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A writer going by the name “Gurwinder” produces a popular Substack blog. In the following piece Gurwinder writes thoughtfully about the experience of discovering that one of his fans was a cold-blooded murderer:
“The Riddle of Luigi Mangione: My interactions with the alleged CEO assassin”
Quote:
We interacted on social media several times afterward, and each time he seemed as polite and thoughtful as he’d been in our chat. As the summer ended, I largely withdrew from social media to focus on my book, so I didn’t notice Luigi had vanished.
And then, a few months later, Brian Thompson was shot dead.
Many people celebrated the murder, mocking the victim and lionizing the killer. Some were frustrated that health insurance cost so much, and some were outraged that they or a loved one had been denied medical claims. For this they blamed Thompson, the CEO of the US’s largest health insurance company.
But while thousands reacted with laughter emojis to Thompson’s murder, and with love-heart emojis to his alleged murderer, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenceless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You in fact advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.
The murder would’ve been shocking even if I didn’t know the murderer. But when Luigi was revealed as the suspect, everything became surreal. My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues he could’ve done this. The only thing that stuck out was when Luigi briefly mentioned healthcare in the US was expensive, and said we Britons were lucky to have a socialized National Health Service. But even this statement, by itself, gave no indication Luigi was capable of what he was being accused of.
When someone is found to have committed murder, friends and relatives will usually say things like “I can’t believe it, he seemed like such a nice guy.” I instinctively said the same thing about Luigi. But as the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be surprised. I’ve long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity. It’s why many of the people celebrating the murder are those who self-identify as “compassionate” leftists. And it’s why most of history’s greatest evils were committed by people who thought they were doing good.
(Emphasis added by me, although Gurwinder himself has chosen to highlight this passage.)
The Observer view on Labour’s plans to reform education is that the “government needs to go further on pay and workload if it is to retain high-quality teachers in schools”:
“. . . schools in England have been facing a worsening teacher for over a decade, and pupil to teacher ratios have risen, particularly in secondary schools. Last year, the teaching workforce grew by fewer than 300 teachers. Too few teachers makes it harder for those in the profession to do their jobs well – further adding to workload and behaviour management pressures, and undermining retention even more.”
I was once a teacher. I have been married to a now-retired teacher for decades. I have met a lot of teachers. The view of almost every teacher, and, equally relevantly, every former teacher that I have ever met was that pay and workload scarcely mattered in themselves. The pay is quite good. The uworkload for a conscientious teacher can be heavy during term time, but, as someone rightly points out every time teachers whinge about how long they spend marking homework and planning lessons, the workload is close to zero during school holidays. What really drives teachers out of the profession is the thing that the Observer editorial mentions as an afterthought, “behaviour management pressures”.
The House of Commons report to which the Observer article links says this:
Pupil behaviour
We recognise that teachers feel pupil behaviour has worsened in the years since the Covid-19 pandemic and we are concerned that this is driving teachers away from the profession as well as dissuading prospective teachers. Valuable work is now being done by Behaviour Hubs to help schools and teachers address pupil behaviour and we recommend that the Department expand this programme to increase capacity. The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance
I expect the work of Behaviour Hubs is of some value, like the work of the Behaviour Units, Behaviour Centres, and other Behaviour Things that preceded them over the decades. I truly admire those teachers who choose to deal with the most badly-behaved children, and spreading the word about better techniques can make some difference. But none of these initiatives solved the teacher retention crises of the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s or 2010s, as these Hubs will not solve the crisis of the 2020s.
As for “The Department must also reinforce the importance of positive and effective partnerships between schools, pupils and parents in addressing and improving pupil behaviour and attendance”, I think it would be better if the Department reinforced the importance of dissolving ineffective partnerships. End them at the request of any party. If a so-called partnership between school, pupil and parent is not working, let it die. In no other area of life is an association maintained by force on one or more of the parties called a “partnership”.
In an ideal world, I would like that philosophy of voluntary association to apply across the education of all but the youngest children, but even in this world, it would do a hell of a lot of good for it to apply where the so-called partnership between school, parent and pupil is obviously a rotting corpse.
Pupils behave better if they know their schools can expel them for bad behaviour. We used to know this as a society, but the threat of expulsion has been neutered by making the process so difficult that schools instead strive to pass the bad kids around all the local schools like counterfeit money. Teachers behave better if they know their pupils can leave. Private schools still do know this, and self-employed teachers know it very well.
Most humans enjoy helping others to learn. Those who join the teaching profession do so because they want to do this good thing even more than most people do. But there can be no joy in teaching without a willing learner. It doesn’t have to be constant happy-smiley-type willingness for years on end, just a basic willingness to be there.
