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]
In my recent post, “Peace-lovers love using the passive voice”, I asked you to supply particularly egregious examples of media attempts to downplay murders by Hamas and other protected groups. Ben did just that. From Canadian TV:
Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died. https://t.co/fR6XfiN9uE
In case it disappears, the tweet from @CTVNews says, “Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, who went missing after Hamas attack, has died.”
The use of “has died” rather than “is dead” makes it sound like she passed away in hospital within the last few days. Actually, she has been dead for a month because she was murdered on October 7th, alongside more than a thousand others. The only thing that has happened within the last few days is that they finally identified her remains. In most situations I would not read so much into a journalist’s slightly odd use of the present perfect for an event a month ago, but when every such oddity of phrasing works to push the murderers out of sight, it is not a coincidence, it’s a technique. Most headlines are written to grab the reader’s attention; these headlines are written to be forgotten. Like the small print in a dodgy contract, they are carefully crafted to meet the technical requirement of having been stated somewhere, but, in a betrayal of the normal function of journalism, those who write them would prefer you not to read on. That someone “has died” is scarcely news at all. Every morning’s news report gives its crop of vaguely prominent people who have died during the previous few days. They don’t want you to think about when or how she died. They don’t want you to think about the state in which Vivian Silver’s body must have been found, given that her remains were not identified for a month. They don’t want you to feel the horror of her murder.
I am going to post an image. If I have done this right, it will be hidden “below the fold”, so you must click the link in order to see it. I put it below the fold because it is horrifying. Am I doing the same as CTV in that tweet I was complaining about, then? No, the opposite. They do all they can to stop their readers ever thinking about the reality of terrorism. I am giving readers who cannot stop thinking about it the option not to see one particularly distressing photograph. The image I am talking about shows a poster put out by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in response to the La Mon restaurant bombing carried out by the IRA in 1978. These days people discussing this poster feel obliged to blur it out, but in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles they were not so sensitive. The poster shows what CTV and so many others in the modern media want to hide. Again and again, it says the word they will not say.
Soon after Hamas attacked Israel, Jeremy Corbyn made a speech. Kyle Orton noticed something odd about it:
“young people who died in the Negev desert”
“young people who’ve been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza”
Telling how he thinks.
So sad about those young people who “died in the desert”. What happened, did they forget water bottles and sun cream? Tut, tut, young people are so imprudent.
All languages have their irregularities. For instance, in Modern Journalese Jews can kill, where “to kill” is a transitive verb, but they die intransitively. Their allotted span of years happens to come to an end that day. The nearest the grammar of Journalese gets to expressing the idea that someone might have – uh, whatchamacallit, done that thing to a Jew so that they end up dying – is to tentatively mention an event that preceded it:
But remember, folks, correlation is not causation. Though in this case, it was. The Community Notes to that tweet by Time magazine state “The medical examiner ruled Paul Kessler’s death a homicide.” He was – I’m speaking normal English, not Journalese, so this sentence is grammatical despite Mr Kessler having been a Jew – killed. The definitional question that remains open is whether his killing was murder.
That question is not open when it comes to the young Israelis who were murdered by Hamas at a music festival in the Negev Desert.
Edit: In the comments, AFT points out that the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs is not the same as the distinction between active and passive voice. An example of the latter distinction would be “The Israelis killed the Palestinians” versus “The Israelis were killed by the Palestinians”. I have seen enough evidence of the journalistic preference for headlines in which Israelis actively, dynamically, kill specified people versus those in which Israelis are killed by unspecified people, and vice versa for Palestinians, that I think I can leave the double meaning of “passive” in my post title unchanged. If you have seen a particularly egregious example of either distinction, add it to the comments.
This is the hierarchy:
1. A killed B.
2. B was killed by A.
3. B was killed. (No killer specified.)
4. B died after some event. (Whether or not their death was a result of that event is left unspecified.)
5. B died at a given location or time, such as “in the Negev desert”, from which the reader who keeps up with the news might be able to deduce that the death was not natural.
