praise here occasionally – Switzerland – it was also neutral, although the Swiss probably, for military reasons, feared with some justification that if it sided with the UK, it would have been rapidly invaded by its German neighbour. These days, the Swiss have imposed sanctions on Russia, along with the UK, EU and the US, so its own neutrality is fading. And Ireland, as an EU member state, has of course imposed the same sanctions, for what that’s worth. It is not a NATO member – something that might come as a surprise to some people.
There’s a wider issue for those of a free market and economics point of view here. Ireland could be accused, perhaps rightly, of being a “free rider” on other countries that are able and willing to spend serious money on defence. This “free rider problem” is a subject that comes up in economics and public policy, and used to justify, for example, compulsory public spending on things such as highways, education and defence because it is uneconomic and inefficient to charge individuals for the benefits of said, and yet there will always be those who benefit but have no incentive for pay up. Is this behaviour by Ireland a “free rider” issue, and if so, what if anything can be done about it?
Separately, Ireland has for a long time had one of the lowest rates of corporate taxation in the world. President Joe Biden, who likes to flaunt his Irish roots (as many US presidents, in their rather tiresome way, do) has been an advocate of a global pact through which major countries adhere to a minimum tax rate of 15 per cent, and who knows, that might go higher. This counts as a tax cartel, and a country such as Ireland (an EU member state, remember) loses out from that, as do other small EU states such as Malta and Luxembourg. Ireland boomed in the late 80s, and through the 90s, in part because of its low-tax charms. These angered the policymakers of Brussels, who perhaps rightly saw this as a challenge to their desire to create a more high-tax/high-spend regime across the EU. So Ireland can at times be annoying for the right reasons.
What this all comes down to is that Ireland has, in different ways, chosen to stand apart. For all that it might be annoying that Ireland doesn’t supposedly do more on defence (it has a big coastline and requires safe shipping lanes), there’s been a sort of independence of mindset about Ireland that I quite like. (And as a coda to all this, lots of Irishmen, during WW2, defied their country and fought during WW2 against the Nazis, to their everlasting honour.)
Here we had a journalist so accustomed to pushing The Narrative that he apparently has no grasp of the facts. More importantly, it showed that despite launching a years-long crusade for social-media censorship, particularly against so-called hate speech, the corporate media are apparently incapable of defining what hate speech is. This of course is because no one can – not objectively, at least. One man’s hate speech is another man’s deeply held conviction. Which is why empowering the state or huge corporations to define and censor hate speech is so incredibly dangerous. These points have apparently never occurred to Clayton, as he bristles at all that ‘slightly’ hateful stuff on his timeline.
– Tom Slater
The tweet with the “165 Likes” to “1.1M Views” ratio is this one from Sarah Jones, senior writer for Intelligencer:
It links to this article:
Children Are Not Property
The idea that underlies the right-wing campaign for “parents’ rights.
The confusingly written subheading suggests that the idea that children are not property underlies the right-wing campaign for <scarequotes> “parents’ rights” </scarequotes>. In fact, Ms Jones’s article argues that parents are wrong to consider their children to be their property. It is true that some parents do think they own their children in the manner of property, and those parents are wrong to do so. For that I bestow my 0.5 of a “Like”, or would if Twitter let me. On second thoughts, make that a quarter-Like, because although words about the separate individuality and personhood of children flow out of Ms Jones in a flood, she concludes by saying the parents are not responsible for their children because the state is:
Children aren’t private property, then, but a public responsibility. To expand our democratic project to children is to grant them the security the right seeks to deny them: education, health care, shelter, food. A better America begins with the child.
Along the way to giving votes to children and children to the demos, she throws in the first few headlines she got by googling the word “children” as proofiness that Republicans think they own their kids:
→ Continue reading: If Twitter let me give half-likes, I’d have been willing to make it 165½
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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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