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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Remember, when the grooming gangs hit the news again in January, after decades of these gangs operating, the official line from No10, repeated by the regime media, remained that ‘the real story here is the tech oligarchs spreading disinformation and the spread of the Islamophobic far right’.
They briefed fake news to the media that ‘Cummings is writing Elon’s tweets’. The PM gave a speech about it. Useless regime hacks like Lewis Goodall called it ‘his best speech’. Goodall explained that the ‘real story’ is the influence of Elon, social media radicalising the right, ‘the emergence of a common UK/US online right … making extremist, until recently fringe politics mainstream in British conservatism… Far right thinking … has become mainstream. Remember that the notion of ubiquitous Muslim grooming gangs has long been a trope of extremism, despite little evidence’ — and the idea that there’s been a national conspiracy to deny victims justice ‘is dangerous nonsense’ (Goodall, Jan 2025).
This was ‘the mainstream’ pundit view in SW1-media-land only 6 months ago. Being pathological and pathologically incompetent, the regime then tried to organise another layer of coverup with a report but this went wrong because the scale of evidence is so vast the author rebelled and told enough of the truth to make the No10 line untenable. Narrative Whiplash kicked in: suddenly the gangs were no longer ‘far right disinformation’, they’re real, there’ll be an Inquiry, though of course the core Insider belief hasn’t changed — the purpose of the Inquiry (from Whitehall’s perspective) is to control the story and suppress as much as possible voters connecting the collapse of border control and the systematic rape/abuse/killing of English children.
– Dominic Cummings
When Israel struck Iranian targets on June 13th, something strange happened four days later—thousands of Twitter accounts tweeting about Scottish independence just… stopped.
That silence? It wasn’t just suspicious. It was evidence.
In this video, I walk you through how a digital blackout in Iran exposed one of the largest Iranian disinformation operations targeting the West. Working with Cyabra, we tracked over 1,300 fake accounts—AI-generated personas pushing division in the UK, attacking the BBC, and praising Iran. And when the lights went out in Tehran, those bots vanished too.
Then they came back… parroting entirely new propaganda.
This is a masterclass in how modern influence warfare works—how state-sponsored actors weaponize your feed and how even silence can be a signal.
– Ryan McBeth
Got that? Britain is a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country, and the government has to show it has a plan to address people’s concerns and provide opportunties for everyone to flourish. And, er, there is a link between concerns people have about (checks notes) ‘where the government is acting on their behalf and on their interests with a range of factors’.
You have to laugh, even through the tears: these are the people who are in charge. Britain is a successful country? And this government has a…plan? But the important point to emphasise here is that Rayner, and the people around her, are simply constitutionally incapable of recognising the problem itself, or the solution. They actually think that ‘immigration and the impacts on local communities and public services’ is just one of a ‘range of factors’ destabilising society, alongside ‘economic insecurity, the rapid pace of de-industrialisation, technological change and the amount of time people were spending alone online, and declining trust in institutions’. And they actually think that the remedy for this is just ‘investment’ in ‘deprived areas’ so as to allow people to ‘flourish’.
British readers are familiar with this mindset: typically what it means is that money gets funnelled into regeneration schemes that kit out otherwise forgotten places like Newport, Dundee or Middlesborough with nice new shopping precincts and art galleries nobody visits. The idea, more or less, is that opposition to uncontrolled immigration is really just a feature of economic insecurity and, perhaps, a lack of civic pride. And if government can therefore just press the ‘grow’ button a bit harder, people will feel better off and pride will re-emerge, and our ‘successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country’ will simply become more successful yet.
– David McGrogan
“This [anti-abundance] mentality ultimately stems from the 1970s `Limits to Growth’ report, which predicted that natural resources would run out, prices would shoot through the roof, and there would be mass starvation.
“Reality has shown this to be bunk. Yet it lives on in decision-takers’ minds, reinforced by the belief that climate change requires a reduction in our global footprint as human beings and use less of everything. And it’s strengthened by a fundamentally elitist, snobbish mindset about economic growth, the view that growth is all about the hoi polloi buying more `stuff’ they don’t need, rather than what it is: the advancement of human possibility for all of us during our limited time on the planet.
“Look hard – actually you don’t need to look hard – and you see it everywhere. Consider the disdain for `cheap food’ and the moral panic about UPFs, surely a fabricated concept, and one whose principal benefit is psychological, allowing well-off politicians and campaigners to play Lady Bountiful telling ordinary voters how to eat. Think of the sneering at big cars, or worse still, people with more than one car, the suburban lifestyle, houses with gardens instead of egg-box flats, package holidays instead of leisurely eco-travel.
“Contemplate all the tedious lifestyle preaching, the hectoring of supermarkets about packaging, the determination to build houses with tiny windows and small rooms and then to ban air conditioning as it’s too damaging to the environment.”
– David Frost, Daily Telegraph.
Note: “UPFs” are ultra-processed foods, which now seem to have achieved the same Voldemort status as tobacco and booze.
Regarding the “abundance mindset” approach, I recommend this book, Fossil Future (2022), of a year or so ago by Alex Epstein. Another is Merchants of Despair, by Robert Zubrin. Last but not least is this book, written more than 25 years ago – The Intellectuals and The Masses – by John Carey. He shows how, from the 19th Century and into the 20th, a lot of supposedly clever people hated the rising prosperity of the broad mass of the public, not simply out of some concern for the natural world (much of which was sentimental bullshit), but because they hated people, and ultimately, themselves.