A related strategy for avoiding naming murderers from a protected group is to blame it all on the instrument. This might be called the “killer car” strategy, as perfected by the Washington Post’s infamous reference to “the Waukesha tragedy caused by a SUV”.
No matter how many times I explained all this, the same question kept coming, over and over. ‘Why do you care so much?’ All I could say was: ‘Why do you not?’
The intercession of the most famous children’s writer in the world in the trans debate was a moment when I thought the argument would shift decisively in my direction. So beloved were the Harry Potter books, so impeccable were J. K. Rowling’s socialist credentials, so compelling her backstory, she would be listened to.
But no, not a bit of it. HMS Rowling – which had piped on board generations of children, and taught them to read for their pleasure and then for their children’s pleasure – was deserted faster than a plague ship, so taboo were the author’s perfectly commonplace views on women’s rights.
The young actors from the Harry Potter series of films instantly betrayed her. If I were a star who had never shown any ability to act past the pre-pubescent level that got me into the business, I’d be keeping my head down, not signing statements insinuating that my old mentor was a bigot.
Those actors – Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint – deserve to be remembered as symbols of the most remarkable arrogance, cowardice and ingratitude. But asking what Rowling actually said that was so terrible produces nothing. You’ve never seen a transphobic statement from J. K. Rowling because none exists.
Fox’s sexual comments about Evans (“Who’d want to shag that?”) and Wootton’s sniggering at them were oafish, but I do not see what Evans has to complain about given that she has made almost identical remarks herself:
So a woman is ok to say I’m not gonna shag you… But when a man says it, it’s misogyny?
I know Laurence Fox shouldn’t have said it on TV and should just apologise.
But, as ever, it’s OK when the Left does it. Last week the Guardian ran a piece by Alexandra Topping called “Russell Brand and why the allegations took so long to surface”. She said, rather defensively I thought, that “multiple experts” had told her it was from fear of Brand suing for libel. OK, the experts do have a point about Britain’s libel laws, and that is why I am making absolutely no comment about the criminal accusations against him and ask you to do likewise, but fear of libel does not explain why Brand remained a star for years despite making on-air sexual remarks about a woman in a manner far worse than anything Laurence Fox has done.
The truly disgusting behaviour of Brand and Jonathan Ross towards Andrew Sachs and Georgina Baillie in 2008 did not stop the Guardian’s George Monbiot calling Brand one of his “heroes” in 2014 and saying “He’s the best thing that has happened to the left in years”.
Brand did not cease being on the left. Until these allegations came out on September 16th, he was due to contribute to book called “Poetry for the Many” edited by Jeremy Corbyn and the trade unionist Len McCluskey. But Brand’s views had ceased to be an asset to the left, certainly to the sort of left that flourishes in the current broadcast ecology.
But now, Facebook is censoring accurate information about the relationship between industrial wind energy development and the increase in whale deaths off the East Coast.
Yesterday, Facebook and Instagram censored my post linking whale deaths to wind energy off the East Coast of the United States. The censorship came in the form of a “FactCheck.org” article from March 31, 2023, which relied entirely on U.S. government sources.
The censorship came on the exact same day that Public and Environmental Progress released a new documentary, “Thrown To The Wind,” which proves that the FactCheck.org article is false.
We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”
“It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”
She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change.
“One of the few sensible things Noam Chomsky ever said was that if you want to understand the world, read the New York Times backwards; that is, start at the end of the story and read up.”
– Steven F Hayward, making this comment in a long and damning critique of “climate crisis” viewpoints and suppressors of dissent.
