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Samizdata quote of the day – what Musk sees in the UK edition “Another way to think about Elon Musk’s relentless attacks on Starmer – and apparent desire to see him out of office before the next election – is that he recognises the opportunity Britain presents, if it can only get its house back in order.”
– Marc Sidwell, CapX.
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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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I agree that Prime Minister Starmer is dreadful as is Jess Phillips – and to report Mr Musk to the Anti Extremist Unit of the Home Office (who never showed any interest in the rape of and torture of thousands of British girls, in many cities and towns, by Islamic gangs) is exactly what I would expect from the tin-pot-totalitarians of the British, indeed international Western, establishment – BUT I do not see any way of getting these people out of office.
If Keir Starmer resigned – he would just be replaced by an even worse Labour Party person, and he is not going to resign anyway because he has no-sense-of-shame, no moral conscience – or, rather, has crushed these things in himself. That may indeed be a character flaw (indeed I suspect Snorri would say it is a mental illness or the sign of a damaged brain) – but in politics it is a great STRENGTH.
If you do not care about how much suffering you cause (for example old people freezing to death – as they are right now as I type these words – because of your “Green Energy” high prices), and your answer for people protesting against you is to put-them-in-prison (remember people in the protests last summer have been sent to prison for such “crimes” as “waving their arms in the air” and “laughing” – these are people who committed no acts of violence or vandalism what-so-ever), then what can the public do?
I regretfully suggest that there is nothing that we can do to remove the socialists from office till 2029 – and by that time Britain will not be much of an “opportunity”.
A place can change so radically, in a short period of time, that it can not be saved.
The gentle scholar Victor Davis Hanson has chronicled the decline of California from the most prosperous society the world had ever seen (which it was) to the dysfunctional place it is now – in his latest talk on this subject (which I have put on social media – and would “link” to if I had any idea how to “link” to things) he uses the term “Systems Collapse” – that is a formal term, and he uses it more than once. He knows what the term means and he has chosen to use it.
If a “Systems Collapse” occurs the place is not an “opportunity” – you need to get away and you need to get away fast. Even though, yes, there are ten million people in the L.A. County and 40 million people in California as a whole. And the United Kingdom is very much on the same track as California – in just about everything from high energy prices to unlimited immigration of welfare dependents.
Part of the problem is, yes, Marxists – such as Mayor Bass of Los Angeles – a long time supporter of Fidel Castro and just back from the swearing in of the new President of Ghana (a man who was trained in Moscow back in Soviet times) – as one could guess everything that this person (and people like her) does is designed (deliberately designed) to do harm – to inflict suffering, the old “Cloward and Piven” Marxist tactic of undermining with endless benefits (in the case of Mayor Bass to illegal immigrants – but she is far from alone in that policy) – BUT it is not just Marxists.
Governor Gavin Newsom and his patron (and aunt) Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Californian Democrat establishment (who, for example, have controlled the State Legislature since the 1960s – more than 50 years) are NOT Marxists – but they are welfarists, basically the only part of Church teaching that they accept is the government-must-help-the-people-with-benefits-and-regulations bit – and that teaching does not lead to problems getting better, it makes them worse-and-worse, it is part of what Ludwig Von Mises called “Destructionism”.
And, of course, there is the “Green” agenda – contrary to the lies of the media (who seem to regard it as their Progressive duty to lie about everything) there could have been plenty of water – but it was diverted away, and has been for years (a lot of it is allowed to just run into the ocean now – dams having being deliberately destroyed by the government, as they were in SPAIN – hence the recent dreadful floods in Spain).
Nothing works in California – brush is not cleared (because “nature will do it” – it does, but in a horrible way), water is not collected (it is allowed to run into the sea), infrastructure is not maintained, appointments are made on the basis of DEI (Critical Theory Marxism) rather than merit – for example a person has testified that he was kept waiting SEVEN YEARS to be a fireman – because he was a white-straight-male, and so everyone else was above him on the recruitment list – people who were incapable of doing the job (because they were ignorant and of low intelligence – for example could not learn how to use the equipment, physically weak, or sometimes even had mental health problems – for example were incredibly scared of fire, think about that a fire “person” who is terrified of fire, so afraid that that they can not move). This is a system where, for example, being a lesbian (or a “person of colour” – or, ideally, both) is considered far more important than knowing anything about putting out fires.
