We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The political scientist Timur Kuran coined the term “preference falsification” in 1987. Earlier today he sent this tweet:
Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a political game changer. Also important was his decision to hide people’s “likes” from other users. This diminished preference falsification on X. It also boosted the apparent popularity, and thus the circulation, of un- or anti-woke posts.
Tony Blair greatly increased the ease of postal voting in UK elections by means of the Representation of the People Act 2000. That Wikipedia article says the Act made only “minor amendments”. They were not minor in their effects and nor were they intended to be. Whoever edited the Wikipedia article on Absentee voting in the United Kingdom got it right:
After the introduction of on-demand postal voting in the UK, there has been a massive uptake in postal voting. Whilst in 2001 1.8 million postal ballots were distributed to voters, this has increased to more than 8 million postal ballots by the UK 2017 general election and represented one in every five ballots cast in 2019 United Kingdom general election.
Labour did this because they thought it would help them win elections, of course. Did it? Perhaps not. While it did increase turnout, which historically has usually helped Labour candidates, the increase in turnout was particularly strong among pensioners, who tend to have mobility problems that make it harder for them to get to the polling station in person. Pensioners skew Conservative. The change also had other effects, of which more below.
I can certainly see a reason for some mechanism to be available to let people arrange to vote by post (or vote by mail as the Americans call it) when circumstances make them unable to vote in person. But absentee voting unquestionably degrades the secret ballot. This brings us back to the issue of preference falsification. As the same Wikipedia article says,
In the United Kingdom a 2016 government inquiry found that postal voting “was considered by some to be the UK’s main electoral vulnerability and to provide the ‘best’ opportunity for electoral fraud… Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders… the possibilities of undue influence, theft of postal votes and tampering with them after completion were all still risks.” The government responded by saying it would consider the recommendations on postal voting.
Presumably the government (by then a Conservative one) did consider the recommendations. It evidently decided it wanted more postal voting anyway. Probably that was to get the pensioner vote.
However something changed in the 2024 election that I speculate might lead Labour to fall out of love with postal voting. Of course Labour won that election with a massive majority – but there were some nasty surprises for individual Labour MPs, many of them quite prominent.
Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health, had a majority of 5,218 in the 2019 election. His majority in the 2024 election was 528. The person who came near to unseating him was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Shabana Mahmood, the Secretary of State for Justice, had a majority of 28,582 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 3,421. The person who came near to unseating her was a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Jess Philips had a majority of 10,659 in the 2019 election. Her majority in the 2024 election was 693. The person who came near to unseating her is a Muslim member of George Galloway’s Workers Party who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
Jonathan Ashworth had a majority of 22,675 in 2019. His constituency was considered a safe seat for Labour, but he lost it in 2024 to a Muslim Independent who campaigned on the issue of Gaza.
There are several other similar examples.
Labour knows full well that its current majority is a mile high but an inch thick, as the saying goes. If Reform eats the Tories, or vice versa, I think that Labour will look with fresh eyes at the issue highlighted in that 2016 report:
Evidence was presented of pressure being put on vulnerable members of some ethnic minority communities, particularly women and young people, to vote according to the will of the elders.
“The national party has made it so that they’ve set up a standard where if Donald Trump doesn’t literally ruin democracy in a very visible way that people feel, then they’re proven wrong. It wasn’t as bad as we thought, so they’re liars again. They have set themselves up for failure”
– Carly Hammond, a Saginaw city councillor and former trade union organiser who campaigned for Kamala Harris, quoted in this Guardian article from 18th January: Democrats in denial over Trump defeat, voters say: ‘Haven’t learned the lessons’
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Tech billionaire wades into controversy after shooting right arm on upwards diagonal during celebrations of Trump
– subheading to Guardian article on Donald Trump’s second inauguration, 20th January 2025: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally
What makes one protest movement succeed and another fail? An article by Helen Pearson in today’s Guardian called “Stand up and be counted: six ways to protest that will make your voice heard” attempts to give a factual answer to that question.
Among its conclusions is this one:
A body of research shows that non-violent protests appear more effective than violent ones. “That’s one of the most robust findings,” says Mueller, who published a handbook for activists this year (The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists). But when authorities violently repress protests, it backfires and appears to strengthen movements.
