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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Give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free “Who reads the Daily Mail?” asks Ed West in Unherd.
Yet while the newspaper’s power is waning, it has now opened up a new chapter beyond, with the Mail Online having just overtaken the New York Times to become the most visited newspaper site on earth, drawing over 50 million unique visitors a month.
The Mail is particularly successful in the US, where it has found a niche among mainstream news sites that are both dreadfully boring and ideologically dishonest, so deliberately cryptic that you have to be a Bletchley Park veteran to actually understand what is being reported. The Mail is popular with many Americans because, in contrast, it tries to tell a story – which is, after all, what journalism should be about.
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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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Me, sometimes.
Is it really too much to ask that news outlets just tell me what happened yesterday?
Why is that your expectation?
It certainly isn’t in their mission statement.
The Mail is surprisingly popular in the USA because it will report on stories and happening that the American lamestream media will not, hence their USA “edition” (or at lest a tab at the header that is marked US). Y’know, such as the antics of Antifa, black crime and criminality etc.
Seems odd that you need to read a foreign newspaper for local news but that’s the way of the media nowadays.
The Mail is the one that broke the story about the Orange County (California) cops that beat a schizophrenic, homeless teenager to death a few years ago. They were the only “paper” to run the story, complete with pictures. The American media wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. Only after an LA radio station (KFI, 640AM) picked up the story did the rest of the US media come along kicking and screaming.
Same reason I follow Sky News Australia to find out what the US Media Complex is hiding/censoring.
Not only the DM, Sky News Australia on YT gets a lot of comments, the gist of which is that Americans need to go to an Australian channel for accurate news.
The mystery is how the revenue keeps coming to these dishonest media sites. Corporate elites throwing advertising budgets at ‘safe’ sites x people too dumb to realise that they are being played?
And Breitbart gives me more coverage of Spanish elections than any UK media outlet.
As I commented on Unherd about this article the Mail had a pretty serious scoop last month when it published extracts and photos from Hunter Bidens laptop together, this is the important bit, with full details of who had done the analytical work.
The rest of the media, UK and US with the possible exception of the NY Post which had considerable skin in this game, still refused to cover it despite having had all the leg work done for them. Instead Hunter received a collective media tongue-bath for his stunning and brave autobiography.
You’re telling me that the American media may on the very odd occasion be less than perfectly honest? Next thing, you’ll be saying the sky is blue!
Oddly, BBC America used to have quite a following of folks that easily recognized systemic convoluted disinformation in “popular” US outlets.
Apparently, the minority of higher IQ (+1SD) folks wasn’t enough eyeballs for a successful business model.
Sadly, NPR, Reuters, AP, prevail.
Worse, YouTwitFace, “Late Night” Cable Tee Vee comedians, and other paid propaganda “outlets”, do as well.
I wonder how long it will be until the American News Media demands that the Daily Mail be firewalled from the US? Why not, they have a compliant puppet in the Whitehouse that they help get “elected”.
The Mail is certainly not perfect – I remember being in an almost perpetual rage against the Daily Mail over their support of Mrs May (the unelected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – who tried to sabotage independence from the European Union).
However, the Daily (and Sunday) Mail are vastly better than the New York Times.
To give but a few examples….
The NYT covered up the murder of millions of people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
It ran a de facto pro Mao campaign in relation to China in the 1940s – backing the line of the pro Communist “Old China Hands” who gave terrible advice to the United States government (advise that was slavishly followed – with terrible results, leading the Mao regime and the murder of tens of millions of human beings in China).
It pretended that the Castro brothers were not really Marxists in the late 1950s (the myth that the Castro brothers only “gravitated” to Marxism later on).
It covered up the drug abuse and womanising of Jack Kennedy in the 1960 election campaign – and the fact that he was dying of Addison’s disease.
And on and on.
So the idea that the NYT was once a good newspaper that has only recently gone bad is mistaken – it may have got much worse in recent years, but it was never good.
