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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It looks like Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system and Arrow anti-ballistic missiles have mostly succeeded in intercepting the missiles sent by Iran. The Iranian regime did not send drones this time because having them shot down by the Jordanians last time was embarrassing.
I saw this quote by John Podhoretz on Twitter:
“The creation and promotion of missile defense by Ronald Reagan remains one of the signature events in world history, and all of you who derided it and him have lived to see your worldviews discredited and your sanctimony discarded by history.”
To which Dan McLaughlin added,
Joe Biden, 1986, to the National Press Club: “Star Wars represents a fundamental assault on the concepts, alliances and arms-control agreements that have buttressed American security for several decades, and the president’s continued adherence to it constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”
“When in a hole, stop digging,” the saying goes. They dug a lot of holes at Kamloops Indian Residential school but, as described in 2022 by Professor Jacques Rouillard, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, they have not found a single one of the 215 bodies allegedly buried there. Nor have they found any since.
They did not stop digging, though. They simply announced that “their investigation was proceeding but would remain confidential to preserve its integrity.”
(That Wikipedia article is quite something. In its current form it is full of talk about “denialists”. Wikipedia was not always like this.)
Some people might be glad to discover that, despite extensive investigation, there is no evidence to support rumours of the secret mass burial of hundreds of children. Not Leah Gazan, an MP with the New Democratic Party, though. As reported by the National Post:
NDP MP tables bill seeking to criminalize residential school ‘denialism’
OTTAWA — An NDP MP tabled a bill Thursday seeking to change the Criminal Code to criminalize downplaying, denying or condoning the harms of residential schools in Canada.
Leah Gazan, who represents Winnipeg Centre, presented her private member’s bill on Monday, a few days before the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
I did not expect to see anything like this on a fairly mainstream site like “Conservative Woman”: “Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes” (Via Sara Hoyt on Instapundit.) Andrew Bridgen, for those not familiar with him, is the former MP for North West Leicestershire. He has had a chequered career. He was expelled from the Conservative Party after criticising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He then joined the Reclaim Party but resigned from it a few months later. He then lost his seat in the 2024 election – which in itself was no surprise, but the spectacular scale of his loss, dropping from 63% of the vote to 3.2%, was unusual.
I said I did not expect to see this piece on the CW website. I would not be entirely surprised if I am soon unable to see it anywhere but Twitter/X. After the US election of 2020, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (before it was owned by Elon Musk) had a policy of deleting any discussion whatsoever of the possibility of electoral fraud. Even arguments that fraud had not been significant were censored. Most of the UK media followed suit, as it usually does.
If anyone reading this has power or influence over the censorship policies of British media organisations, I humbly beg you not to repeat that mistake. My argument does not depend on taking any view on how many votes Andrew Bridgen got in the UK election of 2024.
When “Stop the Steal” and similar Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were deleted overnight after the American election of 2020, what effect do you think it had on the beliefs of members of those groups? Do you think they concluded that since they could no longer discuss their suspicions, those suspicions must be groundless?
Of course it had the opposite effect. A majority of US voters think it is “likely” that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election. That includes 45% of Democrats. The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and of the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory (the first of which is no longer contested and the second of which is accepted as a probable hypothesis by the US and UK governments) only reinforced this.
Censorship destroys trust, and the loss of trust is not limited to the subject being censored. Once people know they are being censored in one thing, they inevitably ask, “What else aren’t they telling us?”
And they can work out that if all accusations of a particular crime are censored, it makes it more likely that that crime will be committed in future.
Related posts here, here and here. In fact, that entire category of “Deleted by the Woke Media” is related.
Edit 25th September: The man who replaced Andrew Bridgen as Conservative candidate in North West Leicestershire, Craig Smith, has responded strongly to the Conservative Woman piece:
Mr Bridgen seems to overestimate the weight of any candidate’s personal vote. In elections most people vote for the party with a personal vote of – somewhere around – a couple of thousand votes for the candidate themselves. It’s arguably why I did marginally better than Conservative candidates in demographically similar constituencies elsewhere, because I had something of a personal vote as a truly local candidate. A personal vote is why Mr Bridgen received around 1,500 votes. To provide Mr Bridgen with a similar example to his own in 2015 Rochdale’s MP, Simon Danczuk, then standing for Labour received 20,961 votes. In 2017, expelled from Labour and and standing as an independent he received 883 votes. Using Mr Danczuk as a base Mr Bridgen could argue that he outstripped expectations!
Mr Smith goes on to say that of course he was not happy with the result – he lost to Labour – but he is convinced it was fair. He then makes some quite detailed observations about electoral procedures, both in general and specifically for that constituency. I thought he came across well. His use of Simon Danczuk in Rochdale as a comparator for assessing whether it is credible for an MP expelled from their party to have such a large drop in votes was reasonable.
