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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Journalists have often tended to be on the Left – some of the most feared murderers of the French Revolution were hacks – but there has definitely been an acceleration. In the 1960s the trend was about 2 to 1, but by the 2000s as little as 7% identified as conservative, compared to 33% of the US public, a figure repeated in a report a decade later.
Rather unsurprisingly, polls show American trust in the media declining, a trend that accelerated in 2008 when swathes of Americans came to believe journalists were conspiring to get Obama elected. I don’t think Donald Trump’s open hostility to journalists did him any harm, nor do I think it will harm the prospects of any future populist.
– Ed West
Today’s Daily Mail:
“Nothing to see here: How most of the left-leaning US media totally ignored Biden’s Air Force One stumble – while the foreign press did their job for them”
The Mail’s Keith Griffith writes,
Major left-leaning U.S. press outlets are largely avoiding mention of President Joe Biden’s repeated stumbles as he boarded Air Force One, while many foreign publications are devoting prominent coverage to the incident.
As of Friday afternoon, the homepages of MSNBC, CBS News, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and New York Times had no mention of Biden’s stumbling incident earlier in the day at Joint Base Andrews.
and
In contrast to the lack of interest in Biden’s stumbles, mainstream U.S. outlets heavily covered an incident last year, in which Trump took mincing baby-steps down a ramp at West Point, which he later explained was ‘very slippery.’
Although Trump did not stumble during the incident, it sparked rampant speculation about his health and criticism over his capacities, including from Biden himself.
‘Look at how he steps and look at how I step,’ Biden said in September 2020, in a clip featured on CNN. ‘Watch how I run up ramps and he stumbles down ramps. OK? Come on.’
If you want to follow Mr Biden’s own advice and compare Trump to Biden on Trip Advisor, the indefatigable New York Post is one of the few US papers with clips of both.
The Scottish Crown Office subsequently wrote to us on March 5th demanding we remove the article. Guido decided to ignore it as it seemed unlikely to prejudice matters or reveal witnesses. The Spectator has taken the same approach to the same letter.
– Guido Fawkes
“Secret Pontins blacklist prevented people with Irish surnames from booking”, reports the Guardian.
For the benefit of readers not from either the UK or Ireland, Pontins is a company that runs holiday camps, and 90% of British or Irish adults who read that headline understood without reading another word that it was not the Irish in general that Pontins wanted to blacklist, it was Irish Travellers. (The Travellers, or Mincéiri as the current term is, are a separate ethnic group to the Gypsies or Romani but are often grouped together due to their similar way of life.) Reports of this incident from several sources, such as this later Guardian article by Séamas O’Reilly that I saw after most of this post had been written, confirm that people with those names were not banned from Pontins outright, it was rather that Pontins staff were told to check their addresses against the postcodes of Traveller sites before allowing them entry.
The Guardian continues,
Outrage over anti-Traveller list of ‘undesirable guests’ that was sent to booking operators
A blacklist circulated by the holiday park operator Pontins telling its staff not to book accommodation for people with Irish surnames has been described as “completely unacceptable” by Downing Street.
The list of “undesirable guests” was sent to booking operators, who were told: “We do not want these guests on our parks.” It said: “Please watch out for the following names for ANY future bookings.”
The list, which included names such as Carney, Boylan, McGuinness and O’Mahoney, was an example of “anti-Traveller discrimination”, a spokesperson for Boris Johnson said. The document had a picture of a wizard holding up a wand and staff declaring: “You shall not pass.”
The Guardian did not open comments for that story. As I said in 2011, that is because it knows perfectly well that Guardian readers hate gypsies and travellers.
However the Times did allow readers to comment on its report of the same events, “Pontins had blacklist of Irish surnames”. The comments, as I knew they would, consisted almost entirely of personal accounts of being the victims of theft, violence and intimidation at the hands of Travellers. This outpouring reminded me of something, but I could not put my finger on what. Then it came to me: the #MeToo movement. That came about when women compared notes about their bad treatment by predatory men. Exchanging their “Me, Too” experiences gave these women the knowledge that they were not alone and brought forth a demand that men in general should examine and change their behavioural norms. The #MeToo movement for women was celebrated by modern society, even when it degenerated into condemning men as a group without trial or investigation. Take note of both halves of that sentence. To forbid people to speak of their bitterness only embitters them more. But the historical record of “Speak Bitterness” movements should terrify anyone who cares about justice.
One of the most highly recommended comments to the Times article came from Patrick Joseph Maloney, who said,
As an Irishman with a name that might have made the list, I sympathise with companies that have to walk this tightrope of exclusion and inclusion.