Either the Independent‘s “Race Correspondent” (who, to add to the comedy, is called Nadine White) has written a report almost designed to be misunderstood, or she is a satirist of genius. I present to you this story:
Juicy! Which one of ’em was it? Will Meghan’s Spotify podcast be coming back so she can discuss it? Sorry to disappoint, but the connection to the current royal family is strong as a cobweb: it seems a catalogue of gems and jewels owned by the Royal Collection “contained more than 40 mentions of offensive racial terms”. The aberrant public catalogue concerning a sub-collection of jewels, cameos, and other small items was actually published fifteen years ago in 2008 but remained on the Royal Collection’s website until the intrepid offence archaeologists of the Independent found it last Thursday. Since the cataloguing and study of the whole collection by historians is an ongoing process, those particular entries could have been written decades earlier. Here is the current webpage. Fear not, it has been purged.
And about that “offensive racial term” in the 2008 version… it wasn’t the n-word the Independent wants you to think it was.
In the latest instance, the offensive terms are mostly used to describe people of African ancestry who appear on the jewels. The words are also included in a number of names of items in the collection.
One brooch is described in the following terms: “Head of a n**** in three-quarter profile to the right, with drop-pearl earring. This type of a n****’s head is found on several sixteenth-century cameos.”
Another item depicting a white person is accompanied by this description and slur: “Athough it uses the dark layers of the stone for the profile, the features are not n*****d’.
Count the asterisks. Four, not five. Ergo it was egro, or in the final example, egroid.
UPDATE 16:20 BST: Someone at the Independent read the readers’ comments. The newspaper has now changed n**** to n***o throughout the article.
“Covid Censorship Proved to Be Deadly”, writes Bret Swanson in the Wall Street Journal, but you could leave the first word off the headline and it would still be true. It is not necessary to agree with or even understand every one of Mr Swanson’s specifically Covid-related points to see the inevitable truth of what he says below:
Legions of doctors stayed quiet after witnessing the demonization of their peers who challenged the Covid orthodoxy. A little censorship leads people to watch what they say. Millions of patients and citizens were deprived of important insights as a result.
The worldwide system of individual doctors reporting and pooling their observations of how diseases progress and treatments work out has been a major factor in the spectacular medical progress of the last two centuries. For it to work, obviously, all must be free to say what they have seen and all must be free to see what others have said. I had thought this understanding was an unshakeable pillar of science, one of those innovations, like literacy and the scientific method itself, whose advantages are so clear that once discovered it is never abandoned.
In case you are not aware of this – and there is no way you would if you got all your news from the Sky website – yesterday we learnt that political entrepreneur, Mr Brexit, and all-round inconvenience to the Establishment, Nigel Farage, has had his bank account closed. No explanation has been offered. When he attempted to open an account at other banks (6 or 7 according to him) he was turned down in every case.
Wow! just wow.
It’s nothing new of course. Similar things have happened to Toby Young of the Free Speech Union and to the guys at Triggernometry. It comes at a time when any number of people have been kicked off social media or lost their jobs as a result of expressing the wrong opinion. I believe even The Boss once fell into the former category.
But, Patrick, you are a libertarian. Surely, you believe in producer sovereignty? Surely, you believe that a bank or any other private institution has every right to decide who it trades with and more pertinently who it doesn’t trade with?
I do indeed. But cherchez l’état. Once upon a time there was such a thing as the Ecology Building Society. It took in deposits and lent it out to – as it would see it – eco-friendly projects. It wasn’t very big and was eventually closed down by regulation. More recently, some of you will be aware of the travails of Dave Fishwick. He didn’t think banks in Burnley were much cop so he tried to set up his own. Not an easy thing to do as it turned out. So difficult in fact that – IIRC – only one new bank had been established in the UK in the last 50 years. The bank in question was Metro Bank which I believe has also been involved in a bit of cancellation recently. Fishwick eventually got his way but only by a bit of creative loophole exploitation.
So, essentially, a bank is very much a creature of the state. It is subject to the arbitrary whims of a capricious master. All very medieval. What are the chances that all these banks have been lent on? High, I would say. This wasn’t always the case. A hundred years ago – where I spend a lot of my time – there were any number of banks. Some of them were not particularly well run but it would appear that if you were dissatisfied with the banks on offer you could set up your own.
