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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”. February 14th, 2021 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “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,
January 29th, 2021 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
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:
But “Is the EU to blame for AstraZeneca’s vaccine shortage?” asks Robert Peston in the Spectator. Short answer: yes.
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” January 26th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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.:
Their literary output is not usually enticing. But I would recommend you read this press release of theirs while you still can.
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:
And so it could. Mere chance that it didn’t.
Yet John McDonnell MP, later to become Shadow Chancellor, thought Woollard was hard done by. 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. January 24th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Times reports,
Shades of Ben Tre. Or of a mirror-universe version of the most recent episode of Star Trek Discovery: “That
I could be persuaded that internet companies should have to decide whether they are platforms or publishers, rather than the present system of allowing them whichever status benefits the US Democratic party this week. However this is not a move to limit the untrammelled and uncontrolled political power of the internet giants. They’ll love it. It is a move to limit and trammel further the already slight power to influence politics held by ordinary people. The “UK affairs” tag has been added to this post solely so I can add this to my list of reasons to be glad that the UK has left the European Union. January 20th, 2021 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was going to stay off the US politics posts for a day or two, but this Times report by Alastair Good is so bad it’s Alastair. “Burning down Kenosha: Trump’s fractured legacy” It includes the lines:
Even the normally anti-Trump Times commenters found this hard to swallow. A commenter called “Gordon W” said,
January 19th, 2021 | 83 comments - (Comments are closed)
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon ought to be riding high. The Mirror reports, “Nicola Sturgeon’s coronavirus handling has won over swathe of voters with support for Scottish independence hitting 57 PER CENT, poll finds”. There have been something like seventeen polls in a row showing majority support for independence. For myself, I would be enormously sad to see Scotland leave the UK, but that is not the point of this post. The point is to ask what the hell is really going on? Something must be. Go to the leading pro-Independence blog Wings Over Scotland and the message from the bloggers and the commenters is one of fury with Sturgeon and despair over the prospects of independence. Compared to 2014 it is a different world. I do understand the outline of the events that led to the convening of the Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints, and which have led the Herald to report,
What stumps me is how it comes about that the reporting by Scottish newspapers (most of whom are anti-independence) seems to support Nicola Sturgeon and speak as if independence is all but inevitable while the leading pro-independence blogs seem sure her resignation and disgrace are imminent and that she has put back the prospects of independence by years. What is not being said? Who is not saying it? The second most popular pro-Independence blog is probably the far left Bella Caledonia. Or maybe it isn’t any more – much can change in six years and much has. In 2014 Wings and Bella were in lockstep, fighting for the same goal. Now they oppose each other bitterly. All the more surprising, then, to read a guest post on Wings, to find myself moved by its patent honesty, then to get to the end of the post and find (a) that it was by someone who until a year or so ago was one of the leading lights of Bella, and (b) that someone is Robin McAlpine. He is the left wing authoritarian (I do not completely repeat myself; there are some points where the two circles on the Venn diagram do not overlap) who wrote an Orwellian piece for Bella called “Real Freedom Sounds Like Many Voices” in which he proposed to institute a system for newspapers like that which supports the BBC: there would be a compulsory newspaper subscription payable by all Scots (the supposed sweetener for this was that the newspapers so funded would be “free” – as in free of charge, not politically free), a handful of approved newspapers would be given government franchises, and, in his own words, “this would require that titles other than the franchised ones would be banned.” Mr McAlpine’s “Real Freedom” post dates from 2013. I wrote my Samizdata piece about it in 2017 when it looked as if Bella Caledonia might have collapsed. I wanted to preserve the memory of just how authoritarian Mr McAlpine’s views were. The piece dated 14 January 2021 by Mr McAlpine that so surprised and moved me is called “The Integrity of a Nation”. It begins,
Added later: For me, the key part of Robin McAlpine’s post was this:
Emphasis added. The manipulation of the law to target political opponents should concern anyone. The “specific individual” is of course Alex Salmond. He is not a nice man. His own defence lawyer does not think much of him. But there is a hell of a difference between having wandering hands and being a rapist. The prosecution had every chance to prove him a rapist and could not do it. A mostly female jury at the height of the #MeToo movement found him innocent of all thirteen charges. Before anyone chimes in, yes, one of them was “not proven” – that is still an acquittal. What a spectacular failure. Almost as if the case should never have been brought at all. Perhaps this failure resulted from the plague of memory loss that has afflicted many of Scotland’s top civil servants, Nicola Sturgeon herself, and her husband Peter Murrell, who happens to be Chief Executive of the SNP yet displays Biden-like levels of incuriosity regarding meetings of burning importance to that party that take place in his own house. For details see his Wikipedia page, though what it says now may not last the hour. January 18th, 2021 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
January 17th, 2021 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Why does the US fall for conspiracy theories?” asks Daniel Finkelstein in the Times.