Not all Irish Travellers are guilty of bad behaviour but a sufficiently large enough minority are.
I understand that the Chinese government recently introduced classes for their tourists on how to behave abroad?
Perhaps Traveller rights groups might consider similar moves as an alternative to simply waving the race and discrimination card? The problem is not one of race….. but behaviour.
The government says it wants to end prejudice against Travellers and passes laws to forbid discrimination against them. Mr Maloney’s comment illustrates how spectacularly that effort to bring about goodwill by law has failed.
Some readers, particularly those new to libertarian ideas, will find it hard to believe that anyone could have any other motive than hatred of Travellers for saying that it would be better for all parties, including the Travellers themselves, if there were no such laws. I can only beg such readers to ask themselves if our current policy is working. People who have done nothing wrong being turned away merely for appearing to belong to a certain ethnic group is clearly unjust. But that is not a description of the bad old days before the Race Relations Act 1965 and the many anti-discrimination laws that followed, it is a description of life in Britain in 2021 with all the laws in place. All that has been achieved by more than half a century of ever-increasing punishments and social pressure is to ensure that these days the “undesirables” are usually excluded by means of a nod and a wink. Whichever Pontins employee wrote that list was unusually careless to put it on paper. But the fact that they did put it on paper, complete with jokey reference to The Lord of the Rings, shows how accepted anti-Traveller hostility is. You don’t put Gandalf clip art on top of an announcement that is likely to be met with outrage. The writer assumed that the staff would accept what he or she saw as the obvious need to keep Travellers out. Evidently most of them did accept it: the blacklist operated for quite some time before someone blew the whistle. I do not consider it wicked to ask what experiences brought the Pontins staff to this state of mind. I assume that there was an implied “after what happened last time” there.
Open prejudice is less cruel than secret prejudice. The sign in the boarding-house window saying “No blacks, No Irish” can be argued against. The quiet word to a member of staff about those people cannot be. A company that openly refuses the custom of members of certain groups purely on account of their race can be challenged – and they lose the custom. But turn them away with a smile and a lie and it can go on forever.
For some, that outcome is fine. What they object to in the anti-racism laws is not that the laws make racism worse but the laws put them to the inconvenience of having to lie. To be clear I object to these laws in principle (people should be free to associate with whom they please) and because I want to see a world where people are judged on what they have done as individuals, not on what someone else with the same surname did. True, there is evidence that the crime rate among Travellers is statistically high, and it is no more wrong to suggest that they need to ask themselves what they should do to change those parts of their subculture that are harmful than it is to urge that males or whites should do the same. But before you condemn the Travellers as a group remember that, like all of us, they have been moulded by their history. Ach, why repeat myself? I said it in my post of 2011 as well as I ever will:
“Welfare” has continued its steady work of ruin. I read a very fine article in the Telegraph about a decade ago which I cannot now find. It described with sadness rather than hostility how, although gypsies had lived half outside the law since time immemorial, there had at one time been countervailing incentives to build relationships of trust with settled people. The gypsies had regular circuits and seasonal work. They needed pitches, employment and customers. They needed people to remember them from last time as good workers and fair dealers. Welfare has eroded that, and their former means of making a living have gone the way of the cart horse and the tin bucket. Nor is the difficulty just that technology has moved on, it is also that the bureaucratic net of form-filling and taxes has tightened so that the casual jobs they once could do within the law must now be done outside it. As in the drugs trade, in illegal trade in labour where there can be no redress for swindling on either side, such swindling is commonplace.
In that post I also said much more hated Travellers and Gypsies had become in my village since I first came to live there. Since then it has only got worse. But, as I also said back then, “I really don’t think it is the gypsies themselves who have changed so much. What has changed in the last few years is that they have become a state-protected group. God help them. State protection is better than state persecution as cancer is better than a knife in the ribs.”
Nine years later the cancer is further advanced. For all that, I do not think it is incurable. Human nature is immutable, but laws are not. For now reversing the spread of “equalities” legislation seems politically impossible, but as the years go by and ever-multiplying laws against hate never seem to reduce it, people of goodwill will start to wonder if it might be time to try another strategy.
In 2012 scientists found the Higgs Boson. In 2015, after fifty years of trying, they finally found gravitational waves.
In 2021…
Leave camp turned Brexit into a religion to capture votes, study finds
Vote Leave turned Brexit into its own religion to capture supporters, a recent study by the universities of Birmingham and Warwick has found.
Researchers said slogans such as “take back control” used the NHS as the country’s Holy Grail that could be rescued from European forces threatened by Britain’s unique historical place in the world.