Omar Wasow, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, saw this in a study of the 1960s US civil rights movement. He found that when protesters were violent, it prompted news stories focused on crime and disorder, and shunted votes to the Republican party, which was viewed as promoting law and order. A wave of violent protests after Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968 even tipped the election to Republican Richard Nixon, Wasow concluded.
“Violent protests provoke a reaction in favour of law and order” seems an obvious point to make – though it never hurts to have some facts and figures to back up the obvious, as the work of Omar Wasow provided. In 2025 Wasow’s findings would be not be deemed controversial by most on the Left or the Right.
Not so in 2020. I knew that name “Wasow” was familiar. A little Googling found me this article by Matthew Yglesias from July 2020, writing in Vox:
“The real stakes in the David Shor saga”
On May 28, David Shor, a political data analyst, sent a controversial tweet. Soon after George Floyd’s death, alongside peaceful mass protests there was a substantial amount of looting and vandalism in Minneapolis and a few other cities. Shor, citing research by Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, suggested that these incidents could prompt a political backlash that would help President Donald Trump’s bid for reelection. At the same time, he noted that, historically, nonviolent protests had been effective at driving political change “mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”
The tweet was characterized as “concern trolling” by the podcast host Benjamin Dixon, while Ari Trujillo Wesler, the impresario behind a popular organizing app, denounced it as “anti-Blackness.”
The following day Shor apologized for the tweet; shortly thereafter, he was dismissed from his job.
The crazy stuff didn’t end there:
. . . in fact, many Democratic Party professionals believe the backlash to his tweets was deserved. Indeed, though Shor has found a new job in progressive politics, one of the conditions of his employment is that he can’t reveal who’s hired him — lest his new employers face the same criticism Civis did. And all accounts of the internal situation at Civis confirm that clients and partners did in fact complain about him and his tweet to the company.
Shor’s tweet, as originally reported by Jonathan Chait, became a topic of discussion on the Progressphiles email list, a widely used networking list for progressive data operatives, and he was soon kicked out of the group. The group’s moderators described Shor’s tweet as “racist” and the criticism he got on Twitter for it as a “much deserved call in.” They also alleged that by arguing with his critics on Twitter, he had “encouraged harassment that led to death threats.”
Shor’s so-called “racist” tweet consisted of quoting factual research by a political scientist – one who is of mixed race himself. Shor’s aim in tweeting it was to help the Black Lives Matter protests and other Democrat causes be more effective. Why were the American Left in 2020 so desperate to believe that violent protest worked better than peaceful protest that they punished one of their own merely for pointing out the tactically useful fact that it did not?
Contemplating the errors made by one’s political enemies during a bout of insanity is fun and easy. It is much harder to spot the errors made by one’s own side due to it currently being the one with its fingers stuck in its ears chanting “La-la, I can’t hear you”. Any suggestions as to what People We Like are currently refusing to see?
Russell Roberts wrote this essay yesterday in response to the devastating fires in Los Angeles: “Profits versus Love”
A few years back we thought about building a deck or a porch on the back of our house. But we decided against it when the estimates started coming in. They were about double what the architect had told us it would cost. Double! Had the architect misled us as a way of encouraging us to proceed with the project? No, six months earlier the Mississippi had overflowed its banks and destroyed a lot of houses in the St. Louis area. Carpenters and builders had no time to build a back porch or a deck. They had bigger fish to fry. To get them to build a porch, you had to pay a premium.
We delayed the project for a couple of years, and prices came down. That delay was an example of the hidden benefit of high prices. When prices are high, the least-urgent projects get delayed, freeing up resources for more urgent projects. The porch just isn’t worth it. So the wood I would have used instead gets set aside to rebuild a washed-away house. The carpenter I would have kept busy now works on building that new house.
As you may have noticed, my claim that Russell Roberts wrote that essay yesterday was a lie. He wrote it twenty-one years ago in 2003. Unfortunately it might as well have been written yesterday because some people never learn. On 12 January 2025 the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, tweeted about measures he is taking in an effort to help the victims of the fires:
NEW: Just issued an Executive Order that will allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape and quickly rebuild their homes.
