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]
“To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense. And to this we have now added powerful tools (called AI) that automate the manufacture of misinformation on an epic scale. If you were a malign superpower that wanted to screw up the democratic world, you’d be hard put to do better than this.”
Worse? It is strange how the writer of an article saying how the ability of everyone to publish whatever they like makes things worse claims to be so concerned for democracy. If he would deny mad Harry the right to publish what he likes and read what he likes, why would he grant Harry the right to vote?
Naughton continues,
At the root of all this are two neuroses. One is the Republicans’ obsessive conviction that academic studies, like those of DiResta and her colleagues, of how “bad actors – spammers, scammers, hostile foreign governments, networks of terrible people targeting children, and, yes hyper-partisans actively seeking to manipulate the public” use digital platforms to achieve their aims is, somehow, anti-conservative.
The other neurosis is, if anything, more worrying: it’s a crazily expansive idea of “censorship” that includes labelling social media posts as potentially misleading, factchecking, down-ranking false theories by reducing their distribution in people’s social media feeds while allowing them to remain on a site and even flagging content for platforms’ review.
Down-ranking theories deemed to be false by secretly stopping them from being communicated freely is not a crazily expansive idea of censorship, it is censorship. The censors’ kindness in allowing the censored material to remain on site so long as nobody sees it is akin to the kindness of the 1960s London gangster Charlie Richardson, who, having had a man beaten bloody in front of him, would make a gift to his victim of a nice clean shirt to go home in.
Why did Joe Biden’s poor performance in the debate last night come as a surprise to many on the left? The responses of two people writing in today’s Guardian give a clue:
Trump’s positions on anything and everything shift and slide at will, and he lies about his own past with pathological confidence – in this debate he both denied that he had sex with Stormy Daniels and that he praised the white supremacists who stormed Charlottesville in 2017. More substantively he lied – unchallenged, except by Biden – about his role in the January 6 coup attempt, and the CNN pundits did not trouble him further about his crimes.
Trump lied aplenty. He acted as if he never had said there were “good people” on both sides in Charlottesville, and pretended that he hadn’t dissed America’s war dead.
Emphasis added in both quotes. Why have I bolded the parts about Charlottesville? Because it seems that neither Rebecca Solnit nor Lloyd Green were aware that in that speech about Charlottesville, Trump said literally seconds later: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White Nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White Nationalists, OK? And the press has treated then absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also you had fine people, but you also had troublemakers.”
Here is my transcription, with timestamps, of Trump’s answers to journalists’ questions in the relevant section of that press conference. I have not attempted to transcribe the questions, but everything Trump said is there. Bear in mind that it was very noisy, with people constantly shouting over each other, hence Trump’s constant repetition of “Excuse me – excuse me”.
*
0:04 I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane. What I’m saying is this: You had a group on one side, and you had a group on the other, and they came at each other with clubs, and it was vicious, and it was horrible, and it was a horrible thing to watch. But there is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left – you’ve just called them the left – that came violently attacking the other group. So you can say what you want, but that’s the way it is.
0:35 Well, I do think there’s blame, yes, I think there’s blame on both sides. You look at – you look at both sides, I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either. And – and – and if you reported it accurately, you would say-
0:56 Excuse me, excuse me [inaudible] and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people – on both sides – you had people in that group – excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue, and the renaming of a park from “Robert E. Lee” to another name.
1:27 George Washington was a slaveowner. Was George Washington a slaveowner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down – excuse me – are we going to take down – are we going to take down statues to George Wash–
1:42 How about Thomas Jefferson, what do you think of Thomas Jefferson, you like him? OK, good, are we going to take down the statue, because he was a major slaveowner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history, you’re changing culture,
1:57 and you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the White Nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and White Nationalists, OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.
2:14 Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers, and you see them come with the, with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You get – you had a lot of bad – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.
*
Despite what Trump actually said being on video for all to see, the mainstream media has repeated thousands of times that Trump praised the neo-Nazis and white supremacists, or that his “both sides” comment was intended to equate the entire group of left wing protesters to neo-Nazis and white supremacists, rather than to equate the extremists of the right to the extremists of the left, and to equate the fine people on the right (whom he explicitly defined as being those who were NOT neo-Nazis or white supremacists) to the fine people on the left.
Which journalists are lying and which genuinely believe this disinformation? It is reasonable to assume Rebecca Solnit and Lloyd Green genuinely believe it. They probably would not have wanted to make themselves look foolish in public, and, besides, the poor lambs probably get their news from the Guardian and the other organs of what is still called the “quality” press.