The deep state behaves as it does in every film – As an aside, that, the endless stream of conspiracy thrillers put out by Hollywood, will do as Explanation No.1. The scriptwriters of these movies were unable to conceive of the cabal of senior people in the US government, the CIA, the FBI, and the military as anything other than right wing, but the imagination of the American people is not so limited. A personal best: I have digressed even before I began. The main point of this post is… ah, **** it, I already said it: By censoring the Hunter Biden story the MSM has also hampered its ability to convince Americans there is no “cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires” which “runs the world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children.” It has also hampered its ability to convince Americans, and not only them, that they should be vaccinated against coronavirus. Hitherto the English-speaking countries plus the Nordics have been somewhat less prone to vaccine conspiracy theories than people in most of Western or Eastern Europe. I expect that to change, and that change will kill people. That is what happens when the boy cries wolf too many times. Lord Finkelstein (Note for foreign readers: I make no political point; he is a life peer) continues movingly:
Yes, false conspiracy theories are dangerous. One of the best defences a polity has against them is a reasonable level of trust in the authorities and the media. In the long run the only way to gain this trust is to be worthy of it, i.e. not to lie and not to hide the truth. By their promiscuous propagation of any story, however baseless, that might harm the Republicans and their enthusiastic censorship of any story, however credible, that might make the Democrats look bad, the American Woke Media, old and new, have lost this trust. As a result reality ensues, to quote TV Tropes. Or if you prefer the same truth in an older format, take your quote from William Caxton’s summary at the end of his retelling of the fable of the boy who cried wolf, “men bileve not lyghtly hym whiche is knowen for a lyer”. January 13th, 2021 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
I want you to observe two things about this piece by Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian: 1) It is quite reasonable, yet Simon Jenkins wrote it. 2) It is obvious that something is consuming the commenters’ reason. I should have known. Simon Jenkins ate their minds. His opinion pieces are no more than the bait by which he ensnares unfortunate denizens of the mundane universe, who are driven by some primaeval attraction like that of the moth to the flame into commenting at the Guardian website. Once they are thus fatally linked to him across the dimensions, he, or rather it, feasts upon their intellects, leaving them as mindless husks blind to their own political interests who can only repeat with idiot vindictiveness whatever slogan last caught their attention. Either that or Guardian readers were like that anyway. January 12th, 2021 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve been reading a three-volume fictionalised life of Beethoven, by, of all people, John Suchet, whom most people probably know only as a television newsreader. The way Suchet tells the story, Beethoven was an oddball from the start. I recall doing a posting here about how Beethoven’s deafness prevented him from having a normal life, as a star pianist, but Suchet’s Beethoven was always set on getting shot of being merely a talented performer, and on becoming a great composer. Beethoven’s friends and supporters had to put up with a lot at the hands of the irascible genius. They took all the angry insults and demands because, when it came to it, they shared Beethoven’s high opinion of his musical genius, and because they knew also what miseries Beethoven himself had to contend with. Beethoven’s deafness was no mere inability to hear all the sounds he was surrounded by. It was also the presence of other often very loud sounds inside his own head, often painfully so. And just to put a tin lid on everything, throughout a lot of Beethoven’s adult life, he had to contend with the consequences of war. Napoleon’s armies took possession of Beethoven’s city of birth, Bonn, and then of the city where Beethoven was based for most of his adult life, Vienna. Quite aside from the usual deaths and disruptions this inflicted upon the Viennese, this played havoc with Beethoven’s various plans to get rich and thereby achieve the freedom he yearned for to just compose his music. In connection with some of this fighting, Suchet, like the journalist he is, quotes a couple of stories that the Wiener Zeitung published, on a particularly black day for Vienna, in October 1805. The first concerned the disastrous battle of Ulm:
John Suchet then adds that at the bottom of this one page, that being all that the Wiener Zeitung could manage on this particular day, there was, in considerably smaller print, a briefer item, which was, Suchet says, “largely ignored by the people of Vienna”. This concerned an insignificant sea battle, somewhere or other off the coast of Spain:
So, good news, surely. But the Wiener Zeitung cannot force itself to deceive its readers:
There you have it. The Continental European attitude to the relative importance of sea power and land power. It took quite a while for that little sea battle to result in the undermining of Napoleon’s power, but it definitely had consequences. The Samizdata world view is more than a mere preference for navies over armies. But that contrast is definitely part of the story. I don’t think a German or Austrian author, writing about Beethoven, would have pointed up this particular contrast the way Suchet does. And does, I think you will agree, rather gleefully, despite him ending his chapter with that second quote. January 9th, 2021 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Biden victory confirmed after deadly attack on Capitol Note the convenient unidirectionality of the word “deadly” in that BBC report. A writing challenge for you: how would these events be reported if those who stormed the Capitol had been doing it in support of Black Lives Matter? January 7th, 2021 | 166 comments - (Comments are closed)
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