We are also extending key price gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable.
The responses are full of people making the obvious point about red tape. A lady calling herself “Orange County MAGA” says, “So you’re saying California has too much bureaucratic red tape? Gee, if only there was an elected leader who we could call…”
Criticism of Newsom’s “price gouging protections” is much rarer, despite the harm they do being more immediate and severe than the long-term harm done by excessive building regulations. That is par for the course. Patrick Crozier’s post from 2015, “People are ignorant about economics”, contains this anecdote from Mike Munger:
…there was a hurricane in Raleigh, North Carolina. The roads were blocked, there was no electricity and there was a shortage of ice.
Ice may not sound that important but it is. Not only does it help to preserve food but it also helps to preserve some medicines like, for instance, the insulin needed by diabetics.
Some “yahoos” – Munger’s term – saw an opportunity to make money. They got themselves a truck, loaded it with ice and some chainsaws and proceeded to drive towards the centre of Raleigh. If they found the road in front of them blocked they chopped up the fallen trees and carried on.
When they got to the centre of town they started selling the ice. Usually, ice sold for $2 a bag. They were selling it for $12. Very soon a queue appeared. Then the police arrived. Citing price-gouging laws they arrested the men and impounded the truck.
And here’s the kicker: as the truck was towed away the people in the queue applauded the police.
Here are some more posts from the Samizdata archives about how “price-gouging” helps people hit by natural disasters:
As Hurricane Milton makes landfall, a reminder about price-gouging
“The good news,” Cuomo said of the promised 12 million gallons, “is it’s going to be free.”
A Quote of the Day from Tim Worstall
Or check out the entire discipline of economics.
The last day of the year is often a time for regrets.* However great our achievements, there are always things that we could have got done during the year but just – somehow – didn’t. Or we did them, but embarrassingly late. Peter Hague extends the idea to humanity as a species:
Silver chloride and ammonia have been produced since antiquity, and the camera obscura is similarly ancient. The only real tech barrier to photography was a lens to allow enough light in to form an image – and Europe has been able to make them for about 800 years. Medieval science just overlooked the idea.
If the right knowledge had been found out, we could now have photographs of Tudor soldiers displaying the body of Richard III, Columbus and his crew ready to depart, and London before the great fire.
Mechanically powered moving pictures may well have followed, and you might be able to see silent film of the US founding fathers.
That the available technologies were not combined for centuries is to me a catastrophic loss of information.
The comments to that tweet add stirrups, wheelbarrows, moveable type, long-distance signalling and many other inexplicably delayed technological advances to the list of missed opportunities.
Bah humbug to the lot of ’em. A load of pointless whining about trivialities. If you ask me what things humanity has to reproach itself for not having invented earlier, I robustly answer, “Zero!”
*Or it bloody well ought to be, anyway. If you are capable of going to a New Year’s party and drunkenly singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again too few to mention” and not immediately mentioning a long list of regrets, buzz off back to your home planet and leave us humans to enjoy ourselves in our own fashion.
Richard Sennett’s article in the Guardian, “McCarthyism stalked my family. Its paranoia contains a lesson for Trump’s second term” is well titled, but, as usual, the lesson is not the one the Left thinks it is.
Professor Sennett’s article treats the Second Red Scare as if it were simply an eruption of irrational hatred. This treatment of the McCarthy era was the standard one when I was young, but feels quaint now. The Venona Project established that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed that many senior people in the American federal government were Soviet agents, he was right. The link takes you to a 2015 post by Patrick Crozier that I recommend you read. I also recommend you read Niall Kilmartin’s comment – McCarthy was right, but he was not a nice man. Professor Sennett is correct to say this about how McCarthy and Roy Cohn chose their targets:
They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets. People such as the playwright Arthur Miller repelled McCarthyite charges through vociferous counterattacks, while more compromising ex-commies such as the choreographer Jerome Robbins suffered sustained persecution. My uncle, threatened by the FBI, turned the tables by conjuring up personal injury lawsuits naming the agents who menaced him; the FBI then lost interest in his case. Cohn thought of commie-hunting as a matter of profit and loss, pursued only so long as there could be a benefit to the persecutor. If not, ideology did not drive him to persist.