“Silence on cousin marriage is the unspeakable face of liberalism”, writes Matthew Syed in the Times (archived version here).
Mr Syed starts with a discussion of the self-censorship on this issue:
Let me start by telling you about Dr Patrick Nash, a somewhat shy legal academic who in 2017 came across an intriguing finding. He noticed that much of the “extremism” emanating from Pakistani communities seemed to have a “clan” component. The perpetrators were linked not just through ideology or religion but by family ties stretching through generations. He noticed something else too: these communities were cemented together by cousin marriage, a common practice in Pakistani culture. By marrying within small, tightknit groups, they ensure everything is kept within the baradari, or brotherhood — property, secrets, loyalty — binding them closer together while sequestering them from wider society.
At this point Dr Nash hadn’t come to understand the genetic risks, the patriarchal oppression and the bloc voting, nor the growing evidence that rates of cousin marriage strongly correlate with corruption and poverty, but — like any good scholar — he thought he’d do a bit more digging.
But then something odd happened: several academics invited him to the pub for a “drink and chat”. He thought nothing of it, but it turned out to be an informal tribunal. “It was put to me that I might consider another line of inquiry that would be more ‘culturally sensitive’, less likely to provide ‘ammo for the right’ and less likely to ‘make life more difficult for myself’ as a junior, untenured academic,” he told me. “It was sinister.”
You might dismiss this as a one-off or perhaps the testimony of an overly sensitive scholar, but bear with me. You see, I sought to study this area during a sabbatical last year. It’s a subject close to home: when I went to Pakistan as a youngster to meet the extended family, my dad half-joked that he could arrange a marriage with a cousin. He said it lightheartedly but the conversation stuck with me. As I grew up, I kept noticing stories that revealed the genetic risks of cousin marriage and how it could lead to cultural separation. It seemed an area ripe for deeper research.
But I quickly discovered that researchers wouldn’t return emails or calls. When I got through to one geneticist, he said: “I can’t go there.” It was like hitting a succession of ever-higher brick walls.
In the next paragraphs, Mr Syed gives other examples of scientific self-censorship. Both libertarians and many traditional conservatives will share his outrage at this, as will many left wingers. But Syed then goes on to draw a conclusion that in libertarian terms sorts the men from the boys:
Eventually I wrote a column calling for a ban on cousin marriage in April last year. I was assisted by Nash, who had continued his research despite being warned off (his trump card was that his salary was paid not by his university but by the Woolf Institute, an independent body committed to free speech). To my surprise, the piece became one of the most-read stories of the year and was picked up in Scandinavia. Not long afterwards Norway, Denmark and Sweden announced plans to prohibit cousin marriage and Tennessee passed legislation.
Last week the movement picked up momentum when the Tory MP Richard Holden gave a brave speech in parliament calling for a ban. He was strongly opposed by Iqbal Mohamed, one of the independent “Gaza bloc” of MPs, who argued that cousin marriage is a good thing since it “strengthens family bonds”, perhaps the most stunning piece of (unintentional) satire in modern political history. Mohamed’s intervention, however, seemed to do the trick. After first implying that it had an open mind on a ban, the government changed its position to “no plans to legislate”, doubtless fearful of losing more seats to the Gaza bloc. I suspect it will come to regret this cowardly retreat.
But the other striking aspect of the debate was the sinister influence of scientific malpractice. MPs on all sides kept referring to the genetic risks of cousin marriage as “double” those of relationships between unrelated couples. This “fact” is endemic throughout the media, from the BBC to The Telegraph, and for good reason: journalists trust what scientists tell them. But the stat isn’t true — indeed, it’s absurd. When inbreeding persists through generations (when cousins get married who are themselves the children of cousins), the risks are far higher, which is why British Pakistanis account for 3.4 per cent of births nationwide but 30 per cent of recessive gene disorders, consanguineous relationships are the cause of one in five child deaths in Redbridge and the NHS hires staff specifically to deal with these afflictions.
Tragic and terrible. But if you once give the State the power to forbid certain couples to have children the consequences might well be more terrible yet.
“Jeremy Corbyn egging: Brexiteer jailed for 28 days”, the BBC reported on 25th March 2019.
“Woman sentenced for hurling milkshake at Farage”, the BBC reports today.
Notice that the BBC report about Jeremy Corbyn’s attacker specified in the headline exactly how long John Murphy was sent to jail for. In contrast, today’s BBC report about Nigel Farage’s attacker, Victoria Thomas Bowen, just says she was “sentenced”. Most people read only the headlines of news stories, and therefore are probably left with the impression that she was sentenced to jail time, as John Murphy was for a similar crime. She wasn’t. Victoria Thomas Bowen was given a suspended sentence.