Do not laugh – firstly because lives are being lost, people are being burned-to-death, but also because do you really think that the United Kingdom is any different? Perhaps not in this specific example – but generally, in is DEI and its “Green” agenda, and its crushing levels of government spending and taxes, and in its endless regulations (many of the people in California have-no-insurance because Gavin Newsom has regulated the insurance companies out of the State), and in its unlimited mass immigration from the Third World.
These places are not “opportunities”.
Places where people are freezing to death because of government policy (Britain) or are burning to death because of government policy (California) are not going to change policy – not under the present regimes, and there is no way of removing these regimes.
In the United Kingdom the next election is not going to be till 2029 – and in California it does-not-matter when the election is, because there is unlimited mail-in voting and no checks on I.D. when people vote in person.
Gavin Newsom, or whatever Democrat is the candidate in 2026, could lose by a landslide in 2026 – and they would still be declared the winner (very much like Venezuela or Brazil).
Places where “Systems Collapse” is occurring are places to get-away-from.
For a rapid transformation – see Venezuela, which has gone from the most prosperous country in Latin America to one of the poorest – in only a few years, and with the Guardian and the rest of the international Progressive media cheering on the socialist policies – till the effects became so obvious that even they could not ignore the disaster (but even then socialism is not blamed – no it is “corruption” and “mismanagement” that is to blame, why not blame “witches”?).
Even now the media has not turned against the “Green” agenda in either Britain or California – on the contrary we are told there have been many years of drought in California (NOT true as the winter of 2023-24 was quite a wet and snow ridden one in the mountains, – although there were very long droughts centuries ago, indeed there were century long droughts in California over the last few thousand years).
And the Guardian, CNN, and the rest of the media inform us that 2024 was the “hottest year on record” – so Britain must keep freezing old people to death, for the good of the planet.
The claims of the “international community” about temperature figures are a tissue of lies (as my fellow Red Sea Pedestrian, Tony Heller, has often pointed out) – but they get cited again and again, by a media who seem to think being a journalist means going to establishment press conferences, and reading-and-repeating establishment press releases. Rather than going to the leather bound record books (which have not all been destroyed) and finding out what the temperature really was in particular places (not “the world” – which turns out to mean a computer model) on particular dates. One can change the temperature figures on computer websites with ease – rather harder to do with a physical book.
Find out the truth that the powerful do not wish to be delivered to the public?
Oh dear me no – and, to be fair, I can understand why.
Tell the truth and you are likely to lose your job – or worse.
After all journalists have families – they do not want to “have an accident” or “die of strictly natural causes at the age of 30”.
So best to just carry on repeating the establishment line – and not upset the powerful.
Hence the road to Systems Collapse continues.
From the article:
Is that the potential that Musk is seeing?
A.I. has tons of potential for profit, both in its use and in its provision. But what it needs for its provision seems to be tons of electrical power. Aside from that, the AI infrastructure would seem to be entirely portable. Tough thing for a power-starved island to pin its future econ hopes on.
For a guy whose biggest personally-held fight seems to be against Altman’s Open-AI conversion to for-profit status, this – that Musk is fighting for the UK’s economic future in this regard – doesn’t ring true.
Everyone wants to claim Musk as their own. I doubt that Musk – with his many kids and (facially) fairly strong personal values – is attacking Starmer and pedophiles for an AI business opp.
Paul:
If Keir Starmer resigned – he would just be replaced by an even worse Labour Party person, and he is not going to resign anyway because he has no-sense-of-shame, no moral conscience – or, rather, has crushed these things in himself.