“They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets.” Well observed mate, but you didn’t have to wait until the eve of Trump’s second term before making the parallel. Trump did nothing McCarthyite when he was president the first time, and I see no good reason to suppose he will be any different when he becomes president a second time. Professor Sennett, where were you in 2020 when your observations about how political witch-hunts work might have helped people who actually were being targeted in the same way as your parents were? What you are describing – the orgiastic yet opportunistic denunciations of individuals, with their degree of guilt a secondary consideration; the digging up of long-abandoned political flirtations; the way that apologies only excite the mob further – that is not Trumpism. That is Wokism.
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.
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.
“PAY UP OR SHUT UP” – “TRILLIONS NOT BILLIONS” – “Global North, PAY UP!” These are some of the signs being held up by climate activists in a photograph taken at the recently concluded COP29 conference in Baku. Perhaps the women holding the “Pay up or shut up” sign are unaware of how many citizens of the Global North wish their governments would take the second option. More probably these activists are well aware that, whatever the citizens of those countries might want, said governments are committed to taking “climate action” and are positively addicted to talking about taking climate action. The link takes you to a Guardian article that continues,
It was only on the last scheduled day of two weeks of negotiations at the UN Cop29 climate summit that developed countries put a financial commitment on the table for the first time.
In reality, this offer took not just two weeks of talks to prepare, but nine years – since article 9 of the Paris agreement in 2015 made it clear that the rich industrialised world would be obliged to supply cash to developing countries to help them tackle the climate crisis.
When it finally arrived on Friday, the initial offer of $250bn (£200bn) a year by 2035 was widely derided as too low. Early the following morning, the countries upped the figure to $300bn, which ended up being accepted, albeit amid acrimony and cries of “betrayal”.
The Telegraph‘s account says,
Cop29 ground out a last-minute compromise deal on Saturday night that offers at least $300 billion (£240 billion) per year by 2035 to help poorer countries confront global warming and allows China’s contributions to remain voluntary.
The sum demanded by the less wealthy nations had been much more following two weeks of negotiations in Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea capital of Baku.
Mukhtar Babayev, the Cop29 president, declared open the final summit plenary after midnight on Saturday, two days after the conference was officially scheduled to end.
A final text was released following several sleepless nights for negotiators, with tensions boiling over as small island states and the world’s poorest countries walked out of one meeting.
A last-minute deal in extra time! Who could have guessed that would happen? Answer: anyone who remembered COP28 in 2023, COP27 in 2022, COP26 in 2021… but I did not come here entirely to recycle my post from this time last year (though I thought the title was amusing), but to point out that rich countries explicitly paying poor countries “to tackle the climate crisis” may have unexpected consequences.
Here is how Wikipedia describes Jizya:
Jizya (Arabic: جِزْيَة, romanized: jizya), or jizyah, is a type of taxation historically levied on non-Muslim subjects of a state governed by Islamic law
Modern writing about jizya as levied in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, tends to emphasize that, for the times, it represented a relatively good deal for adherents of minority religions. It gave those who paid it definite legal status as protected persons. Other descriptions of jizya are less palatable to the modern reader: many Muslim authorities saw the jizya “as a symbol of humiliation to remind dhimmis of their status as a conquered people and their subjection to Islamic laws” and, above all, as an incentive to convert to Islam.
Only it didn’t always work out that way. Robert Hoyland’s book In God’s Path tells of a pious governor of Khurasan called Ashras ibn ‘Abdallah who sent a missionary to bring the dhimmis under his rule to Islam:
…the man they hired preached in the environs of Samarkand, declaring that those who became Muslim would be freed of the poll tax, “and the people flocked to him.” . . . When Ashras realized that a consequence of his policy was a sharp drop in tax revenues, he ordered: “Take the tax from whomever you used to take it from,” and so they reimposed the poll tax on those who had become Muslim, prompting many to apostatize.