But didn’t anyone point out to the Guardian the many debunkings by Scott Adams (https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays) and others of what Adams calls the “Fine People Hoax”? Hey, I tried to do it repeatedly when commenting on those few Guardian articles that allow comments these days. About five per cent of my many attempts slipped through; the other 95% of them were censored immediately.
The same went for my comments about the genuineness of Hunter Biden’s laptop, however polite, however well-referenced. Deleted immediately.
The same went for my comments detailing the many times that Joe Biden came out with provable falsehoods (although he probably believes them, poor chap) or descended into meaningless gabble. Deleted immediately. And I am sure that in keeping its readers and its writers safe from disturbing evidence of Biden’s decline, the Guardian was only following the lead of the New York Times and the rest of the “respectable” media.
And thus the Democrats and their friends wove the net in which they now find themselves trapped.
I was aware of the boycott but did not join in. We do buy stuff from Wickes on occasion. It is useful that they open at 7am and close at 8pm. I certainly was not going to give up that utility because the company had gone woke. If I were to boycott all the companies who waste their substance by hiring “inclusion and diversity” teams and whose senior staff members gush about it to the media, I would have to live like a hermit. Still, it was foolish of Fraser Longden to first tell Pink News that “Creating a culture where everybody can feel welcomed – can be their authentic self, can be supported – is about modernising our business” and then tell the same Pink News that, in his estimate, ten percent of the UK population are “not welcome in our stores anyway”. I did not know whether my position on these issues, which I like to think of as nuanced, would have allowed him to welcome me through the rainbow-festooned portals of Wickes. Nor did I care. Wickes can hate me and still sell me screws.*
The DIY giant Wickes has been accused of stifling freedom of speech after its boss tried unsuccessfully to shut down a website criticising it as “woke” after its boss told trans-critical “bigots” to shop elsewhere.
[…]
In response [to Mr Longden’s comments], Timothy Huskey set up the protest site featuring the headline “Woke Wickes” and claiming “the UK calls for a boycott of Wickes” due to its “highly controversial sexual agenda”, claiming that the company “hates” customers who think there are only two genders.
[…]
In July, the home improvements store’s lawyers contacted Nominet, the body which oversees UK domain names, to complain that the website was abusing the company’s trademarked name, contained “malware capabilities” and was being used for “phishing”, a reference to the use of emails and online platforms for fraudulent behaviour.
Papers filed with the watchdog also said the site was set up for commercial gain and intended to “unfairly disrupt” Wickes’s business.
In response, Mr Huskey, who is American, said he set up the site as “legitimate criticism” of Wickes, and made it “abundantly clear” it is not connected to the company, even offering visitors the address for the company’s official website if anyone wanted to shop with them. He insisted it was not used to make money or for any phishing fraud and contained no malware.
The adjudicator, who ruled on the dispute, found the use of the word “boycott” in the protest site’s name meant visitors would not think it was linked to the official Wickes’s site.
They concluded the company’s claims the site was malicious or set up for “phishing” fell “well short of what is required to support its serious allegation”.
They added that Wickes had not proven that the criticism on the website was “of such an exceptional nature” to merit the site to be shut down. They were also satisfied it was not set up for commercial or illicit purposes.
Wickes’ use of obviously spurious claims about malware and phishing to attempt to silence a critic enrages me. I am glad the attempt failed; https://www.boycottwickes.co.uk/ is still there. Mind you, so is Fraser Longden. Obviously the earlier boycott did not damage their bottom line that much. And I do not delude myself that my little mini-boycott will leave their accountants a-tremble. Mr Longden is right about one thing, most grand resolutions fizzle out when it’s 6:30pm, everywhere else is closed, and you desperately need a screw.
Nonetheless, given that companies will count an expensive advertising campaign a success if it increases custom by one or two percent, they would be wise not to do things that cause even a few of their customers to get into the habit of looking elsewhere first. That is how most of my “boycotts” end up. In 2019 Nigel Farage had a milkshake thrown over him for the first time. Someone in Burger King’s social media team proved their worth by putting out a tweet saying, “Dear people of Scotland. We’re selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun. Love BK. #justsaying”. The net worth of most companies’ social marketing teams is negative: until then I had often used the Burger Kings at motorway service stations because, like Wickes, they remain open when other outlets are closed, and because a family member gets a discount, but their encouragement of political violence led me to declare a boycott. Predictably, my resolve wavered. I have eaten several Burger King burgers at motorway services since then, when BK was the only place selling food open, or because it was what other members of the party wanted. But five years of looking elsewhere first adds up.
*I meant the type of screw that comes in Metric, Imperial or Whitworth. Although having started that line of thought, I did not have the strength not to follow the Wikipedia link that told me that all screws have inherent male gender.