They also said Brexiteers focused on secular theological concepts such as sovereignty and nation to engage voters.
A study found it. It is Science.
Two days ago the BBC reported that the Supreme Court had ruled that Uber drivers are workers rather than being self-employed.
With what glad hosannas did the drivers greet the news of their liberation!
Er, no. As Sam Dumitriu writes in CapX,
Putting questions of legality to one side, it’s clear Uber’s business model works for drivers. If you don’t believe me, just ask them. Countless surveys have found that the majority of Uber drivers are happy with the status quo and would not sacrifice flexibility for greater security.
A survey carried out by Oxford University academics Carl Benedikt Frey and Thor Berger, in partnership with Uber, found that drivers reported higher levels of life satisfaction compared to other London workers, despite on average earning less. And, counter to the conventional wisdom, drivers typically worked full-time in other jobs before choosing to shift to Uber. Furthermore, more than four-fifths of drivers agreed with the statement: ‘Being able to choose my own hours is more important than having holiday pay and a guaranteed minimum wage’. They found that drivers would accept a move to fixed hours – but only if it came with a 25% pay rise.
Perhaps they had looked across the Atlantic and seen the results of California’s attempt to save gig economy workers from working in the gig economy:
In Uber’s home state of California, 70% of drivers backed Proposition 22, a ballot measure that created a carve-out for ridesharing services from the state’s tough laws on freelance work. The measure passed with 59% of the vote in November.
AB 5, the freelancer law which Prop 22 was responding to highlights how interventions designed to solve a problem in one market can have unintended consequences in others.
When it passed, Vox published an article: “Gig workers’ win in California is a victory for workers everywhere”. A month later they published another article: “Freelance journalists are mad about a new California law. Here’s what’s missing from the debate. The alternative to AB5 would be worse”. Two months later, Vox Media itself cut hundreds of freelance writing jobs in California.
When I saw this…
My first impulse when seeing the professional critic score compared to the ‘audience’ score was “hmm, this might be worth seeing.” 😀
What the BBC story looked like 41 minutes after it was published:
The hashtag #FireGinaCarano trended on Twitter for hours following an anti-Semitic story the actress shared on her Instagram.
The link to the Wayback Machine does not seem to be working at the moment, so until it comes back online you will just have to trust me when I say that was the wording that caused me to notice the story a few days ago, though I was too busy to do anything about it at the time. I have only watched a few episodes of The Mandalorian and could not have named Gina Carano. But I knew from the mealy-mouthed paraphrase that was all the BBC gave us of her exact words that something was up.
What the BBC story looks like now:
The hashtag #FireGinaCarano trended on Twitter for hours following a story shared on her Instagram, that some branded anti-Semitic.
Well they corrected it, didn’t they? What’s the problem?
The second part of the problem is that the correction is scarcely less slanderous than the original and is more cowardly. All the “correction” does is allow the BBC to make the accusation of anti-semitism via un-named proxies rather than in its own voice.
The first part of the problem is how did the BBC writer ever come to think Carano’s words were anti-semitic at all? Here is what she actually said, reported by The Scotsman, which unlike the BBC provided a screenshot of Carano’s own words:
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…. even by children.
🙁
“Because history is edited, most people today don´t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
“How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
Overblown, yes, melodramatic yes, self-indulgent in the comparison of current political spats to the Holocaust, yes, and someone needs to tell her that when discussing mass murder sad-face emojis are not helpful – but nothing in what she said was hostile to Jews. I can answer my own question of how the BBC’s un-named reporter came to announce as fact that those words were anti-semitic. It is because BBC journalists have got out of the habit of reading the tweets and Instagram posts that prompt so much of their reporting nowadays. Oh, they scan them to check that the link isn’t dead and does not refer to some completely unrelated person in Iowa, but the idea of reading, of mentally processing the words and weighing what the author meant, is beyond their pay grade.
I do not complain about the fact that most BBC stories are repackagings of stories that were first reported somewhere else: that is inevitable. My complaint is that the BBC increasingly no longer bothers to undo the package and take a look at what lies inside. The only check the BBC really does take care over is the postmark: does this come to us from a reputable source, such as the New York Times or angry people on Instagram.
I mention the New York Times with due reverence. While the BBC was an early adopter of the technique of placing the correction to what was a front page story on page 28B, the NYT was the true pioneer.
