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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The political scientist Timur Kuran coined the term “preference falsification” in 1987. Earlier today he sent this tweet:
Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a political game changer. Also important was his decision to hide people’s “likes” from other users. This diminished preference falsification on X. It also boosted the apparent popularity, and thus the circulation, of un- or anti-woke posts.
Tony Blair greatly increased the ease of postal voting in UK elections by means of the Representation of the People Act 2000. That Wikipedia article says the Act made only “minor amendments”. They were not minor in their effects and nor were they intended to be. Whoever edited the Wikipedia article on Absentee voting in the United Kingdom got it right:
After the introduction of on-demand postal voting in the UK, there has been a massive uptake in postal voting. Whilst in 2001 1.8 million postal ballots were distributed to voters, this has increased to more than 8 million postal ballots by the UK 2017 general election and represented one in every five ballots cast in 2019 United Kingdom general election.
Labour did this because they thought it would help them win elections, of course. Did it? Perhaps not. While it did increase turnout, which historically has usually helped Labour candidates, the increase in turnout was particularly strong among pensioners, who tend to have mobility problems that make it harder for them to get to the polling station in person. Pensioners skew Conservative. The change also had other effects, of which more below.
I can certainly see a reason for some mechanism to be available to let people arrange to vote by post (or vote by mail as the Americans call it) when circumstances make them unable to vote in person. But absentee voting unquestionably degrades the secret ballot. This brings us back to the issue of preference falsification. As the same Wikipedia article says,
In the United Kingdom a 2016 government inquiry found that postal voting “was considered by some to be the UK’s main electoral vulnerability and to provide the ‘best’ opportunity for electoral fraud… Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders… the possibilities of undue influence, theft of postal votes and tampering with them after completion were all still risks.” The government responded by saying it would consider the recommendations on postal voting.
Presumably the government (by then a Conservative one) did consider the recommendations. It evidently decided it wanted more postal voting anyway. Probably that was to get the pensioner vote.
However something changed in the 2024 election that I speculate might lead Labour to fall out of love with postal voting. Of course Labour won that election with a massive majority – but there were some nasty surprises for individual Labour MPs, many of them quite prominent.
Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health, had a majority of 5,218 in the 2019 election. His majority in the 2024 election was 528. The person who came near to unseating him was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Shabana Mahmood, the Secretary of State for Justice, had a majority of 28,582 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 3,421. The person who came near to unseating her was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Jess Philips had a majority of 10,659 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 693. The person who came near to unseating her is a Muslim member of George Galloway’s Workers Party who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Jonathan Ashworth had a majority of 22,675 in 2019. His constituency was considered a safe seat for Labour, but he lost it in 2024 to a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
There are several other similar examples.
Labour knows full well that its current majority is a mile high but an inch thick, as the saying goes. If Reform eats the Tories, or vice versa, I think that Labour will look with fresh eyes at the issue highlighted in that 2016 report:
Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders.
Sometimes the Guardian shows flashes of its old persona as a guardian of liberty. Publishing this article by Apostolis Fotiadis was one example:
The EU wants to scan every message sent in Europe. Will that really make us safer?
In my 20 years of being a reporter, I have rarely come across anything that feels so important – and yet so widely unnoticed. I’ve been following the attempt to create a Europe-wide apparatus that could lead to mass surveillance. The idea is for every digital platform – from Facebook to Signal, Snapchat and WhatsApp, to cloud and online gaming websites – to scan users’ communications.
This involves the use of technology that will essentially render the idea of encryption meaningless. The stated reason is to detect and report the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on digital platforms and in their users’ private chats. But the implications for our privacy and security are staggering.
Since 2022, EU policymakers have attempted to push the legislation, called the regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse (better known as the CSAM regulation proposal), through. Similar attempts to introduce the tech in Britain via the online safety bill were abandoned at the 11th hour, with the UK government admitting it is not possible to scan users’ messages in this way without compromising their privacy.
