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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So why was the UK, US and European media so obsessed with this one shooting? Because it was done by an ICE officer, and ICE has been painted as Donald Trump’s personal law enforcement agency, ignoring the fact that it was created by George W Bush in 2002.
I make no defence of Donald Trump. I make no defence of the violent actions of ICE in so many US cities, but to pretend that this one incident was more important than the nascent revolution going on in Iran is laughable. And that’s what too many media organisations were doing.
I can look myself in the eye because almost from the start of the protests, I was covering them on my LBC show. Indeed, we’ve devoted hours and hours to them – more I suspect that any of the 24 hours news channels up until the last couple of days.
If you wanted any real-time coverage of what’s happening in Iran you had to go to live Youtube channels, like Mahyar Tousi’s TOUSI TV, which has been brilliant at informing people about what’s really going on.
– Iain Dale
On January 13th, Donald Trump indicated “Help is on the way” for Iranian protestors. Allegedly tens of thousands (!) of dead protestors later, which would be approaching Nazi-style Babi Yar massacre numbers if correct, what is the POTUS going to do? Help how? Realistically what can he do that would meaningfully change things for the better for the protestors, if anything?
It still boggles my mind that people can talk about the Holocaust without saying the J-word. It’s like holding forth on the transatlantic slave trade and not once saying ‘people from Africa’. Or lamenting the nuking of Hiroshima and forgetting to mention Japanese people. And yet here we are, 80 years after the Shoah, surrounded by Jew-free yapping about that most calamitous event in history.
– Brendan O’Neill
Surveillance states don’t drop from the sky. They emerge alongside seemingly reasonable excuses that do not ring alarm bells for the ordinary citizen, piggybacking on genuine issues that are of concern to the public. In this case, with breathtaking cynicism, labour are using people’s justified concerns about immigration and the rise in crime to impose what Mahmood unironically describes as a panopticon state upon law-abiding citizens, whilst – typically for this government – doing nothing to address the root cause.
– Eve Lugg
We are only, here in the UK, at the very beginning of the process of descent into tyranny. But it is helpful to frame our thinking with this in mind: that is our trajectory if we continue to imagine that state authority can be founded in political hedonism, or the unity of desire. And it is also helpful for us therefore to imagine how things can be different: what is the proper grounds for the authority of the state, and how are states indeed properly constituted?
The answer, for those who know their political theory, is the antithesis of tyranny: the rule of law. But it is the rule of law understood in a special way. It does not mean the ‘rule of lawyers’ (which we are now highly familiar with). It means something much more specific than that.
– David McGrogan (£)
We are responsible for emissions, we consumers. For it is our consumption that creates the emissions.
And, of course, yes this is important. For by framing the problem as being that of the capitalist bastards it’s then possible to think that if we just eliminated the capitalist bastards then we would have solved the problem. Which does rather obscure the point that if the capitalist bastards did not sate our desires then we’d be nibbling our frozen turnips by moonlight in our winter shack.
That is, the placing of the responsibility upon the fossil fuel firms removes it from ourselves. Which is the lyin’ bastardry going on here. In order to beat climate change it is us that has to change our ways.
That’s also the reason why this lyin’ bastardry is attempted. Because when presented with the actual choice – either Greenland melts and the mangrove swamps flood or you get no hot food nor crib – the actual people, us out here, are going to say bugger Greenland and the swamps.
Which is why people lie about it.
– Tim Worstall
Can someone explain to me why the Tories opened negotiations with Mauritius over the control of Chagos, which was never part of Mauritius and whose inhabitants have never wanted to be part of Mauritius? And can someone explain why Labour wants to pay Mauritius to take over territory it never previously owned at any point in history?
Since Israel’s military response to the October 7th massacre by Hamas, news organisation of the world could not get reporters into Gaza. And yet, we have seen a constant stream of reportage and commentary.
But since the outbreak of mass civil resistance resistance to Iran’s repressive Islamic regime, we have seen an order of magnitude less in the media about the ongoing horrors there. News organisations have often stated this was due to their inability to get reporters into Iran. Strange that.
Truly… no Jews, no news.
The way to win the point is to flatly refuse to have anything to do with these parasites. One of the benefits of self-publishing is that you can bypass the publishing world and its hangers-on, such as sensitivity readers. In a few weeks, my latest novel, Railroad, will go live. It is set during the American Civil War, and it isn’t very sensitive. Okay, I did tone the language down a bit, but there is still language that would make sensitivity readers break out in a fit of the vapours. Too bad. It’s a historical novel, not modern-day. It is set during a period rife with violent racism, so the language and behaviours reflect that.
I would never let a sensitivity reader anywhere near my work. Ever. If readers are triggered, then they are probably reading the wrong author.
– Longrider
The UK’s electricity crisis is not caused by “System Failure”. It’s caused by Net Zero
– Tilak Doshi
As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, ‘is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.’
This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but ‘non-crime hate incidents’, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions.
When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of ‘democratic backsliding’ usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal ‘strongmen’ we read about, just not a very effective one.
– Ed West
It is not a victim of the collapse of the ‘rules-based order’, but of its own terrible decisions.
The cause of Europe’s shift into blandness and relative economic decline is not mysterious: it has developed into a top-down corporatist bureaucracy, where incumbents and well-connected lobbyists always push for ever more regulation until nimbler challengers do the rational thing and relocate to the United States. It is an awkward model for a continent whose historic edge was the opposite: dispersed power, fierce competition between jurisdictions, and constant pressure to innovate. Too often, the officials presiding over this drift are so far removed from the realities they regulate that, when growth stalls, they cannot talk intelligently about incentives, productivity, or risk-taking. So instead they reach for comforting abstractions about “values” and “leadership”.
– Mark Brolin (£)
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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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