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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In case you’re wondering, the apostrophe in the title is not a contraction for “is”. It marks the possessive and refers to the large amount of garbage in Puerto Rico. Apparently Puerto Rico’s landfill sites are overflowing, and this has been recognised as an environmental problem for years.
It would be amusing to do a whole post about the deficiencies of waste disposal in an unincorporated territory of the United States without ever mentioning what brought the subject to the forefront of my mind. I seek to amuse, so that is what I am going to do, although readers from the future who seek context might like to click on one or two of the names to which I link below.
I did a quick internet search for articles containing reference to “Puerto Rico” and “trash” or “garbage”, but containing no reference to “Hinchcliffe” or “Trump” or “Biden”. Here are some news reports from the last few years that demonstrate that Puerto Rico’s garbage problem is not new:
Trash Crisis Leaves Puerto Rico Near ‘the Brink’ – Global Press Journal, February 16th 2021.
Puerto Rico Landfills: Is the Problem Around Capacity or Noncompliance? – Waste360, August 7th 2019.
An island littered with trash: How Maria highlighted Puerto Rico’s poor waste management. Accuweather, 29th March, 2018 (“Maria” is a reference to Hurricane Maria.)
The following quite lengthy report was apparently published just today. I admire them for resisting the temptation to bring politics into it:
Puerto Rico Trash Problem: Understanding the Crisis and Working Toward Solutions – The Environmental Blog, October 30th 2024.
This video shows a group of women on a London tube train chanting, “Settlers, settlers, go back home, Palestine is not your home.” A minute later the racism is even more explicit. They chant, “Israel out of Palestine. Whities out of Palestine’”.
I saw the video via Andrew Fox (Mr_Andrew_Fox) but it is all over Twitter. Like Mr Fox, I reject the racism and religious bigotry displayed by these women. But I am also confused by it.
It is hard to count the number of women in the group of chanters because the camera and the train are moving, but I can see that about half of them are wearing hijabs and about half of them are dark skinned. In itself, that is not surprising. London is by far the most ethnically and religiously diverse city in the UK.
Do they not see the problem? They may genuinely be ignorant of the fact that the direct ancestors of most Israeli Jews came from the Middle East and North Africa, not Europe – because that statistic, and the whole history of the twentieth-century expulsion of the Mizrahi Jews from Muslim-majority countries in which Jews had lived for centuries, is not reported often in pro-Palestinian circles. But surely these women cannot be honestly unaware that by the same criteria that they demand be used to expel Jews from Israel, they themselves would be expelled from the UK?
A good article by “The Liberal Patriot”, Ruy Teixeira: “The Progressive Moment is Over”. The four main points he addresses to his fellow Democrats are:
1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
Twenty-two years ago, alongside John B. Judis, Mr Teixeira was one of the co-authors of a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, which itself was inspired by a book written in 1969 by Kevin Phillips called “The Emerging Republican Majority”. Judging by the popular vote in US elections over the last two decades, Mr Teixeira wasn’t wrong, but all such theses have an expiry date. I would not care to place a bet on who will win the coming US election in eight days’ time, nor on the next one, but I would place a bet on the winners of the 2028 election not being progressives.
I just liked that headline, so here it is again as a link: “How a slice of cheese almost derailed Europe’s most important rocket test”. There is video.
As you might have guessed, the rocket concerned is small enough to almost spin out of control because of the weight of a slice of packaged cheese strapped to one of its legs. So perhaps Elon Musk need not lose sleep over his rivals, a group of students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, just yet – however the headline from Interesting Engineering describing this as “Europe’s most important rocket test” was more justifiable than one might think at first sight.
They ate the cheese after its flight. It was “slightly warm, but still quite tasty.”
“Global calls for reparations are only growing louder. Why is Britain still digging in its heels?”, asks Hilary Beckles, the chair of the Caribbean Reparations Commission.
The original version of this post said, “The answer is that even Sir Keir Starmer, the man who suffered the swiftest fall in popularity of any incoming British prime minister since polling began, has enough minimal awareness of political reality not to touch this one.” Then I saw an update to the Guardian‘s daily politics liveblog. It said, “Starmer ‘open to discussing non-cash forms of reparatory justice for slavery'”. Wow. This is like a man on a life-raft being open to discussing non-meat based forms of food justice with the circling sharks.
