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]
There has been, as we know, much fuss over how Russian Twitter ‘bots backed both Brexit and Donald Trump. This is an interference with our democracy which just cannot be lived with, something must be done. You know, regulate Twitter so that nothing so appalling as anyone ever using it to support non-progressive causes can ever happen again. That not being quite how free speech nor freedom of the press is supposed to work of course.
Expect some of this to die down a little now that we know that those same Twitter ‘bots – from Russia, you know – backed Jeremy Corbyn at the last General Election.
A retired GP accused by a “serial fantastist” of being part of a paedophile ring was told yesterday he would not be reimbursed for £94,000 in legal costs he incurred before the case collapsed.
Stephen Glascoe, from Cardiff, spent most of his savings preparing his defence. The woman who made unproven allegations against him and others has won £22,000 in “criminal injuries” compensation and has asked for more.
Several cases have collapsed in recent months after the Crown Prosecution Service ordered a review of evidence in all serious sexual offence allegations.
Charges against Dr Glascoe and four other men were dropped in January, two weeks before their trial was due to start, after concerns about the alleged victim’s evidence and her relationship with her therapist and the police officer who had led the investigation.
Dr Glascoe, 67, who was not entitled to legal aid because of his savings, spent more than £100,000 on lawyers and expert witnesses. He will receive only £7,280 from the Legal Aid Board and no contribution to the cost of his barrister.
The complainant received £22,000 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority after contacting South Wales police in 2012 but later refused to co-operate with the investigation.
She spoke to police again in 2016 with more allegations about being abused at parties between the ages of three and 15. She said she had a pregnancy forcibly aborted and had been made to take part in torturing other children. She has applied for more compensation.
Christopher Clee, QC, applied at Cardiff crown court yesterday for Dr Glascoe to have all his costs reimbursed on the ground that the charges were the result of an “improper act or omission” by the prosecution. The prosecution should have been alerted, he said, to the poor credibility of the alleged victim by notes from 229 counselling sessions, which included “regression work”, and her improperly close relationship with the investigating detective.
Mr Clee said the notes made clear that the therapist “had exceeded any professional boundaries” and given the woman the idea that she had been raped by five men. Prosecutors had demanded to see the therapy notes before deciding whether to charge, but a senior police officer urged them to take a “victim-centric position”, he said.
Catherine Richards, for the prosecution, said the case was dropped over “considerable concern” about the detective, and because a jury might consider that there had been a “mirror of the undue influence” by the alleged victim on the officer and her therapist.
Judge Thomas Crowther attributed the collapse of the case to “dynamite” evidence that the complainant had lied about an Amazon package she claimed had been ordered by her abusers.
The judge dismissed the application for Dr Glascoe’s costs, saying he would have to prove that no reasonable prosecutor could have decided to bring charges. The decision had been “in line with enlightened modern practice”, he said.
It was certainly in line with modern justice as practised by the Enlightened.
However, you can be sure the global elites, the media, and Trump’s ideological enemies at home and abroad will do everything in their power to downplay, ignore, or misrepresent Trump’s role in whatever progress is made on the Korean peninsula from hereon. Like those who can’t bring themselves to accept that Reagan’s policies were instrumental in bringing about the end of the Cold War rather than leading to nuclear Armageddon, those who claimed Trump was recklessly endangering the world will be incapable of acknowledging he’s probably made it safer. How much safer remains to be seen, but let’s recall Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for doing absolutely nothing except winning the presidency after George W. Bush. Nobody is ever going to award the Nobel prize to Donald Trump even if he permanently eliminates war and suffering by tomorrow night, but Obama could at least gift him his.
You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.
This video appeared in the Illuminatus’ Facebook feed recently:
In it, participants line up for a running race but before they start a man lists a number of life advantages (such as having a father, or money, or a good education) and instructs people to take two steps forward for each of those advantages they enjoyed. He is explaining that people with certain advantages are more likely to win. There is an element of truth, but it is so obvious as to be trite: yes, some people are at a disadvantage in ways that are not their fault. Yes, as Baz Luhrman quoted Mary Schmich, don’t congratulate yourself too much on your successes or berate yourself too much for your failures. Hard work is part of the story but if you are successful you probably had some lucky breaks along the way.
