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]
|
“Kneecap rapper charged with terrorism offence over alleged Hezbollah flag at London gig”, reports the Guardian:
Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who performs with the Irish rap trio Kneecap, has been charged with a terrorism offence for allegedly displaying a flag in support of Hezbollah at a gig in London, police said.
The 27-year-old, of Belfast, was charged after an investigation by the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command and is scheduled to appear at Westminster magistrates court on 18 June.
Kneecap, named after the IRA’s favourite type of mutilation, are a rap group who sing in the Irish language. They’ve had it all, the award winning biopic, the laudatory coverage in the Guardian, the visit from Jeremy Corbyn. And now they’ve had the visit from the counter-terrorism police.
In these cases I never know whether to wrap myself in the mantle of libertarian righteousness and defend even these terrorist fanboys – it was only a piece of patterned cloth, FFS – or to say with Ulysses S. Grant that “I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.”
The late Niall Kilmartin examined this dilemma in this post, “The equal oppression of the laws”. He gave a characteristically fair hearing to both sides, but concluded:
We will not lack for mind-broadening frenemies to defend even after tolerating ‘equality before the law’ arguments against the loudest “I can say it but you can’t” enforcers of the double-standard. The woker-than-thou of today love purging the woke of yesterday – they will supply.
Equality before the law is good in itself. Demanding equality of oppression before the law is a way to expose a dishonest process. Think carefully before judging it a betrayal of our war against the hate speech laws’ evil goal, rather than a way – that can be both honest in itself and effective – of waging it.
We have had laws against ‘inciting racial hatred’ for 60 years. It’s the settled, apparently inviolable position of British law that there are some things so dangerous they cannot be allowed to be said. We have taken, in effect, the precise opposite path to the United States. It was in the 1960s that the US Supreme Court gave the First Amendment its teeth, following a slew of high-profile cases brought by silenced civil-rights leaders. Where America came to see free speech as the answer to bigotry, Britain came to see censorship as essential to multicultural harmony.
– Tom Slater
No one with a shred of humanity could fail to sympathise with Leanne Lucas. On 29th July 2024, she was hosting a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance and bracelet-making workshop in Southport when Axel Rudakubana walked in and started attacking the children, killing three of them. In trying to protect the children Ms Lucas herself was stabbed five times.
When people suffer terrible things, they often throw themselves into searching for a means to help others avoid the same fate. Ms Lucas thinks she has found her cause. The Daily Mail reports:
Southport survivor calls for ban on pointed kitchen knives – as she says she’s not been able to use one herself since the attack that left three girls dead
[…]
After her horrific experiences, the teacher had assumed there would be tighter controls around kitchen knives and was shocked to find there weren’t.
She said: ‘Every time I learnt something new, I’d think, “That doesn’t sound right. Surely there are laws in place so that couldn’t have happened.” The more my eyes have been opened, the more I’ve been able to formulate an idea.’
She does not seem to be entirely clear in her mind whether that idea is a cultural change or a legal one. If my only source had been the BBC’s article on the same topic, I would have thought she was only advocating that people voluntarily adopt a different style of cooking that employs knifes with rounded tips rather than traditional knives with sharp tips.
This idea will not work. The sort of person who would take her proposed pledge to commit to exchanging their pointed knives for round-tipped ones could have a nuclear weapon in their cutlery drawer and still be no threat to anyone. But I have no objection to her proposing it as a desirable cultural change. I do have an objection to her proposing to ban pointy kitchen knives, as if the existing ban on murder lacked only this finishing touch to be effective.
As I said in an article for the Libertarian Alliance written five years after another massacre of children:
When the parents of the Dunblane children spoke there was every reason for the world to hear about their terrible experience. There was never any particular reason to suppose that their opinions were right. In fact their opinions should carry less weight than almost anyone else’s should. This point is well understood when it comes to juries. It goes without saying, or, at least, it once did, that guilt or innocence must be decided by impartial people. Decisions of policy require the same cast of mind as decisions of guilt and innocence.