As Roger Kimball writes,
And the New York Times, true to form, has been a veritable fount of misinformation—an ironical contingency since the paper has recently called for a “reality czar” to combat “misinformation,” i.e., ideas with which they disagree. Take its account of what happened to Officer Brian Sicknick, who died on January 8, two days after the Capitol mélee. That same day, our former paper of record reported that Sicknick died after “[P]ro-Trump rioters attacked that citadel of democracy[!], overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher. . .”
Click the link. You’ll see that an announcement that the column, though originally published January 8, had been updated February 12. Now that sentence is missing, though they don’t say so, and Sicknick died of—well something else.
Kimball goes on to say, “The Times wasn’t alone” and to link to this link-filled column by Julie Kelly that gives chapter and verse of how the New York Times spread the meme that Brian Sicknick was definitely and deliberately bludgeoned to death far and wide.
The mechanism the NYT used is the same as the BBC used in the Gina Carano story. They say something false. Could be deliberate, could just be believing what they want to believe, could be honest error. But anyway, after a few days have gone by someone in the editorial room gets like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden after their scrumping session: And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. So the reporters sew a few leaves – The New York Times Retracts the Sicknick Story – and resignedly wear the aprons around the office a few times while hoping that everyone will think that hand-crafted leafwear is a fashion choice.
Of course anyone who was paying attention has known for at least a month that we do not know exactly how Officer Sicknick died. That is exactly why Niall Kilmartin wrote the following almost prophetic post for Samizdata exactly a month ago: “All who died on the 6th supported Trump. What else do we truly know?”.
Alas, the caveat “anyone who was paying attention” excludes 80% of modern journalists.
Significantly, the rapidly growing UK white-nationalist group Patriotic Alternative is actively targeting younger recruits and recently started Call of Duty Warcraft gaming tournaments for its supporters.
This warning comes from an article by Mark Townsend in the Guardian‘s Sunday sister, the Observer, with the title “How far right uses video games and tech to lure and radicalise teenage recruits”.
“Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them”, he writes in the Guardian.
I will skip the bit where I tell Samizdata readers why censorship is morally bad. You already know. Once upon a time Mr Monbiot knew, too, but it no longer surprises me to see that yet another left winger has succumbed to the modern McCarthyism. You would think sixty-five years of fantasising about how they would have stood up to Senator McCarthy or his equivalents in the House Un-American Activities Committee would have strengthened their spines a little more. But I can still be shocked at how much of a betrayal of the scientific method Mr Monbiot’s attempt to defend science by means of forbidding the publication of opposing hypotheses represents. As a commenter called “tomsmells” says,
This is quite an astounding agenda, considering how new this virus is and how frequently the experts in control have been wrong. Perhaps we should have considered banning talk of encouraging mask wearing when it was very much not considered a good idea by the experts in charge? Or when loss of taste and smell wasn’t considered a symptom? I’m not sure it would have been helpful for the understanding of what works and what doesn’t. It probably won’t be now either even though you seem to suggest we apparently we know exactly how to deal with this virus, despite the bodies piling up around the world. In circumstances when you clearly don’t have all the answers, it can’t be a good idea to ban ideas your consistently wrong scientists disagree with. That is essentially how freedom of speech functions within a democracy, ideas get talked about, hopefully the best prevail.
And on top of that, surely you can see how this approach is wrought with danger? It’s always easy to do the censoring, but bugger me is it difficult when you are the one being censored. Bear that in mind when you advocate this level of censorship, particularly in a debate when you have no doubt been wrong about plenty of things – which may I add is no shame, this is a complicated and evolving problem whose solution won’t be found any faster by banning discussion.
When a politician says the words “common good” it is usually with a very specific meaning, and this use of the phrase by Ms von der Leyen is no exception:
“The EU vows to force firms to declare what vaccines are being exported to the UK as Ursula von der Leyen says she ‘means business’ about getting bloc’s ‘fair share’ – despite warnings a blockade to help shambolic rollout could ‘poison’ relations”, the Daily Mail reports.
Ursula von der Leyen today vowed to make firms declare what vaccines they are exporting to the UK as she scrambled to contain a backlash at the EU’s shambolic rollout.
The commission president said a ‘transparency mechanism’ is being introduced as she insisted that the bloc ‘means business’ about getting its fair share of supplies.
The sabre-rattling from Brussels, which comes amid growing chaos and protests across the continent, has incensed senior MPs, with warnings that the EU could ‘poison’ relations for a generation if it blocks some of the 40million Pfizer doses the UK has bought ‘legally and fairly’.
But “Is the EU to blame for AstraZeneca’s vaccine shortage?” asks Robert Peston in the Spectator.
Short answer: yes.