Oh, and one mustn’t forget that she must complete 15 “rehabilitation activity requirement days”, which usually means something like an anger management course, and pay Farage a massive victim surcharge of £154.
Two British MPs, Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, have been assassinated in recent years. After both murders we heard fervent declarations that attacks on politicians were utterly unacceptable in Our Democracy. Of course we now know that neither Murphy or Thomas-Bowen intended to kill or seriously injure their victims. But when a person is struck by something thrown at them, they do not know at the moment of impact that the missile is harmless.
UPDATE: When I first saw people on Twitter pointing out the judge’s South Asian name, I dismissed the comments as the sort of snide racism that bedevils right wing Twitter. However Toby Young has assembled a list of six judgements by Senior District Judge Tan Ikram that are more than enough to give a rational person cause to doubt his impartiality.
He was last in the news six months ago:
A senior judge has been handed a formal misconduct warning for ‘liking’ a Linkedin post calling for a free Palestine, shortly before he oversaw the criminal trial of three women who displayed paraglider images at a protest.
Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram found defendants Heba Alhayek, 29, Pauline Ankunda, 26, and Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27, guilty of a terror offence at a pro-Palestinian march in central London, a week after Hamas had carried out the October 7 attack in Israel.
The judge’s handling of the case came in for criticism after he handed conditional discharges to the women and commented that they had “well learned” their lesson.
His impartiality was then called into question when it emerged he had previously ‘liked’ the LinkedIn message from a barrister which read: “Free Free Palestine. To the Israeli terrorist both in the United Kingdom, the United States, and of course Israel you can run, you can bomb but you cannot hide – justice will be coming for you.”
(While I was making this update, commenter John independently brought up the topic of Judge Ikram’s record.)
Danny Cohen was once the Director of BBC Television. When he writes in the Telegraph about the way that the BBC currently reports on Jewish and Israeli issues, one can sense the anger of someone who has been let down by former colleagues. In his latest article he writes,
This week the BBC has been reporting live from Syria as the wretched Assad regime collapsed. It is not clear yet whether Syria is destined for a democratic future or will fall prey to jihadists previously affiliated with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
It seems though that the BBC is optimistic. Reporting live from Damascus, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet said the following: ‘‘This is one of the most diverse countries in the Middle East with multiple Christian and Muslim sects. And you can see it here in the Old City, all the different Quarters – Jewish, Muslim, Christian. They’re all here. They want to believe they have a space now as Syria embarks on this new chapter.”
For anyone with the slightest knowledge of the 20th century history of Jewish people in the Arab world, this statement is both ignorant and offensive.
There are believed to be three Jews left in Syria. That’s right, three Jews. The rest fled for their lives. After Syria gained independence from France in 1946, Jewish people and their property were repeatedly targeted. In 1947, the Syrian government organised and encouraged Arab inhabitants of Aleppo to attack Jews. Pogroms followed. Synagogues, Jewish schools and orphanages were destroyed. From that point on it was clear that Jews were not welcome in Syria. The community fled to Israel and elsewhere and now there are just those three Jews left in the whole country.
Related post: Examples of spectacular historical ignorance. I will take the liberty of quoting one of my own comments to that post:
…the holes in the knowledge of innocent dupes are frequently – in fact almost always – the evidence that someone in the past succeeded in deliberately fostering a myth, or blanking out a truth.
“Argentina’s Javier Milei has made a horrible mistake”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph. The article can also be read here.
A year after his landslide victory, Milei is still not letting market forces set the peso exchange rate, and it now looks as if his crawling dollar peg will continue into the middle of next year. He has jammed the process of macroeconomic cleansing.
Argentina is now among the most expensive countries in the world, close to Norway on the Big Mac index. It costs almost twice as much to buy a hamburger in Buenos Aires as it does in Tokyo, even though the pampas are full of cattle, while the rice terraces of Japan are not.
The peso is as overvalued today as it has ever been in Argentine history, or very close. This has suppressed inflation temporarily to a monthly rate of 2.4pc – so has economic contraction – but has in the process strangled the traded sectors of the textile, shoe and toy industries. Car parts, electronics, metallurgy, and heavy manufacturing are the next dominoes.
[…]
He should have taken his chainsaw to currency and capital controls on his first day in office. He is now trapped. Either he claws back lost competitiveness by means of deflationary wage cuts for year after year – nigh impossible in any democracy – or he lets the peso find its level and unleashes a fresh inflation, shattering his reputation at home and abroad as the Friedmanite purist who tamed prices.