We want to comfort those who have suffered unfairly. One way you comfort someone is by agreeing with them, by allowing them emotional license for any outburst. In the ordinary course of life and death, though, even as we say, “yes, yes” to a distraught person we discount – not ignore, but discount – the content of what they say. Phrases such as “He didn’t know what he was saying” or “She was mad with grief” illustrate this. Then, after a while, they are expected to get back to something like normal.
[…]
However it came about, nowadays we give the bereaved parents at Dunblane, the survivors of rail crashes, and similar groups both the license to say anything due to the distraught and the intellectual consideration due to experts. They can’t have both. Not because I’m too mean to give it to them, but because the two are logically incompatible. The press and public have handed power to those least able to exercise it well.
There’s an old saying in policing, usually uttered after the latest scandal or disaster: ‘The public get the police they deserve.’ It reflects how police officers feel about the elites who set their rules of engagement, as well as the occasionally capricious public they serve: whatever the police do will be criticised by somebody. Which, probably, is as it should be; policing isn’t a popularity competition. If a police officer is performing their duties properly, ‘somebody’ is going to have their day ruined. That ‘somebody’ used to predominantly be criminals. Sadly, that’s no longer the case. Yet still, I wonder, What did we, the British people, do to deserve the police we have now?
– Dominic Adler
Read the whole thing.
The Guardian, 6th December 2024: Romanian court annuls first round of presidential election
The Guardian, 9th March 2025: Pro-Russia Călin Georgescu barred from Romanian presidential election re-run
The Guardian, 15th May 2025: Romania might be about to make a Trump-admiring former football hooligan its president. This is why
Georgescu sounds a nasty piece of work, and Simion not much better, but the “election interference” that might truly kill off Romanians’ faith in democracy is not coming from them.
Police face lawsuit after former officer arrested over ‘thought crime’ tweet, reports the Telegraph:
A retired special constable is preparing to sue Kent Police after being arrested over a social media post warning about rising anti-Semitism.
Julian Foulkes, from Gillingham in Kent, was handcuffed at his home by six officers from the force he had served for a decade after replying to a pro-Palestinian activist on X.
The 71-year-old was detained for eight hours, interrogated and ultimately issued with a caution after officers visited his home on Nov 2 2023.
On Tuesday, Kent Police confirmed that the caution was a mistake and had been deleted from Mr Foulkes’s record, admitting that it was “not appropriate in the circumstances and should not have been issued”.
So long as the consequences of police misbehaviour are born by the taxpayer, not the police, why should they care? Words are cheap. They’ll settle out of court, promise not to do it again, and do it again.
Police body-worn camera footage captured officers scrutinising Mr Foulkes’’s collection of books by authors such as Douglas Murray, a Telegraph contributor, and issues of The Spectator, pointing to what they described as “very Brexity things”.
He voted with the majority. They could tell he was a wrong’un.
In Britain, in 2025, whether or not you should be able to criticise a religion, mock its practices, burn its texts, is an alarmingly live issue. And when I say ‘a religion’, you know which one I’m talking about. This debate has lit up again this week, following the charges brought against Hamit Coskun for burning a Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London in February. His one-man protest against the Islamist turn of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been chalked up as a religiously motivated public-order offence, drawing the condemnation of shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and causing an X feud between two MPs. Rupert Lowe – the member for the Very Online right – condemned our backdoor blasphemy laws, while Adnan Hussain – one of the so-called Gaza independents who rode a wave of sectarian, anti-Israel bile into parliament at the last General Election – accused Lowe of singling out Muslims under the guise of freedom of speech.
– Tom Slater
Before it’s possible to suggest a solution to a problem, it’s necessary to grasp the root cause of the problem itself. A sort of Reverse Chesterton’s Fence exercise.
So, what has gone wrong? As we never tire of repeating it’s the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors. That is, for the past 78 years we’ve had that coherent national plan. With a long term vision. Run by the Rolls Royce minds of the Men in Whitehall who know best. Which is how we’ve ended up with the output we’ve got, something that would disgrace a Trabant factory.