The important difference between AstraZeneca’s relationship with the UK and its relationship with the EU – and the reason it has fallen behind schedule on around 50m vaccine doses promised to the bloc – is that the UK agreed its deal with AstraZeneca a full three months before the EU did. This gave AstraZeneca an extra three months to sort out manufacturing and supply problems relating to the UK contract (there were plenty of problems).
Here is the important timeline. In May AstraZeneca reached an agreement with Oxford and the UK government to make and supply the vaccine. In fact, Oxford had already started work on the supply chain.
The following month AstraZeneca reached a preliminary agreement with Germany, the Netherlands, France and Italy, a group known as the Inclusive Vaccine Alliance, based on its agreement with the UK. That announcement was on 13 June.
But the EU then insisted that the Inclusive Vaccine Alliance could not formalise the deal, and the European Commission took over the contract negotiations on behalf of the whole EU. So there were another two months of talks and the contract was not signed until the end of August.
What is frustrating for AstraZeneca is that the extra talks with the European Commission led to no material changes to the contract, but this wasted time that could have been spent making arrangements to manufacture the vaccine with partner sites. The yield at these EU partner sites has been lower than expected.
UPDATE: It’s hotting up: The Daily Mail reports, “Now EU wants our vaccines: Brussels demands Covid jabs made in Britain are sent to EUROPE as one lab warns banning exports from the bloc will mean NO more doses are made”
The Socialist Workers Party (Glad you asked, comrade: apostrophes are a bourgeois affectation!) are a bunch of Trotskyist goblins with admittedly good organisational skills. Back in 2011, I reminisced about how you could turn up at any demonstration for any left wing cause in Britain over the last forty years and find that their lank-haired activists had been there handing out posters since 4 a.m.:
Three quarters of the posters, and almost all of the printed ones, were produced by the Socialist Workers Party. Busy little bees, they were. They still are: it is an astonishing fact that this tiny and fissiparous Trotskyist sect has twice dominated massive popular protest movements in my lifetime; the Anti-Nazi League / Rock against Racism movement of the 80s and the Stop The War Coalition of 2001-2008. Sorry, 2001-present, only they stop wars much more quietly now that Mr Obama is president. They were also big in CND.
Their literary output is not usually enticing. But I would recommend you read this press release of theirs while you still can.
Press release: Facebook shuts down major left wing group in Britain
January 22, 2021
Press release: Facebook shuts down major left wing group in Britain
For immediate release.
Facebook has shut down the accounts of one of the biggest left wing organisations in Britain, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) (1). The Socialist Workers Party Facebook page – as well as account of local pages – have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given. Those targeted say it amounts to a silencing of political activists.
Facebook took the action on Friday, shutting down the Socialist Workers Party page and removing dozens of leading SWP activists from the platform.
The SWP Facebook page regularly posts in support of Palestine, Black Lives Matter and against Boris Johnson’s Covid policies. It also hosts dozens of online events every week that activists across the country take part in.
The SWP say they have been silenced for speaking out on these issues and that the action taken by Facebook amounts to an attack on political activists to organise. They are demanding to be reinstated immediately.
Bye, bye Swappers. You were a presence in British politics for nearly half a century, British as damson jam from Jeremy Corbyn’s allotment. And now you are gone from one platform, just like that, and soon you will be gone from the others.
Incidentally, that nine year old post of mine contained a link to this Guardian story that I expect has had more clicks in the last two weeks than in the nine years before that:
Student protester jailed for throwing fire extinguisher:
A student who admitted throwing a fire extinguisher from the roof of a central London building during the student fees protests has been jailed.
Edward Woollard, 18, from Hampshire, was among protesters who broke into the Tory party headquarters and emerged on the roof on 10 November.
He was jailed for two years and eight months after admitting at an earlier hearing to committing violent disorder.
Police said his actions “could have resulted in catastrophic injury”.
And so it could. Mere chance that it didn’t.
The student, who hoped to be the first member of his family to go on to higher education, was filmed throwing an empty metal fire extinguisher from the seventh-floor of 30 Millbank as hundreds of people gathered in a courtyard below.
The canister narrowly missed a line of police officers attempting to protect the looted and vandalised building from further damage on a day when 66 people were arrested.
Yet John McDonnell MP, later to become Shadow Chancellor, thought Woollard was hard done by.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has faced criticism for allegedly supporting student Edward Woollard, who was jailed for throwing a fire extinguisher off a roof during student riots
Uncovered: John McDonnell Praises 2010 Riots
Look at Niall Kilmartin’s post of January 15th. That and other accounts of the death of Officer Brian Sicknick from injuries sustained at the riot at the US capitol provide an interesting comparison.
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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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