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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Just not in the way the Guardian thinks.
The Guardian view on Romania’s annulled election: a wake-up call for democracies
The unprecedented move by the country’s constitutional court last week to annul the results of the first round of the presidential election, amid allegations of Russian interference, is a landmark moment in the increasingly embattled arena of eastern European politics. The decision followed an astonishing surge to first place by a far-right admirer of Vladimir Putin, who had been polling in low single digits until the eve of the election. According to declassified intelligence reports, Călin Georgescu benefited from a vote that was manipulated by various illicit means, including cyber-attacks and a Russian-funded TikTok campaign. Analysts found that about 25,000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became active only two weeks before the first-round vote.
What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet.
When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try.
I did not see this coming: “South Korea’s president declares emergency martial law”, reports the BBC.
Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, is quoted as saying, “Our National Assembly has become a haven for criminals, a den of legislative dictatorship that seeks to paralyse the judicial and administrative systems and overturn our liberal democratic order.”
Sounds like projection to me.
Can anyone explain what is going on? Is there really any more of a threat from North Korea than there always is, or is it all to do with domestic politics?
Update: Lawmakers in South Korea vote to lift the martial law decree. The Guardian link says,
South Korea’s parliament, with 190 of its 300 members present, just passed a motion requiring the martial law declared by President Yoon Suk Yeol to be lifted.
All 190 lawmakers present voted to lift the measure, according to CNN.
Much depends on which 190 lawmakers were present. If the very fact that they were still in the parliament building after martial law was declared was because they they were from the opposition, President Yoon will dismiss it – although the 190 being an absolute majority of South Korea’s MPs does give their vote moral weight.
If it was a broad spread of MPs from several parties, this vote might mean the end of the coup. Either way, it is troubling to realise that a country that everyone thought was a stable democracy isn’t.
Did democracy stop being cool or something?
I wish I were only talking about this:
“Essex Police Issue Update After WWII Bomb Safely Detonated in East Tilbury”
(This Twitter thread by Tony Brown @agbdrilling shows detailed pictures of how the bomb was found and safely exploded under sand.)
But the thing uppermost in my mind was actually this:
“Amsterdam rioters ‘planned Jew hunt on Telegram’ before they attacked Israeli football fans”
A good article by “The Liberal Patriot”, Ruy Teixeira: “The Progressive Moment is Over”. The four main points he addresses to his fellow Democrats are:
1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it.
Twenty-two years ago, alongside John B. Judis, Mr Teixeira was one of the co-authors of a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority”, which itself was inspired by a book written in 1969 by Kevin Phillips called “The Emerging Republican Majority”. Judging by the popular vote in US elections over the last two decades, Mr Teixeira wasn’t wrong, but all such theses have an expiry date. I would not care to place a bet on who will win the coming US election in eight days’ time, nor on the next one, but I would place a bet on the winners of the 2028 election not being progressives.
“‘He lashed out. He was scared’: the fight to save vulnerable UK children from being kicked out of school”– this Observer report by Anna Fazackerley on how two hundred lawyers “have come together to challenge a wave of discriminatory exclusions” focuses on the “unmet needs” of children who are excluded and the worry felt by their parents. Early on, we are told the story of an eleven year old boy called Sam:
His mother alerted the school that Sam would need support before going into class. But, two hours later, when she returned to check on him, she could hear a child screaming. It was Sam.
“As I went in, he was completely disregulated and surrounded by five adults and he collapsed on the floor. No one had called me,” she said.
The school suspended Sam for five days while they formulated a plan to manage his needs – something she was later told was unlawful. Having tried to push her to accept a move to a pupil referral unit, which caters for children who cannot attend mainstream school, she was then sent the notice of permanent exclusion.
After three months at home, Sam was enrolled at a new school, but it did not review whether he needed any additional support. His grades and class reports were good but, halfway through the year, a girl who had been bullying Sam pushed him and he shoved her back. The school permanently excluded him for assaulting a teacher who then physically restrained him.
“When I got there, he was in floods of tears,” his mother said. “He had lashed out but not in anger. He was scared.”
Maybe he wasn’t the only scared one.
These days one often sees signs displayed in hospitals, in government offices and on public transport that say something like “Assaults on our staff will not be tolerated”. I was tempted to ask rhetorically, “Should not the same apply to teachers?” and end the post there. But there is a complication that will be familiar to libertarians: even the gentlest, most loving childcare inevitably involves adults using force on children. Before Sam assaulted the teacher, the teacher physically restrained Sam. Am I OK with that?
Broadly, yes. I had hoped to quote one or two of Brian Micklethwait’s writings on this paradox but have not been able to find the pieces I was thinking of. Never mind. Brian was the last man to worry about someone else making his argument their own.