I think that is really profound, and important. A person can become so wound up with a sense of their own moral righteousness that they are blind to basic commonsense and eventually, they think their moral views elevate them above the humdrum concerns of the public. As a result, someone such as Sir Keir can sincerely believe that Mr Musk’s tweets are somehow horrible and evil, when in fact what he is doing is cutting through the usual BS of the British establishment. Sir Keir was a Marxist in his youth, and yet like some of his generation, is remarkably incurious about many things that might challenge preconceptions. The same applies to most of his parliamentary colleagues. They trot out certain words as if they have magical power: “sustainable”, “justice”, “inclusion” or whatever. His robotic way of talking (like Rachel Reeves) speaks to some very odd psychology indeed with these people.
I regretfully suggest that there is nothing that we can do to remove the socialists from office till 2029 – and by that time Britain will not be much of an “opportunity”.
Paul, the point is that this is why he wants the UK public to rise up against this clown now. I fear he does not fully understand how the UK political system works, but he might be thinking that something could be done to get this government out.
For me, the big issue is the bond market and sterling. If Labour has to cut spending and hike taxes in the spring at the behest of the IMF etc, then there could be political mayhem.
There’s another explanation: Musk sees the UK as a sort of canary in the coal mine for the US.
I pretty-much agree with Paul Marks here.
!
I think what Musk may not have fully-grasped is that the rot which led to the last 20 years of atrocities against women and girls in the UK is not a function of leadership or party. A fish rots from the head down, but it eventually rots all the way down. If you remove Starmer, he will simply be replaced by a leader with a different name, maybe even a different party, but the basic policies remain unchanged, the basic regulations remain unchanged, and the mindsets that allowed this to happen are now so deeply ingrained in all levels of UK administration – the police, the courts, the social services, the NHS, the local councils, the regional governments, the national government, and the legislators – that no amoint of ‘change’ within the law will make any difference. Nobody has been punished, nobody will be punished, nobody will be burthened in any way in his good or his person for what has happened – except, most likely, for some poor, unfortunate low-ranking apparatchiks who willingly did exactly, as they were told to do. And the systems, regulations and mindsets that allowed it to happen once, will allow it to happen again – maybe not in the same identical way, but in some way that’s different, but just as bad, or worse. Doesn’t matter whether it says Buick or Chevrolet on the hood – It’s All General Motors.
It’s too late. Even a Badenoch, or a Farage, bless their hearts, cannot overturn the depth and breadth of the conditioning that led to this atrocity. It’s too late.
llater,
llamas
As an admirer of Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength” I often wonder if TTK is on a path towards emulating John Wither in that, to quote Paul and Jonathan, he has no sense of shame, no moral conscience or, rather, has crushed these things in himself.
“At the start of next week, in a welcome piece of good news, Starmer will be unveiling the AI Opportunities Action Plan . . . “
Yes indeed, welcome news indeed. After all what we need for AI to succeed is help from the government… Didn’t Ronald Reagan have something to say about the government being here to help?
What I’d say to your brits as you spiral down the crapper is that it all sounds like the winter of discontent, and the disastrous Britain of the 1970s. But let me remind you that in 1979 everything changed. A lot of people seem to be down on Kemi Baddenock, and they might be right, but Maggie only hit her stride when she had power. Kemi has the potential to be transformational, even if she has to keep her powder dry for now. Maybe she won’t be. But I can see in her another potential Thatcher. Maybe what Britain needs is another Iron Lady to rescue you all from your own folly.
Thanks to llamas for providing a list of targets for the much needed Nuremberg style trials.
Paul,
One of your best.
I ran up to Vegas and had lunch today with some friends from the old neighborhood I was raised in (Compton, South LA.) Old Republicans, who tend to feel very lonely most of the time in California.
There’s a bit of schadenfreude going on in LA right now, very much delineated by money. A lot of LA is rather poor. The woodsy areas around the canyons that burned are NOT poor. There’s a set of drone photos circulating on Xitter that shows the blackened neighborhoods, and superimposes the tax valuations on each parcel. Even in the photos that seem to show small lots with small homes packed into blocks, the valuations are evenly sprinkled between 1 and 4 million.