Cybersecurity experts have already made their opinions clear. Rolling out the technology will introduce flaws that could undermine digital security. Researchers based at Imperial College London have shown systems that scan images en masse could be quietly tweaked to perform facial recognition on user devices without the user’s knowledge. They have warned there are probably more vulnerabilities in such technologies that have yet to be identified.
The title of this post referred to this story: “Britain’s biggest choir ditches Every Breath You Take over ‘abusive’ lyrics”
The song, which was written by Sting and released in 1983, is considered by some to be a stalkers’ anthem.
Sting has admitted that the words – “Every breath you take/ And every move you make/ Every bond you break/ Every step you take/ I’ll be watching you” – have “sinister” overtones.
“The national party has made it so that they’ve set up a standard where if Donald Trump doesn’t literally ruin democracy in a very visible way that people feel, then they’re proven wrong. It wasn’t as bad as we thought, so they’re liars again. They have set themselves up for failure”
– Carly Hammond, a Saginaw city councillor and former trade union organiser who campaigned for Kamala Harris, quoted in this Guardian article from 18th January: Democrats in denial over Trump defeat, voters say: ‘Haven’t learned the lessons’
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Tech billionaire wades into controversy after shooting right arm on upwards diagonal during celebrations of Trump
– subheading to Guardian article on Donald Trump’s second inauguration, 20th January 2025: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally
I have been predicting this day would come for decades. It is still chilling to see it arrive.
Both today’s Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday carry the story of an ordinary woman whose life was nearly ruined by an AI-edited version of some doorbell footage that falsely showed her uttering racist abuse. The Mail’s story is here. It has the original video without a paywall, but I had started writing this post using the Sunday Times version before I was made aware by commenter JuliaM that the Mail had the same story, so in what follows I will mostly quote the Sunday Times story, ‘I doorknocked for Labour then racist deepfake ruined my life’. An archived version can be found here.
It started harmlessly enough. A PE teacher called Cheryl Bennett said that she would help deliver leaflets for her colleague, Quasim Mughal, who was standing as a Labour candidate in the local elections in May last year.
For that display of friendship, she has paid a heavy penalty. What happened that morning — or, rather, did not happen — has changed her life forever. For a time, it cost Bennett her reputation and her career. She was at risk of a criminal conviction too, and police visited her home to arrest her.
As she approached the door of a household in nearby Dudley, she was accompanied by two people: Mughal, the candidate who is of south Asian heritage, and her previous head teacher, who is not. At first, the owner did not answer.
By the time the door was opened, both colleagues had moved on to the next property, leaving Bennett to ask the person whether they intended to vote. Unbeknown to her, a CCTV camera perched above the door was filming.
Within days, a short segment of the footage had been leaked, edited to remove Mughal, and given subtitles. The resulting video falsely depicted Bennett launching into a racist tirade against the homeowner, with subtitles declaring: “F***ing p*kis. P*kis,” as she walked away from the front door.
Nobody has been able to establish who maliciously doctored the footage, but it was given to Akhmed Yakoob, a Lamborghini-owning criminal solicitor, nicknamed the “TikTok lawyer”, who was an independent pro-Gaza candidate for West Midlands mayor and had close links with George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.
Yakoob posted a narrated version of the fake video on TikTok. He also posted Bennett’s name and place of work.
The video caused a sensation. Within days, it had received 2.1 million views across TikTok, Facebook and X, and prompted hundreds of people, including dozens of parents at her school, which has a large British-Pakistani community, to demand she be sacked. Yakoob and his followers cited Bennett as an example of Labour and Sir Keir Starmer’s lack of interest in Muslim and minority ethnic voters in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war. She was forced into hiding.
Yakoob has since paid substantial damages for his publication of the video.
For a time, however, it looked as though vindication might never come. Within a short time of Yakoob’s TikTok post at 7.30pm, her phone started to vibrate while she was at a friend’s house.
“My phone just started going off like I’d just stepped out of Love Island or I’d just become famous. It was going absolutely berserk on the table. So I picked it up thinking: ‘Family, is there something going on?’ So I looked at my phone and I had loads of work emails going through.”