The result of [Argentina’s] shock therapy has been a stunning recovery. Milei has brought monthly inflation down from 13 percent to 2 percent. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7 percent. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks—indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42 percent, when Milei was elected, to 31 percent. There is much work still to be done, but a new program from the IMF will provide $12 billion of new lending upfront and potentially another $2 billion, which should enable Milei to remove the remaining capital and exchange controls without reigniting inflation.
Most governments that cut their fiscal deficit by five percentage points of GDP pay a heavy political price for the resulting pain. Margaret Thatcher took nearly all her years in office to get the British public sector borrowing requirement down from 4.5 percent of GDP when she was elected in 1979 to −1.1 percent 10 years later.
– Niall Ferguson
It has almost become a feature of the English sporting calendar, like the Epsom Derby and the FA Cup final, to watch a local heavyweight lose to Oleksandr Usyk in a packed football stadium or on prime-time television. Five Englishmen, on eight separate occasions, have tried and failed across two different weight divisions to beat the Ukrainian champion. None has succeeded. When Daniel Dubois was knocked out in the fifth round on Saturday night, before a sold-out crowd of 90,000 people at Wembley Stadium, it seemed like a sporting affirmation of Einstein’s definition of stupidity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
– Hugo Timms
Also this is amusing.
Now the thing is:
You can gatekeep in Europe
You can gatekeep in the United States
You can gatekeep in every single economy of the West
But you absolutely cannot gatekeep in China, for there are no tools at all, that would allow you to do that
Like what would you even do to restrict the new entrees?
Intellectual property? lmao
Some other lawfare? Again, just like the enforcement of intellectual property rights, that would ultimately rely upon the cooperation of state, and the state in China – unlike in the West – just would not cooperate.
High profit margins in the West are ultimately based upon the artificial restraints upon the new entrees, and upon the state-sponsored gatekeeping. You keep your prices high, because any new entree on the market will be scared away by the force of the state machine. And in China, the state machine just wouldn’t do that. That is why Chinese competition is getting so close to perfect, and that is why prices (and profits margins) in China, can be getting so low.
– Kamil Galeev
But since October 7, 2023, it feels as if the entire informational ecosystem has collapsed under a tidal wave of noise. I’ve never seen so many people scream and tweet and chant and repost without any regard for logic, facts, or history. Emotion has not just trumped reason, it has obliterated it.
The tragedy is not that people are choosing sides; it’s that they’re doing so blindly, ferociously, and with such utter detachment from fact. The battle isn’t just on the ground anymore, it’s for the mind. And most people are losing that battle without even realizing they’ve been drafted into it.
What used to be propaganda is now performance art. What used to be journalism is now tribalism. What used to be analysis is now algorithm.
– Almen Dean
Never ever trust the French and I am not saying this to be mean or edgy.
Many seem to have fallen for Macron and France’s theatrics and rhetoric in recent years.
France has always seen itself as a superpower and always will, and it wants to wield influence and play a dominant role in European and global affairs.
It is not going on endlessly about Ukraine and Europe out of a sense of charity or a desire to do the right thing, but rather because it wants to exploit recent developments in order to take the lead and exert greater influence.
France wants a stronger European security architecture precisely because it believes it can exert influence over it to serve its own interests.
Historically, France has always been reserved about its NATO membership and American dominance in the alliance because it wants to do things its own way and, ideally, maintain its influence.
– ‘Terrorism Guy‘ – National Security Adviser to the Internet 😀
As Ferguson’s law states, any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defence risks ceasing to be a great power. While defence spending is expected to total £56.9 billion in 2025, debt interest is almost double that at £104.9 billion — comprising 8.2% of total public spending. All of this is to say that Army personnel would be vastly outnumbered by the Jihadists already monitored by foreign intelligence and MI5, plus those awaiting release in British prisons, and emigrating through legal and illegal means. Thanks to successive governments’ failure to prepare for this eventuality, and their exacerbation of the problem through permissive immigration policies, Britain is on the brink of the barbarians within its gates putting all we love to the torch.
– Connor Tomlinson
Mexico is inching closer to a Venezuelan-style autocracy. Consider the case of María Oropeza, who was forcibly abducted in Venezuela by armed men without due process. Her crime? Sympathizing with the opposition. That’s the future Mexico risks: where justice is not blind, but partisan. Some dismiss these warnings as exaggeration. But as Adam Smith observed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, people often ignore distant tragedies until they arrive at their doorstep.
– Sergio Martinez
Just as Gorbachev’s failed reforms accelerated processes which “encouraged many Russians to redefine the Soviet territory as alien and to identify the Russian territory as their homeland,” we see a similar process on the rapidly evolving British Right in distinguishing between the Britain of recent memory and its UK replacement. When even Tory grandees such as Lord Frost borrow the disparaging term “Yookay” from the internet Right to disparage what he defines as Blair’s “new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain [but] distinct from it”, we see a similar, explicit distinction being made as that between Russia and the USSR. The counterpoint to Blair’s UK, or YooKay — the two are, now, more or less interchangeable — is, as Frost observes, simply Britain.
Whether you welcome this development or fear it, British politics in its current tumultuous form, with all its increasingly radicalised and existential debates on immigration and demographics, on its history, social housing and the welfare state, and on the nature and boundaries of Britishness or Englishness, is inexplicable without accepting that the country has now entered this phase of political development.
– Aris Roussinos
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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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