As it is national control of planning – the TCPA really does define who may build what where, is the nationalisation of land use – that is the problem then the solution is to get rid of what caused the problem. Blow up the TCPA, proper blow up – kablooie.
– Tim Worstall
The Press Gazette reports:
Essex Police loses accuracy complaint versus Telegraph over Allison Pearson questioning
Essex Police has had a complaint against The Telegraph rejected by IPSO following a visit to columnist Allison Pearson by two uniformed officers on Remembrance Sunday.
Pearson was visited by police in November 2024, apparently to discuss a potentially inflammatory post on X by the comment writer.
(The tweet in question criticised two-tier policing of Pro-Palestine marches.)
Pearson said she was accused of a “non-crime hate incident” by police. The Telegraph also reported that she was questioned over an “alleged hate crime”.
Essex Police said Pearson was wrong to claim officers described the matter as a “non-crime hate incident” and provided a transcript of video taken filmed by officers at the time. IPSO rejected the complaints, saying the Telegraph had taken sufficient care to establish the facts ahead of publication.
Why does it matter whether it was or was not a “non-crime hate incident”? Because Essex Police tried to claim that because Pearson was – ludicrously – being investigated for an actual crime (someone had complained that the tweet had incited racial hatred), that meant that the Telegraph could not report on their own columnist having the rozzers turn up unannounced at her door on Remembrance Sunday.
Rejecting the complaint, IPSO said: “While the complainant had said that it had not been given sufficient time to respond to this email, it had responded within four hours, with both a for-publication comment and a not-for-publication note. Neither the comment nor the background note responded to the claim that the writer had been told that she had been ‘told she had been reported for a non crime hate incident’. While both pieces of correspondence made clear that the police were investigating the matter as a potential criminal offence, the position regarding what the writer had been told during the visit had not been disputed or corrected.”
IPSO added: ” The complainant had said that the articles should not have been published, as the publication was not aware of the full circumstances of the case, and had attempted to dissuade the newspaper from publishing the articles under complaint. The committee noted that, on occasion, the press will report on ongoing investigations, and the code does not forbid it from doing so. It further noted the role that the press plays in reporting on the criminal justice system, and that – provided that the code is not breached – there is no bar on the media reporting on ongoing and developing cases, and doing so can serve the public interest, for example by holding institutions to account, or by reporting on matters of ongoing public debate.”
“Europe has a serious free speech problem. Instead of taking ever more measures to punish their citizens for what they say, it’s time for countries from Germany to Britain to abolish the deeply illiberal legislation they have, with little attention from the press or the public, introduced over the course of the last decades. To live up to the most basic values of the democracies that are now under threat, the continent needs to reverse course—and restore true freedom of speech.”
– Yascha Mounk
In the Guardian, April O’Neill writes,
The Online Safety Act is now partly enforceable. Paul might make you think a bit harder about it. Understandably, much of the conversation surrounding it has been focused on protecting children, but there is a glaring hole in this legislation regarding the protection of adults. Despite a 2022 report for the Ministry of Justice finding that the role of the internet in radicalisation pathways “was most evident for older rather than younger individuals”, the Tory government backed out from provisions that would have prevented adults from seeing “legal but harmful” content online over fears about freedom of speech.
April O’Neill holds that the people who need to be forcibly protected from hearing bad opinions are old people who distrust left wing media sources. Ms O’Neill is the winner of The Guardian Foundation’s 2025 Emerging Voices Awards (19-25 age category) recognising young talent in political opinion writing.
The modern view of a councillor is that they are there to promote state policies, such as Diversity and Inclusion (see, for example, the Equality Act 2010 – and the duties it lays down).
A councillor, or even a Member of Parliament, is not there, according to the modern view, to represent ‘reactionary’ residents or constituents – not AGAINST the state, but rather the elected representative is there to help the resident or constituent get benefits or services from the state. And to promote Progressive attitudes and behaviour.
I am not saying I agree with the modern view – I am just explaining what it is.
After all supporting ‘reactionary’ residents might imply that one shared their opinions and, therefore (according to the modern view – of the training colleges and so on) deserved to share their punishment.
– Paul Marks
|
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.
|