Most of them contained abuse. Some were written by children at her own school. “Appalling,” one pupil said. “Being racist is harmful because it disregards the inherent worth and dignity of individuals solely based on their race.” Another wrote: “I didn’t expect a teacher of your standard to be discriminative of races.” Bennett, confused, protested that she had said no such thing, but the messages kept on coming through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. “Stop lying.” “Ur not getting away with this.” “Racist little bitch.”
Then came the formal complaints, as well-meaning parents wrote to the head teacher demanding an investigation and threatening to contact the board of governors. The secondary school received 800 complaints in a short time, some from parents at her school, others from her previous school.
Within hours, the head teacher had told Bennett not to return to work for her own safety. She was not safe at home either, where she lived alone. Strangers arrived at the homes of her parents and her grandmother demanding information as to her whereabouts. Even her car number plate was circulating online.
She stayed at a friend’s home that night. At about 2.30am, West Midlands police went to her home to arrest her, putting a postcard through her door asking her to call them.
The Mail’s version of the story makes it clearer that Ms Bennett having fled to a friend’s house was the reason that she was not present when the police arrived at her home to arrest her at 2.30am. Even if she had been guilty, I do not see why the police thought it was necessary to turn up at that hour to arrest a woman for a non-violent crime.
The Sunday Times account continues:
“I was just constantly in survival mode. I was just trying to get through every single day. And it’s only because I’ve been raised by a very strong family, by very strong women, in terms of you keep fighting and pushing through. Because there was days where I just thought: ‘Would it be easier if I was to just end my life?’ Just because I felt like my career would never be same.”
Before long, police discovered the video was a hoax. They obtained the original doorbell footage, which specialist officers could see bore no resemblance to the subtitles in the video. On May 8, a spokesman for the force said they had found “no evidence of any racist slurs or language used”.
Lucky for her the original footage was still available. How long do they keep it on file? Round here we tend to assume surveillance is bad in itself, but we may soon end up being grateful for it more often than not.
On 28th September 2018, the fantasy author Niel Gaiman tweeted,
“On a day like today it’s worth saying, I believe survivors. Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to believed at the ballot box & with art & by listening, and change this world for the better.”
I presume the “day like today” referred to the fact that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a U.S. Supreme Court judge had been forwarded to the Senate that day. The previous day, 27th September 2018, Kavanaugh himself and Dr Christine Blasey Ford had both testified to the Judiciary Committee. In her testimony Dr Ford said that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her approximately thirty six years earlier at a party when both were teenagers. I say “approximately” because although Dr Ford said that the assault was “seared into her memory”, she could not say in which year it happened, nor in whose house the party took place.
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There are times when the message “You’ve reached your monthly article limit” is very welcome. I got it from New York magazine’s Vulture blog. That means I cannot re-read Lila Shapiro’s exposé of Gaiman’s sexual behaviour. Good, I’d rather not read that again. It is clear that he used his fame and status to sexually exploit young women who came into his orbit as fans or employees in a manner that is no less disgusting for being a tale as old as time. Some of his deeds may have reached the level of crimes.
Many now say, “Who cares about the “may”? Let Gaiman be hoist on his own petard! Let those making accusations of sexual assault against him be believed automatically, as he wanted to happen to Kavanaugh.”
I do not say this. The presumption of innocence is a universal principle. That means it applies to everyone, including those who would deny it to others. I used to think it was a settled principle; that anyone in the political mainstream understood its importance. That particular delusion died for me as I watched Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings and read hundreds of tweets and opinion articles like Gaiman’s that said that Ford should be believed because she is female, and Kavanaugh disbelieved because he is male.
The #MeToo movement had ceased to be concerned with justice.
I want the presumption of innocence to be re-established as a universal principle of justice. Justice demands that both sides be heard and that potentially exculpatory evidence be seen. And there are some things in the Vulture exposé to which Gaiman could point in his defence if this comes to a trial. I have talked a great deal about the evils of automatically believing women (or whites or blacks or rich people or poor people or any other category considered as a lump of virtue or vice). But there is an equal and opposite evil, that of assuming that adult women cannot be believed when they say “I consent”.