The BBC has up a story that currently has the headline “Commonwealth leaders to defy UK on slavery reparations”. The BBC’s original headline, under which it was posted to the /r/ukpolitics subreddit, was “Commonwealth heads of government to defy UK on reparatory justice”. The UKpolitics subreddit leans strongly left, but the most-recommended comment was this one by redditor LycanIndarys:
“A report published last year by the University of West Indies – backed by Patrick Robinson, a judge who sits on the International Court of Justice – concluded the UK owed more than £18tn in reparations for its role in slavery in 14 Caribbean countries.”
OK, so just as a rough guide to get your head around that sort of figure, total annual UK government spending is about £1.2tn. So if we scrapped every single thing that the UK government does, and devoted all government spending to paying these reparations, then it would still take 16 years to pay. And of course, the UK would collapse in the mean-time, because we would have no health-service, no military, no roads, no benefits, no education, etc.
Or if we would instead put it on our national debt, then we’d be looking at a significant increase from our current debt of £2.3tn. Effectively increasing our debt by a factor of 8. I assume the repayments on that would also cripple us, but I’ll admit I haven’t calculated the figures.
Put aside any morality on this, or thoughts about why some people seem to think that trans-Atlantic slavery is the only crime ever committed (a suspiciously American outlook), and look at this in pure political terms. Any government that agreed to pay those reparations would lose in a landslide to another party that had “stop giving money to the freeloading bastards” as line one in their manifesto, wouldn’t they?
You know how people always complain about Foreign Aid, because they don’t see the benefit on sending UK taxpayer money abroad? Well imagine the reaction to that, but about a sum of money literally a thousand times bigger.
The news today is full of stories that laud the proposal in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to ban disposable vapes. The first link takes you to a Guardian report, the second to an almost identical BBC report that says,
“Disposable vapes are difficult to recycle and typically end up landfill, where their batteries can leak harmful waste like battery acid, lithium, and mercury into the environment, the government said.
Batteries thrown into household waste also cause hundreds of fires in bin lorries and waste-processing centres every year.”
I am glad that the BBC has discovered that lithium-ion batteries can cause fires, but I think their focus on the tiny little batteries in disposable vapes might be missing a bigger problem. A report on the British Safety Council website says that,
“Batteries that power electric vehicles such as e-bikes, e-scooters and electric cars were responsible for almost three fires a day across the UK last year, according to data collected by [Business Insurer] QBE from freedom of information requests sent to UK fire services.”
After quoting the Circular Economy Minister (did you know we had one of those?) about how disposable vapes need to be banned to discourage “this nation’s throwaway culture”, the BBC finally gets round to talking about the original reasons that prompted Rishi Sunak’s government to table this legislation and Sir Keir Starmer’s government to continue with it:
“It is already illegal to sell any vape to anyone under 18, but disposable vapes – often sold in smaller, more colourful packaging than refillable ones – are a “key driver behind the alarming rise in youth vaping”, the previous government said when it first set out its plan.
The number of people who vape without ever having smoked has also increased considerably over recent years, driven mostly by young adults.
Vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking, but it has not been around for long enough for its long-term risks to be known, according to the NHS.”
So, vaping is certainly less harmful than smoking, but it might not be completely harmless. The reason I am confident that it is largely harmless is that vaping has, in fact, been around for twenty years at least, and if they had solid evidence of harm they would have told us faster than an e-bike explodes. Personally, I think people have the right to make their own judgement of risk against pleasure in their own lives, and hence should be allowed to buy e-bikes, disposable vapes, non-disposable vapes, and tobacco.
The Sunak/Starmer government disagrees. The long title of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, as stated on the Parliamentary website, is “A Bill to Make provision about the supply of tobacco, vapes and other products, including provision prohibiting the sale of tobacco to people born on or after 1 January 2009; and to enable product requirements to be imposed in connection with tobacco, vapes and other products.”