For babies and small children, it is inevitable that they spend almost their entire lives being physically moved around by adults. They are fed, dressed, cleaned and generally sustained by beings bigger and stronger than they are, without anyone so much as getting their signature on a consent form. Then, if all goes well, as they grow older children gain more and more independence until they reach adulthood. In a sane world, schools for children of about Sam’s age would be half-way houses to independence where the necessity of rules being enforced by, well, force, was acknowledged but not something one had to think about minute by minute. All but the very worst of workplaces and other places where adults spend their time are like this. A great deal of the unpleasantness of school life derives from the fact that, in contrast, they are places where force is omnipresent. The least bad part of this is that for 90% the time the children cannot choose what they do – after all, much of adult life also involves spending time on tasks one would not do for pleasure. The most bad part of it, the horrifying part of it, is that they cannot choose to leave. They cannot get away from bullies. Some of those bullies are fellow-pupils, some are teachers. Both categories of bullies are often bullied in their turn. They probably became bullies in the first place out of fear. Frightened people lash out, as Sam did. One ought to be able to spare some compassion for Sam and those like him; to acknowledge that in a better environment he might not have turned violent. It remains a hard fact that in this timeline the continued presence of violent pupils like Sam in a school makes life a misery for other pupils and teachers. It remains a fact that state schools are, on average, places of greater misery than private schools because when state schools try to protect their staff and students by expelling violent pupils they are hamstrung by the likes of the two hundred benevolent lawyers in the School Inclusion Project.
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.”
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.
The Guardian reports,
Scores of Hezbollah members hurt in Lebanon after pagers explode
Scores of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, including fighters and medics,
Oh, the poor Hezbollah medics!
were seriously wounded on Tuesday when the pagers they use to communicate exploded, a security source told Reuters.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.
A Reuters journalist saw ambulances rushing through the southern suburbs of the capital, Beirut, amid widespread panic. People said explosions were taking place even 30 minutes after the initial blasts.
I feel that this development deserves to be commemorated in period style.
Edit: It is now being claimed that a ten year old girl, Fatima Jaafar Abdullah, was killed by one of the exploding pagers. If true (and despite Hezbollah, like Hamas, being inveterate liars who regularly fake the deaths of children, it might well be true that she was handling her Hezbollah father’s pager or something similar), that is tragic. But overall one of the things about this operation that fills me with admiration is that it must be one of the most precisely targeted military strikes in history. Targeted to the very hip pockets of individual terrorists. Oh, and it would have been nice if a few more of the people denouncing Israel for this had also denounced Hezbollah for firing rockets at Israel completely indiscriminately for years on end. Only a few weeks ago, twelve Israeli Druze children were “shredded to pieces” by a Hezbollah rocket while playing soccer.
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.
Government anti-terror ban forces closure of UK model steam train firm
A historic British firm which produced model steam trains for 87 years has been forced to close its doors after getting hamstrung by red tape.
Mamod this month closed down production in its factory due to dwindling sales and spiralling overheads, in an era of gaming consoles and social media.
The firm was also hobbled by a government ban on the ‘dangerous’ hexamine fuel tablets that had long been used in the models to heat water and set the intricate engines chuntering.
Founded in 1937, Mamod’s steam trains quickly became a favourite of children across the country, boasting static generators which powered models with wire loops and scaled-down traction engines.
While it is true that model steam engines of this type had all but disappeared as toys, there is a considerable market for them among dangerous men with names like Kenneth and Stanley who might convert their garden railways to hexamine-powered rail-mobile nuclear missile launch systems.
The BBC reports,
SNP MSP John Mason has been stripped of the party whip after “completely unacceptable” social media posts about the conflict in Gaza
Mr Mason said he was “disappointed” by his suspension, which came after he wrote on X that the country’s actions in Gaza did not amount to “genocide”.
In response, a spokesperson for the SNP Chief Whip said: “To flippantly dismiss the death of more than 40,000 Palestinians is completely unacceptable.
“There can be no room in the SNP for this kind of intolerance.”
The spokesperson added the SNP Group would now meet to discuss the matter, with a recommendation of a fixed period suspension, for what they described as a “utterly abhorrent comment”.
The withdrawal of the whip means Mr Mason is effectively expelled from the SNP with immediate effect and must sit as an independent MSP until it is restored.
His “utterly abhorrent comment” was this tweet:
John Mason
@JohnMasonMSP
There is no genocide. If Israel wanted to commit genocide, they would have killed many many more.
If the Scottish National Party wants to eject Mason for having a different definition of the word “genocide” to the one the party favours, that is its prerogative. I am not clear on how it helps anyone in Gaza, or indeed Scotland, but the decision is not mine to make.
What interests me is the way that this type of political thinking shrinks the parties and political tribes that practise it. The three steps are: (1) Take an existing word. (2) Change its definition. (3) Throw anyone who does not accept the change out of your in-group.