I had been groping towards a way to express this when Sarah Hoyt of Instapundit pointed me to a writer who had already expressed it better than I could. The piece in question is by Kat Rosenfield and is called “On what women want”. Rosenfield writes,
By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
Related posts:
“A point that has to be made again and again about high profile sexual abuse cases”
“No evidence will ever be enough for those determined not to believe”
What makes one protest movement succeed and another fail? An article by Helen Pearson in today’s Guardian called “Stand up and be counted: six ways to protest that will make your voice heard” attempts to give a factual answer to that question.
Among its conclusions is this one:
A body of research shows that non-violent protests appear more effective than violent ones. “That’s one of the most robust findings,” says Mueller, who published a handbook for activists this year (The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists). But when authorities violently repress protests, it backfires and appears to strengthen movements.
Omar Wasow, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, saw this in a study of the 1960s US civil rights movement. He found that when protesters were violent, it prompted news stories focused on crime and disorder, and shunted votes to the Republican party, which was viewed as promoting law and order. A wave of violent protests after Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968 even tipped the election to Republican Richard Nixon, Wasow concluded.
“Violent protests provoke a reaction in favour of law and order” seems an obvious point to make – though it never hurts to have some facts and figures to back up the obvious, as the work of Omar Wasow provided. In 2025 Wasow’s findings would be not be deemed controversial by most on the Left or the Right.
Not so in 2020. I knew that name “Wasow” was familiar. A little Googling found me this article by Matthew Yglesias from July 2020, writing in Vox:
“The real stakes in the David Shor saga”
On May 28, David Shor, a political data analyst, sent a controversial tweet. Soon after George Floyd’s death, alongside peaceful mass protests there was a substantial amount of looting and vandalism in Minneapolis and a few other cities. Shor, citing research by Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, suggested that these incidents could prompt a political backlash that would help President Donald Trump’s bid for reelection. At the same time, he noted that, historically, nonviolent protests had been effective at driving political change “mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”
The tweet was characterized as “concern trolling” by the podcast host Benjamin Dixon, while Ari Trujillo Wesler, the impresario behind a popular organizing app, denounced it as “anti-Blackness.”
The following day Shor apologized for the tweet; shortly thereafter, he was dismissed from his job.
The crazy stuff didn’t end there:
. . . in fact, many Democratic Party professionals believe the backlash to his tweets was deserved. Indeed, though Shor has found a new job in progressive politics, one of the conditions of his employment is that he can’t reveal who’s hired him — lest his new employers face the same criticism Civis did. And all accounts of the internal situation at Civis confirm that clients and partners did in fact complain about him and his tweet to the company.
Shor’s tweet, as originally reported by Jonathan Chait, became a topic of discussion on the Progressphiles email list, a widely used networking list for progressive data operatives, and he was soon kicked out of the group. The group’s moderators described Shor’s tweet as “racist” and the criticism he got on Twitter for it as a “much deserved call in.” They also alleged that by arguing with his critics on Twitter, he had “encouraged harassment that led to death threats.”
Shor’s so-called “racist” tweet consisted of quoting factual research by a political scientist – one who is of mixed race himself. Shor’s aim in tweeting it was to help the Black Lives Matter protests and other Democrat causes be more effective. Why were the American Left in 2020 so desperate to believe that violent protest worked better than peaceful protest that they punished one of their own merely for pointing out the tactically useful fact that it did not?
Contemplating the errors made by one’s political enemies during a bout of insanity is fun and easy. It is much harder to spot the errors made by one’s own side due to it currently being the one with its fingers stuck in its ears chanting “La-la, I can’t hear you”. Any suggestions as to what People We Like are currently refusing to see?
Russell Roberts wrote this essay yesterday in response to the devastating fires in Los Angeles: “Profits versus Love”
A few years back we thought about building a deck or a porch on the back of our house. But we decided against it when the estimates started coming in. They were about double what the architect had told us it would cost. Double! Had the architect misled us as a way of encouraging us to proceed with the project? No, six months earlier the Mississippi had overflowed its banks and destroyed a lot of houses in the St. Louis area. Carpenters and builders had no time to build a back porch or a deck. They had bigger fish to fry. To get them to build a porch, you had to pay a premium.