But hang about, if Farage’s de-banking is all to do with state regulation how come all those people got cancelled on social media which has almost no regulation at all? Er…
Update 1/7/23 It would appear that the Ecology Building Society is very much still with us.
The cancellation of eminent science writers and statisticians like Dr. Whitehouse and Professor Fenton for ‘wrongthink’ highlights the ever-shrinking boundaries of the discourse around science and medicine and the unwillingness of science’s gatekeepers to challenge groupthink and politically sensitive dogmas. As Dr. Whitehouse says, “science thrives on debate and scrutiny”. Silencing those who challenge prevailing orthodoxies was the approach favoured by the Catholic church in 17th Century Italy and is completely at odds with the scientific method.
I used to read every issue of New Scientist ‘back in the day’ but it has been a bastion of approved high-status groupthink for many years, suitable for cat tray liner only.
I do not know what this woman is accused of. [UPDATE: Commenter John did know, and linked to this Mark Steyn interview and this Mail story from October 2022.] It is always possible that things will look different if ever we get to hear the full story – not that Surrey Police seem inclined to tell us. But if this is half as bad as it looks, Caroline Farrow is right: it is important – and frightening.
I’m going to do a thread and limit replies. You’ll see why. Please do not speculate with names. But I think what is happening to me is important. I am not prohibited from talking about things in general terms.
To save space, and to keep a sequential record of them in case they disappear, I have written out the rest of the tweets in her thread as bullet points. The following was written by Caroline Farrow, not me:
—
On Monday afternoon my solicitor received a bizarre communication from Surrey police solicitors. He thought it had to do with my civil claim against them.
After some miscommunication, they sent through a bundle for a court hearing.
I am due in court tomorrow morning.
The police asked that “physical paperwork” relating to the court hearing against me in 2 days, was withheld from me.
They wanted me to go to a court hearing without access to the accusations and alleged evidence.
Surrey police have applied for a stalking protection order as a result of material I have posted on Twitter.
On page 1 of the bundle repeated misgendering is cited.
Here are the prohibitions they are seeking tomorrow morning.
I will be assigned an “offender manager”.
I will not be allowed to use any Social Media, Social Networking, Gaming, Dating (lol) site without this person’s written permission and having supplied them with usernames and passwords for all sites within 3 days.
In addition the following requirements are added:
1. Allow Police Officers to enter your registered address(es), between the hours of 8am and 8pm, to conduct a risk assessment, monitor devices, and manage compliance of the order
2. Provide your Offender Manager with any mobile, digital, or internet enabled devices for examination, review, and monitoring purposes, immediately upon request. You must also your provide your Offender Manager with any access PINs, passwords, or patterns. Examinations may be completed manually on scene, or could entail them seizing your device(s) for examination by agencies contracted by the police for that purpose. Failing to disclose the existence of a device in your possession to your Offender Manager will count as a failure to comply with this condition.
3. Re-register home address every 12 months at a Police Station (within 365 days of last registration).
4. Provide your Offender Manager with list of all mobile, digital, or internet enabled devices that you own or have access to use. The list must be provided within three days of the order being granted or within three days of any changes.
The police officer says this:
I believe that while presenting a significant interference with the respondent’s privacy rights, it is an appropriate course of action in the circumstances.
Signed by Surrey Police Superintendent
“I consider that in accordance with paragraph 2 of Article 8 of HRA, an interference by this force as a public authority is in accordance with the law and is necessary.”
I left out another condition Surrey police are asking for.
5. Possessing, owning or using more than one mobile phone and one SIM card, unless with written permission from your Offender Manager in the area that you reside. You must provide the telephone number and unique identifying numbers of all device(s) within three days of this order being granted or within three days of and supplying any changes within 3 days of any such change.
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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