My friends do not live so well, and neither do most Angelenos.
But this was a fire of the wealthy, and so this fire is going to get huge coverage and help. Biden has promised this wealthy set of victims full federal assistance. He gave the North Carolina hurricane victims tents, in the winter. But they are not his donor base.
My friends from Compton are just PO’ed at this. It’s all for the huge D donor base. The Lahaina fire had over 100 deaths, and disappeared from view quickly, and the victims are financially destitute. The LA fires had 10 deaths, and will head the coverage for weeks, and the Beverly Hills Hotel will get many federal vouchers from FEMA.
So, California still works if the Democrats like you.
I have read that the population of Pacific Palisades is to a large extent, composed of people whose wealth is tied up in their homes. We are talking about middle-class people who have owned their homes for half a century or more, and were counting on being able to sell them at the inflated prices that have occurred within that half century. To their great misfortune insurance for those homes has become almost impossible to obtain as the insurance companies have withdrawn from California because they are not allowed to make a profit. If that is the case, then all of those tax valuations are for properties that in mini cases no longer exist. Some of those people are going to be no doubt ruined, and there is a very great likelihood that the state of California and the city of Los Angeles will come after them for taxes on properties. They no longer exist. I don’t know if this is true or not , but the people who were asserting it claimed to be from the area and I have local knowledge.
“hottest year on record” – records that only go back to 1890 or so.
Once upon a time, I’d be bristling with outrage that some colonial should diss my country in this way.
Now? Keep it up, Musk! You’re doing God’s work.
Johnathan Pearce – yes indeed Sir, you make very good points in your comments.
bobby b – the time is coming, even if it has not already arrived, when things will not work in California – even for the Democrat elite.
“Systems collapse” does not play favorites – everyone goes down.
And it was not me who used that formal term (and more than once) – it was Victor Davis Hanson, a gentle scholar (not an angry type like me).
And Britain is on the same road.
California is reaping the consequences of misgovernment since before Arnie Schwartzenegger became governor.
Victor Davis Hanson is good on all this.
There have been plenty of warnings of catastrophe. Now it’s here.
On both sides of the pond, we are seeing systems collapse: law enforcement; fire management; welfare; public finances; defence.
@Paul Karks:
“… there is no way of removing these regimes.”
Well, actually, there is
Two choices:
Subversion(very slow), or,
WAR, the time-honoured method that sane people do not want and timid and already-beaten people will avoid until there is only a choice between the noose of the “camps”.
Some bloke called Oliver Cromwell had a few words on the matter.
” Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defiled this sacred place, and turned the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices?
Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here by the people to get grievances redressed, are yourselves become the greatest grievance.
Your country therefore calls upon me to cleanse this Augean stable, by putting a final period to your iniquitous proceedings in this House; and which by God’s help, and the strength he has given me, I am now come to do.
I command ye therefore, upon the peril of your lives, to depart immediately out of this place.
Go, get you out! Make haste! Ye venal slaves be gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.
In the name of God, go!”
See also: Sir Winston Churchill:
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory.”
“There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one “package-deal”: (1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance”.
If the Conservative Party replaced the Labour Party, we’d still have eye watering energy bills. We’d still have illegal immigration accompanied by lots of noise and no action. We’d still have massive government spending and soring government debt. We’d still have people here from Africa who’s only contribution to us is knife crime and murders. We’d still have immigration in the hundreds of thousands. Shall I go on?
After the treasonous abdication of principal and power by the tories, Britain is doomed. I don’t like to be pessimistic, but I expect nothing short of dwindling to irrelevance, except as a cautionary tale for others.
Bruce – it is rather less difficult to just leave California than it is to overthrow an entrenched power structure.
Even back before elections were blatantly rigged in California, “Big Arnie” (Arnold S.) found he could do little as Governor – as the Democrats controlled the State Legislature (they have since the 1960s) and the courts. In the end he just gave in – and reinvented himself as a leftist (the opposite of what he had been elected to be).