We delayed the project for a couple of years, and prices came down. That delay was an example of the hidden benefit of high prices. When prices are high, the least-urgent projects get delayed, freeing up resources for more urgent projects. The porch just isn’t worth it. So the wood I would have used instead gets set aside to rebuild a washed-away house. The carpenter I would have kept busy now works on building that new house.
As you may have noticed, my claim that Russell Roberts wrote that essay yesterday was a lie. He wrote it twenty-one years ago in 2003. Unfortunately it might as well have been written yesterday because some people never learn. On 12 January 2025 the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, tweeted about measures he is taking in an effort to help the victims of the fires:
NEW: Just issued an Executive Order that will allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape and quickly rebuild their homes.
We are also extending key price gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable.
The responses are full of people making the obvious point about red tape. A lady calling herself “Orange County MAGA” says, “So you’re saying California has too much bureaucratic red tape? Gee, if only there was an elected leader who we could call…”
Criticism of Newsom’s “price gouging protections” is much rarer, despite the harm they do being more immediate and severe than the long-term harm done by excessive building regulations. That is par for the course. Patrick Crozier’s post from 2015, “People are ignorant about economics”, contains this anecdote from Mike Munger:
…there was a hurricane in Raleigh, North Carolina. The roads were blocked, there was no electricity and there was a shortage of ice.
Ice may not sound that important but it is. Not only does it help to preserve food but it also helps to preserve some medicines like, for instance, the insulin needed by diabetics.
Some “yahoos” – Munger’s term – saw an opportunity to make money. They got themselves a truck, loaded it with ice and some chainsaws and proceeded to drive towards the centre of Raleigh. If they found the road in front of them blocked they chopped up the fallen trees and carried on.
When they got to the centre of town they started selling the ice. Usually, ice sold for $2 a bag. They were selling it for $12. Very soon a queue appeared. Then the police arrived. Citing price-gouging laws they arrested the men and impounded the truck.
And here’s the kicker: as the truck was towed away the people in the queue applauded the police.
Here are some more posts from the Samizdata archives about how “price-gouging” helps people hit by natural disasters:
As Hurricane Milton makes landfall, a reminder about price-gouging
“The good news,” Cuomo said of the promised 12 million gallons, “is it’s going to be free.”
A Quote of the Day from Tim Worstall
Or check out the entire discipline of economics.
Further to my previous post, I was pleasantly surprised to see this comment by “MJuma2018” to a Guardian piece called “A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media”:
Part of the reason SM has become a source of news for many is declining trust in traditional media platforms including liberal ones that set out to subtly manipulate readers. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Who holds the media accountable for manipulating readers rather than reporting news? Should they also be held responsible for misleading/manipulative content like the Hunter Biden laptop story and Biden’s cognitive status?
What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop on a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.”
I relieved my feelings by immediately following up my deleted comment with this one,
I just demonstrated to myself that even now, four years later, the mere mention of a certain electronic device that featured in a news story broken by the New York Post brings swift euthanasia to a comment on this website. Guys, stuff like that makes people lose trust in the media.
It was deleted too, of course. Dunno what quality to melt the censor’s heart MJuma2018’s comment had that my very similar one of two months ago lacked, but I am glad to see someone at Guardian Towers woke up.
The Guardian reports,
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
I wanted something light-hearted for my first post of 2025. Instead, you get this list of Samizdata posts going back more than eleven years. The topic of all of them is the same: rape gangs in Britain whose ethnicity has been described variously as “Asian”, “South Asian”, “Pakistani” and “British Pakistani”. Their religion is Muslim.
From 2022: Rotherham 1400, Telford 1000
From 2020: “With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.”
From 2018: Grooming gangs in Rochdale and Rotherham raped with impunity and you won’t believe why!