Later Islamic rulers learnt from this and similar episodes that they could avoid the trouble such a sharp reversal of policy caused and keep their jizya revenue flowing by quietly discouraging dhimmis from conversion, while, of course, loudly proclaiming how utterly vital it was that they should convert.
Daniel Ortega, remember him?
Ortega was one of the leaders of the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) that overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, thus ending 43 years of rule of Nicaragua by the Somoza dynasty.
For a while Sandinista rule in Nicaragua was popular at home and admired worldwide. A often-repeated line from left wing sources was that its success represented “the threat of a good example”, the good example being of a country thriving despite the opposition of the United States, which had supported Somoza, as it did many right-wing dictators in Latin America.
The admirers included teenage me. Not that I followed every twist and turn of Nicaragua’s politics, but, at first, it all sounded good. Land reform. Education. Healthcare. If I had known then what I know now “price fixing for commodities of basic necessity” might have told me what was coming, but I did not know then what I know now.
Several years went by and a few discordant notes started to spoil the chorus of praise. The forcible ejection from their ancestral lands of the Miskito Indigenous people (at that time everyone, even the Guardian, called them “the Miskito Indians”) was one ugly incident that I remember noticing. This Time article from 1983, “Nicaragua: New Regime, Old Methods” gives many other examples of Sandinista human rights abuses.
That said, the Sandinista National Liberation Front of that era under the leadership of Daniel Ortega still had enough decency left to hold an election and, having lost it, leave.
I will spare you a blow by blow account of Nicaraguan history from 1990 to the present day. You can read Wikipedia as well as I can. Suffice to say that half a lifetime later the reference books once again list the Sandinista National Liberation Front as the ruling party of Nicaragua and Daniel Ortega as its leader, and this time he has no plans to ever leave.
“Nicaragua: Ortega and wife to assume absolute power after changes approved”, the Guardian sorrowfully reports.
The Geneva-based UN human rights office in its annual report on Nicaragua warned in September of a “serious” deterioration in human rights under Ortega.
The report cited violations such as arbitrary arrests of opponents, torture, ill-treatment in detention, increased violence against Indigenous people and attacks on religious freedom.
The revised constitution will define Nicaragua as a “revolutionary” and socialist state and include the red-and-black flag of the FSLN – a guerrilla group-turned political party that overthrew a US-backed dictator in 1979 – among its national symbols.
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One of the Tintin books – remind me which – starts and ends with a picture of a couple of thuggish cops patrolling a shanty town. The only significant difference between the two scenes is that the party symbol on the police uniforms has changed.
Update: Thank you JJM, who supplied the name of the book. It was Tintin and the Picaros. ¡Viva [Tapioca / Alcázar] !
A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German.
That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning.
Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Our Green Minister of Economic Affairs Robert Habeck has been bringing criminal speech complaints against his critics for years. As of August 2024, he had filed 805 such charges – well over half of the total raised by all cabinet ministers since September 2021 combined.
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use.
In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up something that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump.
Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a man in SS or SA uniform holding a placard with the words “Germans, do not buy from Jews!”. Niehoff gave the whole group of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”.
Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis?
Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
Plainly, Niehoff meant only to compare the Müller boycott to Nazi boycotts against Jews by way of rejecting both of them. That might be in poor taste and I certainly wouldn’t argue this way, but I also can’t see how this tweet has anything to do with criminal statutes against incitement.
What happened here is clear enough: Insulting cabinet ministers may, if you squint, count as online “hate speech,” but it does not remotely qualify for the Eleventh Action Day Against Antisemitic Internet Hate Crimes. To improve their enforcement statistics against the kind of crimes that really generate headlines, while at the same time persecuting the Green Minister’s online detractors, our Bamberg prosecutors went poking around Niehoff’s account for a minimally plausible post that would justify putting him in the precious antisemitism column.
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is.
Will Hutton: “Farmers have hoarded land for too long. Inheritance tax will bring new life to rural Britain”.
“Inheritance tax springs from the universally held belief that society has the right to share when wealth is transferred on death as a matter of justice.”
It is not universal.
“This is not confiscation, especially if the lion’s share of the bequest is left intact.”
It is confiscation.
“It is asking for a share.”
It is not asking.
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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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