“However, the implication that a country seeking a Western-focused future can be construed as having brought its fate upon itself because of the assailant’s paranoia is an odd argument to be advanced by a champion of national sovereignty. The Russian bear may well have been poked, but history has taught us that despotic dictators cannot be appeased.”
An editorial in the Daily Telegraph (£) today. The author is bemused by Reform leader Nigel Farage’s continued assertion that someone (NATO/EU/West/insert as desired) are to blame for encouraging Putin to invade a sovereign nation state. As the leader writer observes later on, it seems rather curious that a champion of national sovereignty, as Mr Farage claims to be, should regard Ukraine as little more than buffer defence terrain for Russia, and that its own diplomatic ambitions as a nation should be dismissed. I find it more than a little odd, and it is one of the reasons I won’t vote Reform on 4 July.
Perry de Havilland wrote back when Russia invaded Ukraine that there is, on the Right as much as much of the Left, a curious desire to make things like wars to be always matters that are about us, which in a way also denies moral agency and choice to actors in many countries around the world. This is a reflexive thing, and ironically, often held by people who claim to hold hard-headed realist views on foreign policy, and yet there is a sort of naivete to it, in my view.
Eye-catching data from this article, by Nicolai Heering, on UK anti-money laudering regulations (AMLR) in the UK:
About 170,000 individuals are being debanked in the UK every year due to the AMLR. By comparison, only some 1,000 individuals are actually convicted of money laundering. Thus, the remaining 169,000 individuals are done a very serious injustice as being without a bank account has profoundly negative consequences for most people.
And
How can that be resolved? The electorate needs to understand the scale of the costs of AMLR compliance: that they themselves are ultimately paying those costs, that the AMLR have little to commend them by way of crime-reducing results, and that the AMLR are causing vast numbers of innocent people to be debanked every year. Only then are the politicians likely to sit up and listen.
The article refers to this study from the Institute of Economic Affairs about money laundering controls, debanking, and the perverse consequences of forms of regulation.
Part of the problem, in my view, is that because banks are not purely free enterprise institutions, but are umbilically linked to the central bank as a lender of last resort, and hedged around and protected by all manner of rules, they are almost obliged to treat clients poorly. There is nothing resembling client confidentiality. Under AML rules, bank staff are required, on pain of serious penalties, to report supposedly suspicious transactions. It means that in many cases that people are obliged to prove they aren’t doing anything wrong. And add to that the cookie-cutter approach embedded in a lot of modern “regtech” software, it is easy to see how you can end up with stories of tens of thousands of innocent people “de-banked” for no good reason.
The story last summer of how Reform leader Nigel Farage (he wasn’t leader then, but a GB News presenter) was de-banked by Coutts, (see my related thoughts here) and how evidence surfaced that he was ousted in part because the bank appeared to dislike his views, and also because of possible issues with his being a Politically Exposed Person, hasn’t vanished. There remain serious issues about how banks treat clients. And with a Labour government likely days away from achieving office, I doubt some of the more outrageous examples of “debanking” will be dealt with. As ever, the current Conservative government appears to have missed an opportunity to take decisive action.
“It is true that taxes and prices have risen. But this did not happen in a vacuum. For much of 2020 and a chunk of 2021, we paid people to stay home, and printed money with wild abandon. What the hell did we think would be the consequences?”
Today is Brexit Day, which is something to celebrate.
But to put it bluntly, the nation is an absolute mess. Levels of taxation and spending are insupportable. Pretty much every aspect of life is regulated by the state and its adjuncts. We have permitted speech, not free speech. Constitutional checks and balances abolished under Tony Blair have not been rolled back, in fact they have been expanded and deepened under a Tory government. The people responsible for mass abridgement of the most basic civil right 2020-2021 are still in politics and able to show their faces in public. The laughably named ‘Conservative’ Party has not only failed to fight the culture war, leading party members such as the risible Penny Mordaunt do not know what a woman is. Parliamentary democracy has in large part been replaced with a technocratic administrative blob, one that deposes Prime Ministers who question the high-status Guardian-reading consensus on almost anything. What remains of democratic politics has started to develop very dangerous sectarian elements in some parts of the country. And whilst the Tories arm of the ConLab blob have proven to be inept, inane, and malevolent, they are about to be replaced by a Labour government who will dial all of that up even further.
And yet…
On 23 June 2016, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that even with every Parliamentary party supporting Remain, echoed by the majority of the mainstream media, the blob can be defeated. Never forget that.