From September 2014: Want to blame someone for Rotherham? Lets start with the Guardian…
From August 2014: Politically correct evasiveness fails on its own terms
From 2013: If you do not want to see the BNP vindicated, try not proving them right
And I will finish by quoting the late Niall Kilmartin from a 2022 post that was mostly about something else:
People did not just fear to discuss whether islamicism could have any statistical relationship to grooming in Rotherham; they felt obliged to deny it and hide it. That fact, that cancelling and criminalising of free speech, explains much of how it was that a larger gang had victimised some 1400 girls, not a smaller gang some 14 or so, before people dared to say it was happening. Making it an islamophobic thought-crime to notice didn’t just delay discovering the crimes that an existing gang were committing anyway. It helped the gang grow and persist – helped more of the corruptible rally to the corrupt. It helped the crime rate grow – taught more of the law-abiding to look away. It made the very thing that it forbade you to say more statistically true – because it forbade you to say it. It ensured that Lord Ahmed of Rotherham (who was finally convicted last month of pedophile assaults on two boys and a girl) would be more representative.
The last day of the year is often a time for regrets.* However great our achievements, there are always things that we could have got done during the year but just – somehow – didn’t. Or we did them, but embarrassingly late. Peter Hague extends the idea to humanity as a species:
Silver chloride and ammonia have been produced since antiquity, and the camera obscura is similarly ancient. The only real tech barrier to photography was a lens to allow enough light in to form an image – and Europe has been able to make them for about 800 years. Medieval science just overlooked the idea.
If the right knowledge had been found out, we could now have photographs of Tudor soldiers displaying the body of Richard III, Columbus and his crew ready to depart, and London before the great fire.
Mechanically powered moving pictures may well have followed, and you might be able to see silent film of the US founding fathers.
That the available technologies were not combined for centuries is to me a catastrophic loss of information.
The comments to that tweet add stirrups, wheelbarrows, moveable type, long-distance signalling and many other inexplicably delayed technological advances to the list of missed opportunities.
Bah humbug to the lot of ’em. A load of pointless whining about trivialities. If you ask me what things humanity has to reproach itself for not having invented earlier, I robustly answer, “Zero!”
*Or it bloody well ought to be, anyway. If you are capable of going to a New Year’s party and drunkenly singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again too few to mention” and not immediately mentioning a long list of regrets, buzz off back to your home planet and leave us humans to enjoy ourselves in our own fashion.
Richard Sennett’s article in the Guardian, “McCarthyism stalked my family. Its paranoia contains a lesson for Trump’s second term” is well titled, but, as usual, the lesson is not the one the Left thinks it is.
Professor Sennett’s article treats the Second Red Scare as if it were simply an eruption of irrational hatred. This treatment of the McCarthy era was the standard one when I was young, but feels quaint now. The Venona Project established that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed that many senior people in the American federal government were Soviet agents, he was right. The link takes you to a 2015 post by Patrick Crozier that I recommend you read. I also recommend you read Niall Kilmartin’s comment – McCarthy was right, but he was not a nice man. Professor Sennett is correct to say this about how McCarthy and Roy Cohn chose their targets:
They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets. People such as the playwright Arthur Miller repelled McCarthyite charges through vociferous counterattacks, while more compromising ex-commies such as the choreographer Jerome Robbins suffered sustained persecution. My uncle, threatened by the FBI, turned the tables by conjuring up personal injury lawsuits naming the agents who menaced him; the FBI then lost interest in his case. Cohn thought of commie-hunting as a matter of profit and loss, pursued only so long as there could be a benefit to the persecutor. If not, ideology did not drive him to persist.
“They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets.” Well observed mate, but you didn’t have to wait until the eve of Trump’s second term before making the parallel. Trump did nothing McCarthyite when he was president the first time, and I see no good reason to suppose he will be any different when he becomes president a second time. Professor Sennett, where were you in 2020 when your observations about how political witch-hunts work might have helped people who actually were being targeted in the same way as your parents were? What you are describing – the orgiastic yet opportunistic denunciations of individuals, with their degree of guilt a secondary consideration; the digging up of long-abandoned political flirtations; the way that apologies only excite the mob further – that is not Trumpism. That is Wokism.
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