The British law is modelled after a similar age-discriminatory tobacco prohibition law passed in New Zealand in 2022 when Jacinda Ardern was prime minister: “New Zealand passes legislation banning cigarettes for future generations.” It was reversed by Christopher Luxon’s government. We should be so lucky.
“‘He lashed out. He was scared’: the fight to save vulnerable UK children from being kicked out of school”– this Observer report by Anna Fazackerley on how two hundred lawyers “have come together to challenge a wave of discriminatory exclusions” focuses on the “unmet needs” of children who are excluded and the worry felt by their parents. Early on, we are told the story of an eleven year old boy called Sam:
His mother alerted the school that Sam would need support before going into class. But, two hours later, when she returned to check on him, she could hear a child screaming. It was Sam.
“As I went in, he was completely disregulated and surrounded by five adults and he collapsed on the floor. No one had called me,” she said.
The school suspended Sam for five days while they formulated a plan to manage his needs – something she was later told was unlawful. Having tried to push her to accept a move to a pupil referral unit, which caters for children who cannot attend mainstream school, she was then sent the notice of permanent exclusion.
After three months at home, Sam was enrolled at a new school, but it did not review whether he needed any additional support. His grades and class reports were good but, halfway through the year, a girl who had been bullying Sam pushed him and he shoved her back. The school permanently excluded him for assaulting a teacher who then physically restrained him.
“When I got there, he was in floods of tears,” his mother said. “He had lashed out but not in anger. He was scared.”
Maybe he wasn’t the only scared one.
These days one often sees signs displayed in hospitals, in government offices and on public transport that say something like “Assaults on our staff will not be tolerated”. I was tempted to ask rhetorically, “Should not the same apply to teachers?” and end the post there. But there is a complication that will be familiar to libertarians: even the gentlest, most loving childcare inevitably involves adults using force on children. Before Sam assaulted the teacher, the teacher physically restrained Sam. Am I OK with that?
Broadly, yes. I had hoped to quote one or two of Brian Micklethwait’s writings on this paradox but have not been able to find the pieces I was thinking of. Never mind. Brian was the last man to worry about someone else making his argument their own.
For babies and small children, it is inevitable that they spend almost their entire lives being physically moved around by adults. They are fed, dressed, cleaned and generally sustained by beings bigger and stronger than they are, without anyone so much as getting their signature on a consent form. Then, if all goes well, as they grow older children gain more and more independence until they reach adulthood. In a sane world, schools for children of about Sam’s age would be half-way houses to independence where the necessity of rules being enforced by, well, force, was acknowledged but not something one had to think about minute by minute. All but the very worst of workplaces and other places where adults spend their time are like this. A great deal of the unpleasantness of school life derives from the fact that, in contrast, they are places where force is omnipresent. The least bad part of this is that for 90% the time the children cannot choose what they do – after all, much of adult life also involves spending time on tasks one would not do for pleasure. The most bad part of it, the horrifying part of it, is that they cannot choose to leave. They cannot get away from bullies. Some of those bullies are fellow-pupils, some are teachers. Both categories of bullies are often bullied in their turn. They probably became bullies in the first place out of fear. Frightened people lash out, as Sam did. One ought to be able to spare some compassion for Sam and those like him; to acknowledge that in a better environment he might not have turned violent. It remains a hard fact that in this timeline the continued presence of violent pupils like Sam in a school makes life a misery for other pupils and teachers. It remains a fact that state schools are, on average, places of greater misery than private schools because when state schools try to protect their staff and students by expelling violent pupils they are hamstrung by the likes of the two hundred benevolent lawyers in the School Inclusion Project.
I have heard that Trump was quite entertaining at the Al Smith Memorial dinner, but this riposte from the Guardian’s Helen Sullivan displays true comic genius. Her effortless mastery of the role of the po-faced straight man (replace “mastery” and “straight man” with gender-neutral equivalent terms if required) is a joy to behold.
Trump speaks at Al Smith dinner – as it happened
03.35 BST
Trump’s speech ends and he receives warm applause from the crowd. We will end our coverage of this event now.
03.31 BST
Trump says he will bring back the SALT tax deduction. Some context from NBC’s Sahlil Kapur: [screenshot of tweet]
03.26 BST
Trump makes another transphobic joke.