That is how it should be done. That is how it should have been done in the US. Don’t forbid discussion, contribute to it. I repeat my plea for there to be no censorship of the claim that the election was rigged against Mr Bridgen.
A theme appears to be building in this splendid US Presidential election.
JD Vance, the running mate for Mr Trump, has been beaten up for talking about “childless cat ladies”; Taylor Swift, the singer, has come out for Harris and proudly declared herself to be a childless cat lady. Mr Trump, meanwhile, apparently made comments about illegal immigrants eating the moggies.
Meanwhile, 10 Downing Street, the official UK residence in London of the Prime Minister, is renowned for also being home to Larry, a cat who has lived through and endured various prime ministers. A benevolent dictatorship behind the scenes?
(Full disclosure: I drive a Jaguar.)
Question: Where do the dog-owners enter this election cycle?
In all the genuflections about the impact of the mass-murders inflicted in New York and Washington and the deaths of the passengers fighting against the hijackers on Flight 93, I thought these comments by Glenn Reynolds stood out. His blog, Instapundit, was one of those that saw a massive rise in traffic as people sought information outside the usual MSM gates at the time. And Samizdata, founded around that time, was part of that process too.
Prof Reynolds is unimpressed by US politics, overall, since that terrible day, and by the performance of parts of the security services and the like. Far too few people at the CIA and other places were fired. If there was any cleaning house, I missed it. A huge amount of taxpayers’ money was spent on new organisations (TSA) but I never got a sense of a general purge of incompetence and sloppiness that made it easier for the 19 hijackers and enablers to do what they did.
Of course, there have been some great exceptions, and let’s not forget that for every terrorist outrage that gets covered in the media, we often don’t hear about those plots that get disrupted or thwarted, and by people who cannot be named. Bear that in mind amidst the sombre atmosphere that such an anniversary causes.
To this day, I consider radical Islamism, in all its nihilistic fury and ugliness, the number one problem for humanity today. It is an attack on all the best features of human civilisation, if I may presume to use that word. Islamists hate ideas such as individual rights, free personal agency, human curiosity, a sense of adventure, production of material values, equality before the law – all of it.
Back to Prof. Reynolds:
We said “never forget.” Well, we haven’t forgotten the heroism of people like Rick Rescorla, the Flight 93 passengers, the firefighters who charged up the WTC stairs, or the volunteers who set up the American Dunkirk evacuation of lower Manhattan by boat.
But we have forgotten the criminal negligence of our political leaders and intelligence services that got us to that point. We should have purged the incompetents then. Instead, they’re still running the show. The country is still sound, but the people in charge of it have only gotten worse.
Bless America and its great Republic.
And yet, once the Ukrainians ask for long-range fires, all of a sudden their importance is downgraded and minimized. There was the widely-discussed piece in Foreign Affairs by Stephen Biddle which recently kick-started this argument—but it was an argument greatly amplified by Defense Secretary Austin a few days ago.
During the latest Ramstein meeting of Ukraine’s partners in Germany Austin basically said long-range fires were not that important. As it was relayed by PBS:
After the talks, Austin pushed back on the idea that long-range strikes would be a game-changer.
“I don’t believe one capability is going to be decisive and I stand by that comment,” Austin said. The Ukrainians have other means to strike long-range targets, he said.
Its hard to know what to make of that extraordinary claim. Is he saying that the US Army’s number 1 priority for modernization is not nearly that important? That would be bold of him—but more than likely he is desperately searching around for an argument because he knows just how important long-range fires are in war.
– Phillips P. OBrien (£)
I went into my segment with Tucker intent on challenging him if the opportunity presented itself, but the brief appearance focused on my Oxford speech and ended before I’d had the chance to raise my objections to his coverage of the war in Ukraine.
His producer WhatsApped me immediately after to congratulate me on the appearance with the invitation to “Please come back soon!”. ”Here is my moment”, I naively thought to myself and replied with the offer to come back and discuss my disagreements with Tucker on the war in Ukraine.
The response was telling:
”I’m just not sure it would be great TV to have him debate you on the war”.
[…]
The message was clear: we don’t want to have a discussion about this and if you keep pressing the issue you won’t be coming back on the biggest show in America.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. No one is entitled to appear on anyone’s show to talk about a subject they nominate. Tucker and his producers are perfectly entitled to invite the guests they want to discuss the subjects they want. But the incident made it obvious to me that Tucker was not a truth-seeking journalist and that when it came to Russia and the war in Ukraine, at least, he had no intention of being objective. That much is obvious, especially after the events of the last week. But the real question is why?