Which would be fine for a trite bit of social media wisdom if it had been about “advantages”. But this video is about “privilege”, an altogether more loaded term. And at 2 minutes 55 seconds the host remarks that some of the black dudes would win the race if it was fair. As an eldritch horror from the underworld, the Illuminatus is not qualified to have an opinion, but it wonders whether it really is “woke” for a white guy to tell a bunch of black dudes that they have no chance. Certainly that is the sort of thing that Candace Owens was talking about; that Kanye West seems to like. It does not seem too much of a stretch to worry that if you keep telling a group of people that their only hope of success is to be rescued by others then they might believe it and miss out on some opportunities as a result.
Matt Christiansen deconstructs the privilege race video. He notes its flaw as a metaphor for economics: there is not a single race for a single prize; each individual can maximise his gains at no cost to others. The Illuminatus muses changing the rules of the game in the video such that prizes of descending value are handed out in order of finishing: that would much more interesting.
In a more recent video, Christiansen discusses Count Dankula and freedom of speech in the UK, and Chelsea Russell who was convicted of posting some rude rap lyrics on the internet.
Paul Joseph Watson, who is a bit unhinged on some topics, but very entertaining on the subject of the culture wars, has a video about the Candace/Kanye incident. At the end he claims that the establishment is terrified of West, and of social media conservatives like Owens, because they are the new counter-culture. Later, a show on Comedy Central mocked him for claiming that conservatism is the new punk rock. So he replied:
It’s the left who consistently act like joyless puritans and literally try to ban fun. Whether it’s cheerleaders, offensive songs, topless models or free speech, you’re the new censors. You’re the new puritans. And that’s not very punk. Being owned by a monolithic transnational corporation and a 94-year-old billionaire [Sumner Redstone]: that’s not very punk.
He’s not quite right, though. Conservatives aren’t the real counter-culture, libertarians are. If conservatives are punks we are the weird kids too busy playing Dungeons & Dragons to be into cool music. Our day will come.
A woman has told how she shot at a machete-wielding intruder with a CROSSBOW when a gang burst into her home and attacked her family.
Anji Rhys, 49, said she sprang into action when masked raiders kicked down her door in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, after apparently mistaking it for a drugs den.
Ex-Thai boxer Anji, who is reportedly a grandmother, grabbed her crossbow, which she dubs Manstopper, and shot one thug during the horrifying ordeal.
Anji keeps the bow on a wall inside the house to protect her family which include her partner Rebecca, son Dillon and elderly mum Lilian.
The so-called survivalist, who possesses an arsenal of weapons inside her home, was reportedly watching TV when the yobs entered her home and pinned down her son.
Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to read that this lady was able to protect herself and her family. But I am mystified by the supportive tone of the Mirror reporter, and of most of the comments, when exactly the same sequence of events but involving a gun-wielding grandma in the US instead of a crossbow-wielding one in the UK would have been dismissed as NRA propaganda and further evidence of the lunacy and barbarism of Americans in their “love affair with the gun”.
And if you like the idea that a comedian convicted a making a joke in bad taste and fined £800 by a Scottish court could end up making a tidy profit, you might want to drop your mouse on this link and send him some money. I did 😀
Help Markus stop a truly terrible precedent being set and help fund the appeal. If there is any money left over, he promises to invade the Sudetenland.
We remind you, once again, not to be swayed by politicians hopping on to the bandwagon by cynically pushing inadequate substitutes for the program of the only political party that really cares.
When I hear someone say we should ‘democratise’ something, that’s code for ‘make civil things political’ because that much misused word ‘democracy’ doesn’t mean ‘interacting civil society’, it means politics (i.e. struggle to control means of collective coercion)
The story that I and most people here are familiar with is that in the 1840s Britain abolished the Corn Laws, became the pioneer in free trade and that this was a good thing.
John Nye begs to differ. In this Econtalk podcast (from, ahem, 10 years ago) he makes two points. Firstly, British tariffs were falling throughout the 19th Century and that the abolition of the Corn Laws was not particularly significant in that process. Secondly, French tariffs were by-and-large lower than those in Britain.
But surely Britain was much richer than France at this time? Yes it was, and according to Nye that was mainly due to it having fewer taxes and regulations. France even had internal tariffs as Samizdata’s own Antoine Clarke once pointed out.
So much as I don’t think Trump’s trade war is a good idea it is possible that it may not be as bad as all that.
I have discovered a source of wisdom on the internet (no, really 😉 ) and I am reliably informed that the blessed Theresa herself has been known to solicit advice from the famed Agatha Antigone.
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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