Redefinition – the first two steps – is a standard political technique, common on all points of the political compass. Many American campaigners for gay marriage dropped the “gay” and spoke of themselves as campaigning for “marriage”. It worked. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit often prefaces links to stories about gun rights with the general term “Civil Rights Update”. The good version of the idea is that the reader will do a double-take at seeing something they had never previously thought of as being an example of [marriage / civil rights / whatever] so described, but will then think, “Is there really any reason it shouldn’t be?” The manoeuvre can veer off into being annoying or even deceptive, and I think that some politically involved users of the technique such as the American LGBT advocacy group called the “Human Rights Campaign” do not appreciate how confusing the use of a general term for a much more specific purpose can be to those who are less politically aware, but as a rhetorical technique, it’s fine.
I can also think of things to praise about Step (3). A party – or a doctrine – that does not define itself is pointless. “Vote for us! We’ll do everything!” If the definition concerned is a clear distillation of what that party believes and the other parties do not, it is right and necessary to eject dissenters. No party is obliged to host its opponents. This remains true if the party changes and the opponents being ejected are those who were orthodox yesterday, although I do feel sorry for the Old Believers in this situation.
Step (3) leads into a quagmire when the definition in question is as distant from the party’s main purpose as, well, Gaza is from Scotland. Or, worse yet, when a new Step (3) pops up every week.
As with the Gaza “genocide”, a pattern of making acceptance of a newly-altered definition a condition of continued membership was followed – indeed pioneered – by the SNP with regard to the meaning of the word “woman”. That went very badly for the party, and also for the Scottish trans women it was meant to help. It did not have to be this way. Cast your mind back seven or eight years. Theresa May was Prime Minister. The Equalities Minister was Justine Greening. When Greening announced a bill to enable transgender people to choose their sex more easily, the standard view was mild satisfaction that this reform was being proposed by a Conservative government.
It started to go wrong for the SNP when they reduced their position to four words: “Trans women are women”. Just as John Mason balked this week at accepting that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide, while still expressing sympathy for the people of Gaza, so quite a few SNP politicians balked at that definition of “woman” while still stressing that they remained “committed to human rights, equality and dignity for all people”. Several of the MPs and MSPs who signed that letter in 2019 have since left or been thrown out of the party. Things came to a head in 2023 when a double rapist now called Isla Bryson was remanded to a women’s jail. Faced with a wave of popular anger, the then First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, backed down and effectively introduced a third legal gender to Scottish law, that of “rapist”. Once punctured, the four word rule “Trans women are women” soon deflated entirely in Scotland, and I think the same is happening across the English-speaking world. The new dominant four word rule is “Transwomen are men”. It would have been better to let people agree to differ.
Having seen how well insisting on a novel definition of “woman” worked out for Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney appears to have decided to see if insisting on a novel definition of “genocide” is going to work any better for him.
Why do parties nowadays so often try to force an immediate yes-or-no answer on an issue, proudly insisting that there should be “no debate”, when it is obvious that in that case many of their own supporters are going to answer “no”? Why do they compound the error by doing it on issues that most of their supporters did not previously care about?
“You know who else should be on trial for the UK’s far-right riots? Elon Musk”, writes Jonathan Freedland, who used to be a liberal, in the Guardian, a newspaper whose very name was once universally understood to mean “Guardian of our Liberties”.
Mr Freedland writes,
Of course, it’s good that so many of those responsible for a week of terrifying far-right violence are facing an especially swift and severe form of justice – but there’s one extremely rich and powerful suspect who should join them in the dock. If the UK authorities truly want to hold accountable all those who unleashed riots and pogroms in Britain, they need to go after Elon Musk.
Freedland then accurately describes the way that pogroms throughout history have started:
In 1144, it wasn’t Southport but Norwich, and the victim was a 12-year-old boy called William. When he was found dead, the accusing finger pointed instantly – and falsely – at the city’s Jews. Over the centuries that followed, the defamatory charge of child murder – the blood libel – would be hurled against Jews repeatedly, often as the prelude to massacre.
There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that, so far and thankfully, these riots have not killed anyone – although given the attempts to burn down buildings with people inside, that seems more a matter of luck than mercy. But the common element in events nearly a millennium apart is that lies can wreak havoc when they spread. And that spreading now takes seconds.
So Mr Freedland describes a phenomenon that has recurred throughout history, citing an example that occurred 862 years before Twitter existed. He observes that this phenomenon has taken place yet again, but with the blessed difference that this time (when Twitter was present) no one was killed – and concludes that Twitter made it worse.
That does not make sense. Not only did the Norwich pogrom that Mr Freedland cites happen before the coming of Twitter, it happened almost exactly three centuries before the coming of Gutenberg’s printing press, with its terrifying ability to spread unvetted commentary right across Europe in mere weeks. “And that spreading now takes seconds”, frets Mr Freedland, but on these islands at least, the correlation between the speed of propagation of information and the frequency and severity of race riots and pogroms has been negative. As has been the correlation between these things and the freedom of the press.
Why?
→ Continue reading: Thank you, Elon Musk, defuser of riots
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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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