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]
Where were you at 10:45 this morning? I expect some of you were attending one of the Remembrance Sunday services that take place at war memorials in towns and villages up and down the UK in order to commemorate the dead of the two world wars and other wars since then. By quarter to eleven the people attending such a service have assembled ready for the two-minute silence at eleven o’clock.
In 1987, just as it did this year, Remembrance Sunday fell on the 8th of November. At 10:45am on that day, the Provisional IRA detonated a bomb at a Remembrance Sunday parade in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. There was no warning. Eleven people were killed at the time. Another victim died in 2000 after spending thirteen years in a coma.
One and a half minutes into the video, the newsreader, Nicholas Witchell, observes that “So far the IRA has said nothing, which is unusual”. I remember that silence, as if the bombers themselves could scarcely believe what they had done. I have read that even the IRA’s Russian and Libyan paymasters were appalled. As it said eleven minutes into the 1987 BBC report, the Soviet news agency TASS called the bombing “a barbaric act”, and film of the aftermath of the bombing was shown on Russian television.
As I said, I remember noticing at the time that a whole day went by before the IRA admitted responsibility. But in 2026 I seem to be unusual in remembering the attack at all.
Now look at his list. Black English, Asian English, Mixed English, “etc.” Every item is a prefix bolted onto English. English on its own never appears, and White English, the one I asked him about directly, is left out. I don’t think that was a slip. It’s what happens when a clever man has absorbed the official grammar of British ethnicity, the grammar in which English is not a people but a suffix, a flavour that attaches to the real categories. In that grammar the one group with no prefix is the one group that never gets named, because to name it would be to concede that it exists as a people at all rather than as the plain paper everyone else is printed on. Something that cannot, ever be allowed.
I am not the first person to question the arrangements as they currently stand. The Labour peer and former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote, in his review of UK citizenship for the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008, that “I do propose that government gives consideration to making a clear connection between citizenship and the right to vote by limiting in principle the right to vote in Westminster elections to UK citizens”, adding “it is right in principle not to give the right to vote to citizens of other countries living in the UK until they become UK citizens.” Unfortunately Gordon Brown ignored the report. So did David Cameron’s government and all its successors. But Lord Goldsmith was still correct.
Sir John Cowperthwaite ran Hong Kong’s finances from 1961 to 1971 and treated regulation like a tax on discovery. Nobody in government can know which business will work, so he refused to pick, plan, or protect.
Whitehall sent officials to Hong Kong to push for economic statistics, and he sent them home. When Milton Friedman asked in 1963 why he collected so little data, Cowperthwaite answered: “If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.” Numbers give planners a reason to act, and every plan arrives as a rule that tells entrepreneurs what they may not try. Asked what poor countries should do to grow, he said they should abolish the office of national statistics.
This is not a change of heart. A change of heart is permitted to an honest man, and he announces it, and he takes the consequences. This is something else. It is a man who held one view in the pub in Ashton and holds the opposite in the Berlaymont, and who will not say rejoin and will not say no, because either word would cost him somebody.
If you can’t see the cartoon, it shows a man and a woman in what looks like a TV studio set up for a Sunday morning political interview. The man, a toffee-nosed member of the upper classes, is saying, “Britain has already paid reparations for slavery to all those poor slave-owning families who lost out when it was abolished…”. The woman – presumably the interviewer – looks nonplussed.
The cartoon is clearly meant to suggest that the British government of the 1830s paying the slaveowners the then vast sum of twenty million pounds to free their slaves after the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act was a bad thing.
It was indeed regrettable that those who had done evil were rewarded rather than punished. But paying off the masters worked. After half a century of effort, and with a thousand caveats and complications, it freed the slaves.
I ask Mr Jennings, as I ask everyone who sneers at the fact that the British government paid off the slaveowners, what strategy they think the government should have followed to free the slaves instead?
Just telling the owners to get on and do it because Parliament said so ran the risk that, without any incentive to obey a law that would impoverish them, they would simply refuse. Then what – war? The slaves were held in the West Indies, not in Britain itself. Sending multiple fleets across thousands of miles to subdue each rebellious island and territory would have been beyond the capacities of any government in the world at that time. Civil wars, as this would have been, are particularly terrible. The war the United States fought to end slavery in that country killed a higher proportion of the people involved than almost any other war in history.
Another thing: the outcome of war can never be certain. The slaveowners in some or all of the islands might very well have fought off the overstretched government forces, establishing independent slaveowning states in which slavery might have lasted for generations more than it did in real life.
All in all, if you were a slave circa 1833 and you somehow heard about this proposal to bring freedom to you and your family at the cost of unjustly rewarding your oppressor, would you want it to go ahead?
Oxfam started out as famine relief – a good, Godly, righteous thing to be doing. Get food to the starving – bonzer.
Then two things happen. One, we find out that shipping food to the starving – except in the most obvious cases of outright famine – isn’t really the way to do it. Because that bankrupts all the farmers for the next year, we make the problem permanent. Instead, we should ship money to poor people so they can buy food.
I have been wading through various sources to try and make sense of the political confrontation in Poland. Any actual experts on Poland’s political scene care to weigh in? If so, keep it focused please, rather than hitting us with diatribes rather than analysis.
Before 7 October 2023, the English-language Wikipedia article on Zionism opened by describing a movement that emerged to “espouse support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Since then, the opening has been reworded to say that this homeland was to be established “through colonization,” immediately followed by a new sweeping claim: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” The sentence is backed by an unusually large bundle of 17 citations, drawn from historians including Benny Morris, Rashid Khalidi, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé, and to the casual reader it looks like the settled verdict of scholarship. It is not. The editor who introduced it in August 2024 has since been banned from the entire Palestine-Israel topic area for non-neutral editing. Yet the sentence survives, and for a year Wikipedia formally barred its editors from even discussing whether to remove it.
For their part, Russian commentators and politicians today seem to have an absurdly exaggerated idea of Britain’s power, the puppet-masters behind American global domination, still pulling the strings, rather than a country run by naive humanities graduates who place our ‘international standing’ above national interests. Rabid threats to nuke London by tipsy Russian politicians are the last crumbs of dignity and self-respect we have left, for which thank you.
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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