A commenter called Krassi Stoyanova says, “Well, Ambrose, having listened to Milei and his plans for the Argentine economy, I have far more confidence in him than I do you.”
I want to agree. But, truth to tell, I do not have a good understanding of this branch of economics. Some of you guys do. What do you think?
Just not in the way the Guardian thinks.
The Guardian view on Romania’s annulled election: a wake-up call for democracies
The unprecedented move by the country’s constitutional court last week to annul the results of the first round of the presidential election, amid allegations of Russian interference, is a landmark moment in the increasingly embattled arena of eastern European politics. The decision followed an astonishing surge to first place by a far-right admirer of Vladimir Putin, who had been polling in low single digits until the eve of the election. According to declassified intelligence reports, Călin Georgescu benefited from a vote that was manipulated by various illicit means, including cyber-attacks and a Russian-funded TikTok campaign. Analysts found that about 25,000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became active only two weeks before the first-round vote.
What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet.
When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try.
I saw this comment by Paul Marks to the previous post and thought, “This is huge. Why isn’t this story the main headline on every news outlet?”
It is being reported, somewhat less prominently than the Princess of Wales going to a carol concert. Heartwarming though that is, I would have thought that the fact that a Romanian court has annulled the first round of their presidential election because the Russians allegedly “ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round” was bigger news.
So what if they did? Where did this idea come from that the people of a country are not allowed to watch, read or listen to foreigners attempting to persuade them how to vote? Well, certain foreigners at least – those who promote this information Juche never seem to have a problem with the European Union’s taxpayer-funded propagation of its opinion.
And not just “on the agenda” in general, on today’s agenda at the European Council, “where national ministers from each EU country meet to negotiate and adopt EU laws”.
They never give up, and with “they” being the European Union, they only have to win once.
Tech Radar reports,
The EU proposal to scan all your private communications to halt the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is back on regulators’ agenda – again.
What’s been deemed by critics as Chat Control has seen many twists and turns since the European Commission presented the first version of the draft bill in May 2022. The latest development came in October 2024, when a last-minute decision by the Netherlands to abstain from the vote prompted the Hungarian Council Presidency to remove the matter from the planned discussion.
Now, about two months later, the controversial proposal has returned and is amongst the topics the EU Council is set to discuss today, December 4, 2024. EU members are also expected to express their vote on Friday, December 6.
That’s today, kids.
As mentioned, lawmakers have implemented some changes to the EU CSAM bill amid growing criticism from the privacy, tech, and political benches.
Initially, the plan was to require messaging services and email providers to scan all your messages on the lookout for illegal material – no matter if these were encrypted, like WhatsApp or Signal chats, for example, to ensure that communications remain private between the sender and receiver.
Lawmakers suggested employing what’s known as client side-scanning, a technique that experts, including some of the best VPN providers and messaging apps, have long warned against as it cannot be executed without breaking encryption protection. Even the UK halted this requirement under its Online Safety Act until “it’s technically feasible to do so.”
Fast-forward to June 2024, the second version of the EU proposal aims to target shared photos, videos, and URLs instead of text and audio messages upon users’ permission. There’s a caveat, though – you must consent to the shared material being scanned before being encrypted to keep using the functionality.
I did not see this coming: “South Korea’s president declares emergency martial law”, reports the BBC.
Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, is quoted as saying, “Our National Assembly has become a haven for criminals, a den of legislative dictatorship that seeks to paralyse the judicial and administrative systems and overturn our liberal democratic order.”
Sounds like projection to me.
Can anyone explain what is going on? Is there really any more of a threat from North Korea than there always is, or is it all to do with domestic politics?
Update: Lawmakers in South Korea vote to lift the martial law decree. The Guardian link says,
South Korea’s parliament, with 190 of its 300 members present, just passed a motion requiring the martial law declared by President Yoon Suk Yeol to be lifted.
All 190 lawmakers present voted to lift the measure, according to CNN.
Much depends on which 190 lawmakers were present. If the very fact that they were still in the parliament building after martial law was declared was because they they were from the opposition, President Yoon will dismiss it – although the 190 being an absolute majority of South Korea’s MPs does give their vote moral weight.
If it was a broad spread of MPs from several parties, this vote might mean the end of the coup. Either way, it is troubling to realise that a country that everyone thought was a stable democracy isn’t.
Did democracy stop being cool or something?
As a good libertarian, I feel I ought to like the emphasis that the Montessori method of education places on giving children maximum freedom. On the other hand, what I said on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 was – what is that word they used to use? – that’s it, right.