03.26 BST
Trump repeats claims that he has been treated worse than any other president.
He takes a jab at Gaffigan, saying that hopefully his role as Tim Walz will be short-lived.
03.25 BST
Trump makes a joke to boos, then says, “That’s nasty. I told the idiots who gave me this stuff.”
The joke was about Harris’s support for childcare and was directed at her husband, Dough Emhoff and paid child care workers.
“Last time I did this I was wondering against crooked Hillary…I had the meanest guy you’d ever seen write stuff up and man was the room angry,” Trump says.
They said “It’s too much, but I did it anyway.”
Trump jokes that he is meant to make self-depracating jokes, then says, “So here goes. Nope! I got nothing”.
03.15 BST
“Chuck Schumer is here looking very glum, Trump says. “But look on the bright side chuck, considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses you still have the chance to become the first woman president,” Trump says – it is a transphobic joke.
03.13 BST
Trump again refers to Harris not appearing in person, and says she is “receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” to claps and cheers.
“If the Democrats really wanted someone to not be with us this evening, they would have just sent Joe Biden,” Trump says.
Trump claims – not clear if joking – that Biden is having second thoughts and wants to come back. There is no evidence of this.
Trump says the term “fake news” is no longer in vogue.
He refers to President Barack Obama as “Barack Hussein Obama” – dog whistling for the baseless ‘birther’ conspiracy theory that Obama is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya.
03.07 BST
Trump says of Harris, “I like her a lot, but now I can’t stand her.”
“Catholics you gotta vote for me,” Trump says. “I’m here and she’s not.”
Trump lists good deeds done by Catholics.
“If you wanted Harris to accept your invitation you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the rioters and looters in Minneapolis,” Trump says, to loud whoops and cheers.
Trump is referring to the George Floyd protests that took place in the historically Catholic city of Minneapolis in 2020.
03.03 BST
“The last Democrat not to attend this important event was Walter Mondale,” Trump says, “And it did not go very well for him. He lost 49 states and he won one: Minnesota. So I said there’s no way I’m missing it.”
Mondale “was expected to do well, then it didn’t work out,” Trump jokes. “It shows you there is a god.”
Trump then says that Harris is weird and it is weird that Harris isn’t here tonight – saying the word several times, referring to the insult Harris and Tim Walz direct at Trump and his supporters.
03.01 BST
“Always: It’s a rule, you gotta go to the dinner, you gotta do it, otherwise bad things are going to happen to you from up there,” Trump jokes, getting a laugh – he is referring to God.
“But my opponent feels that she does not have to be here which is disrespectful to the event and in particular to our Catholic community,” Trump says. The crowd claps.
02.59 BST
“They’ve gone after me. Mr Mayor, you’re peanuts compared to what they did to me,” Trump says.
02.58 BST
“Mayor Adams, good luck with everything, they went after you,” Trump says to a big laugh.
02.57 BST
Trump is receiving a warm response from the crowd.
“They told me under no circumstances are you allowed to use a teleprompter and I get up here and see there is a beautiful teleprompter,” he says.
Unclear if that is a joke or more of Trump’s obsession with whether Harris is using teleprompters or not.
I particularly loved Sullivan’s deadpan re-telling of Trump’s jokes in the character of a robot explaining human humour: ‘…if Kamala loses you still have the chance to become the first woman president,” Trump says – it is a transphobic joke’ and ‘Trump claims – not clear if joking – that Biden is having second thoughts and wants to come back. There is no evidence of this’.
Do I detect a call-back to a famous anecdote about one of Bruce Bairnsfather’s cartoons depicting life in the trenches during World War I? The cartoon in question, headed “So Obvious”, shows an old soldier – probably but not certainly his recurring character “Old Bill” – slumped wearily against a brick wall with an enormous hole in it while his younger companion looks on. The caption says,
The Young and Talkative One: “Who made that ‘ole?”
The Fed-up One: “Mice.”