– Konstantin Kisin
Like Kisin, I once saw Tucker Carlson as one of the good guys, on the same side. I am wiser now, even if we share a few of the same enemies. But sometimes, the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.
“Ms. Harris’s handlers should have enough respect for the voters, and for their candidate, to let her stand alone and answer questions by herself. Joe Biden was allowed to hide in his basement and avoid tough questioning during the Covid campaign of 2020. We all know how that turned out.”
Wall Street Journal ($)
One of my theories is that Harris is not allowing herself, or being allowed, to speak on her own in an interview not just because she is stupid, and a Leftist who might blurt out what she really might think. It is also the risk she is going to cackle halfway through answering a question. Imagine, if you will, she is asked about a trade deal with the UK, say, or defence and Ukraine and the Baltics, and she starts to get a fit of the giggles.
The handlers may also have worked out the Keir Starmer/Rachel Reeves (UK prime minister, Chancellor) strategy in the UK before the 4 July general election, which is to avoid talking in detail on policy, keep things as vague as possible, block requests for specifics, and then go in hard and Leftist when in power. Under the UK’s winner-takes-all system, with a split opposition and low turnout, this has been a successful gamble. In the US, where much of the MSM is covering for Harris, her approach may also succeed in November.
These situations make me wish for a more rigorous age. I recall from the 80s there was, in the UK, a Sunday current affairs programme, on ITV, a show called Weekend World, initially hosted by the late Peter Jay (son of a former UK government minister) and later taken over by Brian Walden (a Labour MP who went Thatcherite, as some do) and finally, Matthew Parris. Jay was good, Parris was okay and Walden was brilliant.
The first half of the programme would involve an analysis of a particular issue (striking unions, state of the economy, rise of the SDP, public finances, the nuclear deterrent, drug use, what to make of Gorbachev, etc) followed by a 25-minute interview with a senior minister or senior opposition figure (politicians such as Denis Healey, Margaret Thatcher, Peter Shore, Nigel Lawson, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Cecil Parkinson, Michael Heseltine, etc). These were political figures of gravitas, who were asked difficult questions, probed hard for answers, and not allowed to get off with issuing word salads. The analysis of a story was rigorous; the questioning was forensic, polite and as sharply revealing as that of any clever attorney. And all done on a Sunday lunchtime just after the roast lamb and glass of Cote de Rhone and before the afternoon film or the rugby. The show would be the talk of Westminster for the early part of the week. Walden could get a politician, such as Neil Kinnock, Roy Hattersley or Norman Tebbit to say more than, perhaps, they wished, but it was all done with such cleverness.
I don’t buy into the whole “in the good old days” line on everything, but in my view, some of the calibre of journalism, and the quality of those running for office, or in office, has declined, and on both sides of the Pond.
Back to Mrs Harris. I doubt her handlers (the fact she has such people makes her sound like a child) would let her within a mile of a journalist and recovering political figure such as a Jay or Walden, or, to give a more modern case, Andrew Neil and their American counterparts. Not. Going. To Happen.
And so here we are.
A young cosmopolitan such as I did not need the foreign terms explained. When well-meaning people tried to tell me that the “Cookie Monster” was equivalent to a “Biscuit Monster”, or that the “trash can” in which Oscar the Grouch resided was the same as a dustbin, I responded, with some hauteur, that I already knew these things. There was, however, one thing that I did not understand about Sesame Street, and that was why on earth at some point in every episode the announcer would say something along the lines of, “Today’s show is brought to you by the letter P and the number 6”.
Oh well. I liked the puppets.
I remain a fan of the letter P and the number 6. But when it comes to the American media I consume nowadays, I no longer like the puppets.
Oh, I can sympathise a little with the American newspapers for dutifully hastening to parrot every Word of the Week that the Harris campaign gives them. It is human nature to follow the herd. Although, as Glenn Greenwald put it in this tweet, “Not even herd animals are this flagrant about it. You tell me how and why corporate media constantly speaks from the same exact script this way, verbatim.” “Not happiness, not glee, not delight, not jubilation.” The cue card says JOY.
Until Kamala’s JOY expires and the next card comes up. The next card is Donald Trump’s dress sense, or lack of it.
As I said, I can understand, if not admire, the obedience of the American press. But why do British newspapers feel the need to immediately follow suit in complying with the “TRUMP’S SUITS” order?
Cue the Telegraph: The meaning behind Trump’s ill-fitting suits
Cue the Guardian: Donald Trump’s weird clothes: from shoulder pads to extremely long ties, what do they mean?