The NYT leads and the rest of the American media follow – like a flock of sheep.
All the American “mainstream” media care about is the Progressive cause – the cause of Collectivism (that is what they are taught at school, college and then “School of Journalism”) they do not give a damn about the truth.
To give one more horrible (indeed utterly horrific) example.
More than half a million Americans have died from Covid 19 – ten times more Americans have died of Covid 19 than died in the Vietnam War.
Early Treatment with well established medications could have saved about 80% of the people who have died in the United States.
The New York Times knows that very well – but it has NOT told the people that.
That should tell anyone all they need to know about the New York Times – and the “Deep State” of government agencies, and allied vast Corporations, that it represents.
Front page of the Daily Mail this morning – another example of Joe Biden’s total fantasy-world, a made-up story he told at a campaign event about his use of Amtrak that even the most-basic fact-checking shows cannot possibly be true as he told it, or anything like it. He just makes s**t up, according to his audience. Banner headline, with video.
Any US media outlet – Not A Peep.
No, I take it back. Fox News and the Washington Post are now covering it.
I knew the story was a complete fantasy, the minute I read the headline. Biden makes great play of how he always rides/has ridden Amtrak from Washington to and from his home in Wilmington. To have travelled 1,500,000 miles on Amtrak, as he claimed, he would have had to make this round trip of 198 miles some 7,600 times, or (put another way) every single week day for 31 years. Seem likely to you? The plain fact is, he just makes things up. And even if the US media covers it at all, there will be no further inquiry, no in-depth reporting, nobody will be pressed to answer questions about it – like a pebble dropped in a pond, there will be a brief splash and then it will disappear forever.
llater,
llamas
The US media continues to run deficits because they don’t care. Their losses are being covered by their owners and other far left corporations/donors. They ARE the Pravda/Izvestia of the Democrat Party.
Exactly.
The same reason that Disney has run the Star Wars franchise into the ground.
The propaganda value exceeded any monetary value lost.
From the article:
Seems to me that this simply means the wrong people are in all of these roles.
Why are Corporate Elites throwing their advertising budgets at leftist (indeed Frankfurt School) media?
Because the Corporate elite do not tend to own the companies they control – and do not want to hand on these companies on to their children and grandchildren – as owner-managers NOT “trust fund kids”. The landowning Old Whig families cared about liberty and cared about the long term for the reasons that the Corporate Elite and the “trust fund kids” do not.
There is also the massive influence of the “Woke” (Frankfurt School Marxist) education system – but let us imagine (for the sake of argument) that a Corporate manger stood up for liberty…..
There would, at once, be a Social Media (and general media) campaign for the dismissal of this “racist”, “sexist”, “transphobe”, “Islamophobe” for calling for less government spending (or whatever).
The Corporation would cave – and the person would be made to apologise for their “bigotry” and then would be dismissed anyway.
Incorporation is a gift from government (a point Edmund Burke made in relation to the East India Company) – these are not “Mom and Pop” stores where if they discriminate against you, you can just walk down the road to another store.
If incorporation is to be allowed to continue – then it must be made clear that a condition of incorporation (this gift of limited liability from government) is to NOT discriminate against people on the grounds of their peacefully expressing their political and cultural opinions.
Otherwise “Freedom of Speech” is just the freedom to starve to death in the gutter – with no job, no home, no banking services or payment services for self employment, and so on.
“You are a reactionary – so you are dismissed from your job, and no other corporation will employ you (we hunt as a pack)” or “you can not have a bank account – due to your opinions” or “you can not have payment services – because you are a bigot”, is the Death Warrant for a free society.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9522591/Hunter-Bidens-close-relationship-Chinese-American-secretary-revealed.html
Following on from my previous comment about the Mail reporting on Hunter. They’re not giving up on the story.
George Atkisson, I’ve been noticing that more and more lately. It’s in entertainment as well – it’s not hard to find projects that should have been cancelled years ago which somehow soldier on despite regular losses. It’s always the most woke stuff.