According to the Bairnsfather’s Wikipedia article, in the next war along, the Nazis, puzzled by the apparent paradox that humour about grumpy British soldiers seemed to actually raise British morale, made careful study of the phenomenon and explained it to their own soldiers, using this very cartoon as an example:
Quoting a Nazi textbook taken from a German prisoner of war that shows the cartoon, the clipping reads: “Obviously, the hole was not made by a mouse. It was made by a shell. There is no humor in this misstatement of facts. The man, Old Bill, was clearly mistaken in thinking a mouse had made it. People who can laugh at such mistakes are obviously not normal; therefore we should pay careful attention to their psychology. Their very decadence may prove to be a weapon of self-defense.”
Call me cynical, but I find it hard to believe that anyone, even an employee of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, ever really believed that it was necessary to explain that the hole was not made by mice. I suspect that claimed “Nazi textbook” was in truth written by some chap in the British Ministry of Information who enjoyed his work. Helen Sullivan continues in that great comedic tradition.
“In many parts of the country the graduate earnings premium is negative – these local economies are unable to absorb or properly use higher qualified people because of the structure of the local economy.”
– From this essay, “Levelling up: against just “cities and skills”, by Neil O’Brien, who I think is the Conservative MP of that name. I found the link via the trade unionist Joe Allen.
Though I salute Mr Allen’s open-mindedness in linking across the political aisle, I would like to make one observation with which he probably – and his employer the TUC certainly – disagrees: to whit, the fact that there are parts of the country where going to university on average makes a young person poorer is yet another argument against rent control.
Again and again I see the argument that, far from it being a problem that landlords are being driven out of the rental market, it is a fine thing, because landlords selling up will make more homes available. “Home” is a beautiful word, but there are and always will be people who are not looking for a permanent home. Some of this group are students, obviously, alongside those in temporary jobs, those whose work requires them to move frequently – and those who have a choice between staying at home where their degree is useless or moving to some place where it isn’t. A strong rental market allows rural people to try out life in the city, and vice versa for city people. In a society where landlordism is banished and every house is a home, you had better pray that the waiting list to leave your quaint village is exactly equal in length to the waiting list to join it.
This example of socialist priorities comes from “economic justice campaigner” Richard J Murphy:
Richard Murphy
@RichardJMurphy
Tackling obesity and all its related issues via an injection, instead of dealing with the cause, would be like saying: “Don’t worry about smoking; just take this anti-cancer drug”.
12:47 PM · Oct 15, 2024
Price gouging during disasters is good. It saves lives.
Think of it this way. When the hurricane is on its way do you want people to panic-buy double what they need “just in case”, causing the shops to run out? Why wouldn’t they do that if prices are artificially stopped from rising? Wouldn’t it be better if people limited the amount they bought because “it’s so expensive right now”, leaving more available for others?
When the disaster strikes, would you like businesses and individuals from hundreds of miles away to drop whatever they were doing previously and start transporting emergency supplies into the area affected – and keep doing it until there are no more shortages? Would you like factories hundreds of miles away to shift production to whatever the people in the afflicted area need most? You would? Then let them sell their stuff at a higher price than usual.
“Badenoch favourite to win Tory leadership in members’ vote against Jenrick”, reports the Guardian. This is unexpected. The format for the Conservative leadership contest this time round was as follows:
Six candidates stood for the leadership: Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, Mel Stride and Tom Tugendhat. They will be eliminated in a series of votes, until two remain to stand in November. On 4 September, Patel was eliminated in the first round of voting, with Jenrick outperforming expectations by coming first. On 10 September, Stride was eliminated in the second round and went on to endorse Cleverly.
Following a strong performance at the Conservative Party Conference, Cleverly emerged as a frontrunner by coming first in the third round of voting, whilst Tugendhat was eliminated.
Despite this, Cleverly was unexpectedly eliminated in a close fourth round of voting when both Badenoch and Jenrick overtook him.
What happened? The Guardian‘s Andrew Sparrow quotes this tweet from Alex Wickham of Bloomberg that might explain it:
Tories saying they think the Cleverly camp lent Jenrick votes to try to keep Badenoch off the ballot but lent too many. Or Cleverly supporters did it off their own backs thinking he was nailed on for the final
Great plot twist, looking forward to the finale.
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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.
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