The courts are important – many years ago now the people of California voted (in a referendum) to limit the government benefits and public services that illegal immigrants were getting.
But the politically (and culturally) CORRUPT courts just smashed democracy – they said that the voters would not get the policy they voted for. It was “unconstitutional” – even though the Constitution of California (as written) does not give illegal immigrants (or indeed anyone) rights to government benefits and so on.
A lot of people just gave up on referendums at that point – and either left the State or stopped voting. Although the crazy “you do not get really arrested or punished if you steal less than one thousand Dollars worth of goods at one time” thing did get voted out in November 2024 – too many Democrat owned business enterprises were getting robbed (999 Dollars worth of stuff one day – then back the next day…., or multiple people each robbing them of less than a thousand Dollars worth of stuff each).
So perhaps there will be real “reactionary change” now – but do not bet on it, as the lying establishment media (such as CNN – but not just them) are pretending that the fires were caused by “Climate Change”.
And they are attacking President Elect Trump for suggesting that the local and State governments in California are the problem.
But it is not an impossible hill to climb – at the last election for Mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass won – and people like me said “look even a freaking Communist “ex” terrorist supporter wins in California” – but people have answered me back pointing out that she only got 55% of the vote with a property developer (a Republican pretending to be a Democrat – shades of Donald Trump in New York City a few years ago) getting 45% of the vote.
I responded by pointing out that the LA Council is dominated by leftists (all but one of the councillors) – but I still had to take the point that elections are not impossible to win in LA – if only the FAKE votes could be stopped.
Calling Kash Patel of the new FBI – rigging elections is, after all, a “Civil Rights violation” – so the Feds could, in theory, get involved.
Johnathan Pearce – absolutely, both California (and some other States) and Britain are going to Hell in a Handcart.
The difference is that someone in California can get in their car, or even take the train, and go to, for example, Elko Nevada.
What are British people supposed to do?
A rhetorical question – as I do not believe there is an answer here.
The next General Election will not be till July 2029 – there is no reason for Labour to leave office before they have to.
And the United Kingdom will be wreaked by then.
President Trump has inherited a terrible position in the United States – truly terrible (36 Trillion Dollar debt, Entitlements out of control, education under the control of Marxist lunatics, and-so-on), but he will do what he can and so will the people around him, such as J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, V.R., and so on.
The British elected government is made up of people who want (yes actively want) to do harm – the elected Labour politicians are on the same page as the unelected officials.
No more Jacob Rees-Mogg or Suella Braverman fighting against the officials – no, as I have already pointed out, the elected Labour Party ministers are on the same page as the unelected officials – and the judges (thanks to the “reforms” of Tony Blair – at the time few noticed how he was subverting the legal system).
Keir Starmer, not so long ago, wrote essays for the Haldane Society (the society of socialist lawyers – of which he was a leading member) about how the basic principles of the Common Law must be subverted.
This was not when he was a young student – this was only a few years ago, and he is doing exactly that.
Remember “they will be sent to prison” last summer about people who had not been convicted of anything.
Not “they will be sent to prison if convicted” – and that would have been bad enough, as it assumes they would be sent to prison, rather than fined (or whatever) – no just “they will be sent to prison”.
He was assuming guilt – instructing his allies the Progressive Judges to do what they did.
Even if the “crime” was such things as “laughing” or “waving his arms in the air” – during protests.
That was, of course, NOT the real crime – the real crime was the perceived political position of the protestors (NOT the rioters – the protestors) they were perceived to be “far right” – and that is a crime according to Sir Keir Starmer. Leftist protestors could “laugh” and “wave their arms about” and they would NOT go to prison – indeed they would not be punished at all.
He also holds that private property rights and freedom-of-contract must NOT be what the law is about.
And Sir Keir is no way freakish – he is the norm for the modern establishment.
The education system has done its work.
What do people do in a country, the United Kingdom, where both the unelected officials (including the judges) and the elected Labour Party ministers wish to do, and are doing, harm – at least harm from a “reactionary” point of view.
Well if people are wealthy and can do it – they do what Perry has done, they get out.