Brexit was not the endpoint for anything, it was just the start of a long process of a great political and social realignment. Brexit was a prerequisite, a strategic battlefield shaping operation if you will. This will be a long struggle and it will get worse before it gets better. But it is a struggle that has to be fought and can be won.
Despite everything, I will vote Conservative in this election, because my local MP is Kemi Badenoch, of whom I approve. But what a silly party the Tories have become.
I had my say about their proposal to reinstate conscription a month ago in this post: “A press gang there I chanced to meet”. I am honestly amazed that the proposal is still alive as anything other than a guaranteed laugh line for Radio Four comedians. It seems I was wrong: the prime minister still maintains this is something he will do after his surprise election victory. OK, let’s run with that. If he thinks that it would be a good thing for the state to compel British youth to spend a year in the army or “volunteering” (yes, they really do call it that) in the community, why does he evidently not trust the legal mechanisms of compulsion that the state evolved over centuries to enforce it?
Taking away people’s driving licence is an arbitrary punishment. For one young draft-dodger living in the country it might come as a disaster, for another convicted of the same crime but living in a major city with good public transport, it would be no more than a mild inconvenience. A young person who could not drive in the first place would laugh in the faces of the enforcers. Did we not once have some sort of legal system to iron out inconsistencies like that?
Another thing, I could have sworn we used to have this idea that a driving licence was issued when a person had demonstrated he or she could safely operate a motor vehicle on the public highway, and could be revoked only if that person drove dangerously. If it can be revoked for offences that have nothing to do with driving, trust in the whole system of licensing is damaged.
“When sweeping, idealistic dreams trickle down into sales and marketing channels, AI’s potential uses become unclear. Framing AI as a general-purpose Swiss Army knife for productivity inevitably leads to paralysis for its end users: Where do you even start with a technology that can do everything?”
Their abrasiveness and militancy has alienated the public, and though a strategic shift is needed, I fear that community leaders will fail to understand this until it is too late.
According to this year’s edition of the Ipsos LGBTQ+ Pride Report, which polled adults in 26 countries, support for queer rights has decreased across the globe since 2021. Several metrics suggest that the starkest changes occurred in Canada.
This year, only 49 per cent of Canadian respondents believed that people should be open about their orientation or gender identity (down 12 points from 2021), while support for LGBTQ people publicly kissing or holding hands fell to 40 per cent (down 8 points). Fewer Canadians want to see openly gay or bisexual athletes (50 per cent, down 11 points) or more LGBTQ characters on screens (34 per cent, down 10 points).
Decreases in the popularity of groups supposedly protected by activists happen so predictably that I have concluded it is what the activists, consciously or unconsciously, wish to see. It gives them something to do.
Before I quote from it, I must apologise for quoting myself. Over the last few days, I, like many other people, have talked about several instances of blatant Jew-hatred in New York. So that this post will stand alone, I am going to repeat part of what I said then:
The video [posted by “KosherCockney”] shows a bunch of supporters of the Palestinians, their faces hidden by keffiyehs or black ski masks, who have evidently just poured into a New York subway carriage. The ordinary travellers stand rigid or sit hunched with their eyes down, trying to avoid being selected.
The leader of the pro-Palestinians says, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Activists: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”
Leader: “This is your chance to get out.”
Activists: “This is your chance to get out.”
Understandably, none of the travellers raise their hands.
The progressive says with satisfaction, “OK, no Zionists. We’re good.”
I do not think it is an exaggeration to hear in that sentiment an echo of the Nazi term “Judenfrei”.
I urge you to watch the video if you have not yet seen it. Now read how Talia Jane describes it:
The fourth incident Biden references is perhaps the most disingenuous: Protesters filled subway cars while commuting from Union Square to Wall Street during Within Our Lifetime’s protest. As the car filled with pro-Palestine demonstrators, one protester jokingly remarked to the car, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist. This is your chance to get out,” a nod to the density of pro-Palestine protesters on the subway train. This remark was reinterpreted by the mayor as a threat, with calls to identify the protester and a spokesperson for the mayor stating, “Threatening New Yorkers based on their beliefs is not only vile, it’s illegal and will not be tolerated.”
“I was just kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” Bullies learn to say that in the school playground. Antifa activists and other racist persecutors quickly graduate to the the group version: “Can’t you people take a joke?” As a line to use while intimidating members of the public, it is effective in several ways. It both shields the racists from being punished for threatening behaviour, and torments their victims a second time, by forcing them to either deny that it was all a joke and admit how afraid they were, or to pretend to laugh along for fear of worse, and thus become complicit in their own humiliation. Both of these responses give the fanboys and fangirls like Talia Jane a good laugh.
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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