“Flashback: Harris fumed at Americans for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ before illegal migrants got protections”, Fox News reports:
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris warned Americans not to say “Merry Christmas” until there was permanent status for some illegal immigrants — amid a Trump-era battle over protections for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
“And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas,” she said at a 2017 press conference, a video of which was obtained by Fox News Digital.
Speakers pushed for the passage of the Dream Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors, NBC News reported.
Here is the video and here is the 2017 NBC article to which the article refers.
This clip has got a lot of play because it shows Kamala Harris as a purse-lipped woke puritan. Fair enough, she is one. Even if one completely accepted her point of view that passing the DREAM1 Act was a desirable objective in 2017, why should that not having been done be the thing that made it outrageous for Americans to wish each other “Merry Christmas” until it was done? There were plenty of worse things going on in the world in 2017: wars, famines, natural catastrophes, terrorism, poverty, crime. Why were these miseries not enough to prompt the curtailment of Christmas greetings until they were solved? Nor were these evils limited to the year 2017. So far as I know the DREAM Act has not been passed to this day. So we must assume Kamala Harris has now personally abstained from “speaking Merry Christmas” for six years and seven months and is still saying “How dare you” to anyone else who does it.
Yet in her defence, gestures of self-abnegation as a demonstration of commitment such as Harris made have a long history. In 1601, during the Dutch Revolt, Archduke Albert of Austria was laying siege to Ostend. His wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, declared that she would not change her shift until the city fell2. Since that did not happen until September 1604, her underwear got a bit grubby, giving rise to the colour term “Isabelline”.
Now that’s what I call commitment. If she wants to be taken seriously, Kamala Harris needs to follow the example of Isabella and urge her followers to do likewise.
*
1No offence, Yanks, but for introducing the idea of bills or laws whose titles spell out aspirational words, your entire nation deserves to suffer the fate of Ostend.
2This story has been fact-checked to the standard expected of the Guardian or the New York Times.
Douglas Young ponders how close to the edge our lives are.
In the wake of the near assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, a large number of Americans have wondered if he survived solely “by the grace of God.” Indeed, many believe that the Almighty Himself must have altered the direction of the assassin’s bullet so that it grazed Mr. Trump’s ear instead of hitting his head.
But if we accept this and are logically consistent, do we not also have to believe that God guided the assassin’s bullet that killed the devoted father shielding his wife and children at the event, as well as the bullets seriously wounding two other men? Or that He simply did not care about them?
I think the July 13 assassination attempt is all the more disturbing because it highlights so starkly just how huge a role luck plays in our lives. It is sobering to realize that, no matter how good or careful we think we are, very often we have no control over whether we get terminal cancer, crippled or killed in a car wreck, or even shot.
I suspect the major novelist Norman Mailer was right that this is why we prefer conspiracy theories to make sense of senseless tragedies. So instead of a total loser like Lee Harvey Oswald being able to kill President John Kennedy and change history all by himself, we much prefer to believe that only a massive cabal involving the CIA, our military-industrial complex, the Mafia, the Russians, or the Cubans could have managed such a massively consequential crime.
Now, despite clear evidence of recent rank incompetence at the U.S. Secret Service, we are sorely tempted to believe that last month’s extremely close call with the GOP presidential nominee had to be the result of a well-coordinated plot involving the CIA, other government officials, and/or even the Secret Service – anything but that awkward and lonely assassin barely out of his teens acting by himself. Yet almost every shooter of an American president has been an utter failure who somehow single-handedly pulled off what was assumed to be almost impossible.
In 1835, President Andrew Jackson survived an assassination attempt by a deranged man convinced he was a 15th century English king. In 1881, President James Garfield was murdered by a lone gunman and likely schizophrenic whose life had been a complete catastrophe. In 1901, President William McKinley was shot to death by an unemployed socialist-anarchist. In 1963 President Kennedy was cut down by a mentally ill high school dropout who had become a communist. And in 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot by an insane loner hoping to impress a famous actress he had not even met.
→ Continue reading: This precarious life
“How will the service rebuild in the wake of its catastrophic failure? The agency might argue that it is striving to bulk up, adding personnel needed to thwart assassins. On Monday, the Secret Service advertised two openings. The positions could be found at the U.S. government’s employment portal, USAJobs. Those hired will each be paid $139,395 annually. With what essential mission will they be tasked? Counter-sniping? Evasive driving? No. The title of both jobs is “Lead Public Affairs Specialist.”
– Eric Felten, Wall Street Journal ($).
The humorous writers and mockers of government idiocies, such as the late H L Mencken and P J O’Rourke, would have had much sport with this sort of story.
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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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