It’s been called discovery learning, experiential learning, problem-based learning, inquiry learning and now (heaven help us) “constructivist instructional techniques”.
Whatever you call it, it gives worse results for most people most of the time than just telling them.
It would save you time to take my word for it, but, if you are so inclined, you can click on the link to my old blog to discover my reasons #1, #2, #3a, #3b and #0 for saying that teachers consistently overestimate the effectiveness of discovery learning. The individual links no longer work; you’ll have to scroll down. The process will be good for your soul.
So why am I sitting here wincing as I think about the Montessori method for the first time in decades?
Because of these three tweets that form part of a long thread by Samantha Joy, an advocate of the Montessori system. She writes,
How should we help young children develop positive social skills? The typical answer:
>put children in groups
>enforce norms like sharing
>encourage collaborative play
But this approach *backfires*… often tragically. Montessori saw this, and developed a new approach:
Most people think the focus for ages 0-6 should be socializing.
Learning can wait, they say.
This is the time to meet other children and do things together: play outside, pretend, build things.
There’s just one problem with this strategy …
young children, by and large, aren’t all that interested in one another.
They *prefer* to work and play alone.
True? Or just true for the sort of anti-social little freaks who were destined to still own the set of felt tip pens* they got at the age of ten half a century later?
*Most of which still write. That’s because I put the lids on properly.
Progressives and Left-wingers in the UK have gone right off “Vox populi, vox Dei”. The Brexit vote was the last straw. Every time I try to think of a first straw – Essex Man voting for Thatcher? – an earlier one pops into my head. Maybe, as we discussed last week, the British Left’s long turn away from reverence for the views of the populace goes right back to the popular conservatism of the Primrose League. In itself, this cessation of reverence is probably a good thing.
Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!
Holy State or Holy King—
Or Holy People’s Will—
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
Order the guns and kill!
(Relax, delatores, it’s only a poem.) The sort of progressives who have reluctantly had to say, “The people have spoken, the bastards” do fewer terrible things than the sort of progressives who still think their will and the will of the people are one and the same.
But although the voice of the people-in-general is no longer sacred to British progressives, the voices of some people still are. Which people? Being from an ethnic minority certainly helps to gain entrance into the category of persons who must be listened to with reverence, even if enough black and brown-skinned British people have followed in the footsteps of Essex Man (including the Essex MP who leads the Conservative Party) that skin colour no longer works on its own.
However, being an ethnic minority and a socialist is a qualification, and being a Muslim Labour MP lets you say practically anything without fear of contradiction. Why, you can cheerfully propose to reverse one of the proudest achievements of the previous Labour government, and the leader of the present Labour government will spray out deliberately-ambiguous words in response that pointedly do not include the word “No.”
Yesterday’s Hansard records that Tahir Ali, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Mosely, put the following Parliamentary Question to the Prime Minister and received the following reply:
Tahir Ali
(Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley) (Lab)
Q12. November marks Islamophobia Awareness Month. Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the desecration of religious texts, including the Koran, despite opposition from the previous Government. Acts of such mindless desecration only serve to fuel division and hatred within our society. Will the Prime Minister commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions? (901500)
The Prime Minister
I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.
A video of the exchange can be seen here.
Wikipedia claims that “The common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were formally abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and Scotland in 2024.” The laws concerned had been dead-letter laws for some time before that, but their final extinction in England and Wales under Gordon Brown’s premiership was actually accomplished by means of an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2008 put forward by the Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris. There was little serious opposition, even from the Established Church. For instance, the Bishop of Oxford said,
“We are representatives of religious, secular, legal and artistic opinion in this country and share the view that the blasphemy offence serves no useful purpose. Yet it allows partisan organisations or well-funded individuals to try to censor broadcasters or intimidate small theatres, print media or publishers.”
That, and more importantly the fact that such laws directly contradict the teaching and example of Jesus, was why I and many other Christians welcomed the end of the offence of blasphemy.
I must admit that when the new age of toleration dawned in 2008, I was expecting a gap before it dusked, if that is a word, of longer than fourteen years in England and Wales and, er, zero years in Scotland.
Because dusked it has. Blasphemy against the Muslim religion is already effectively illegal in the UK, and has been for some time. As reported by the BBC, “A religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School was forced into hiding in 2021 after showing a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad during a class.” He is still in hiding. There are other similar cases. Defenders of Sir Keir argue that his two-faced waffle in response to Tahir Ali’s question was just him trying to keep two factions of his own party on side – in other words they celebrate his evasiveness as a clever move. But when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has to resort to deception in order to avoid saying “No, we will not reintroduce a law against blasphemy”, darkness has already fallen.
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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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