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]
I can answer this simply. William Shakespeare doesn’t send me a monthly letter threatening to send the boys round if I don’t give him money for something I don’t want, don’t need and don’t use.
However, less flippantly, the BBC’s bias is blindingly obvious to anyone who takes even a passing look. The most egregious recent example being the Trump edit. But even before that, we have a flat refusal to engage with anyone who dares to disagree with the climate hysteria. Their COVID coverage was not only dire; it was blatantly untrue and hysterical. At no point did they do any journalism and question the inflated death figures coming out of Downing Street via Half-Whitty.
In 2011, with the glass barely swept up after the London riots, the think tank Demos measured Britain’s pride in itself and found it obstinately intact. A net 74% of us were proud to be British. Last week Demos ran the ruler over us again. The figure is 47%. Pride in Britain’s role in the world stands at 13%. The BBC, which fifteen years ago enjoyed a net pride score of 48%, now sits at minus 11, meaning more Britons are ashamed of the Corporation than proud of it. That last number is, I suppose, at least evidence that the public can still see straight.
Compare the two cases and a pattern emerges. Cofnas cleared every formal bar that Cambridge erected—a competitive fellowship, a strong publication record, an eventual ruling that he’d broken no law and no policy—but he was punished anyway, and his position quietly expired while the university dithered. Arday did not clear the bars his professoriate peers had to clear, he was defended anyway, and he was propped up by administrators who failed to do due diligence. One scholar was punished for an opinion; the other was protected despite misconduct that objective methods could verify. Two different treatments, one shared instinct: expedience trumps evidence.
But eventually one notices that the Tories cannot achieve the easy things either. They cannot stop the boats because the Blob is too powerful. They cannot build houses because the planning system is too powerful. They cannot cut spending because the Treasury is too powerful. They cannot reform the NHS because the NHS is too powerful. And now they cannot liberalise Soho because the Soho Society is too powerful. There is one common denominator here, folks: it is called the Conservative Party.
Our new Prime Minister is taking action to protect British people against unfair dealing.
Too many people feel like modern life is designed to catch them out.
It should be just as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to start it. And if something is advertised as half price, it should actually be half price.
“It should be just as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to start it. And if something is advertised as half price, it should actually be half price”, he says. Sounds fair.
Hi Andy, I don’t use my BBC subscription, could you help me cancel. While you’re at it, my water provider is providing a partial service, I can’t use my hose, can I get a refund. Also I haven’t subscribed to picking up illegal migrants in the channel, could I stop funding it. I’d… https://t.co/b9nkhosYPg
I was a career policeman. My lived experience (for what it’s worth) was that, generally speaking, serious sex offenders don’t change. Hey, I’m not a criminologist or psychologist, but I spent my working life around criminals of virtually every persuasion. Sex offenders are a special breed. Even “decent honest criminals” tended to agree.
On the other hand, I’ve met ex-offenders (who were, but are no longer, criminals) who’ve changed. I’m mates with a few. I have no problem with people who’ve made mistakes in their lives: we all have feet of clay and there for the grace of God go I (etc). I reckon I’d have made a half-decent Christian.
But the Simon Levy types? No. Fucking. Way. If you get convicted for predatory rape you should have a target on your back ad infinitum. Is my view too extreme? I don’t care, to be perfectly honest. I’m simply as passionate about victims as the criminal justice elites are about “oppressed and marginalized” offenders. I believe the rights of women and girls trump those who’ve demonstrated bad faith and a propensity to offend.
That’s the starting point. Fairness builds from there. Anything else is perverse. A system which invites, almost by default, sexual re-offending. Which is the system we have now.
Standing at the fence I found myself asking what a Cochrane would do now, and the answer is uncomfortable, because the need for one is so plain. Our age has its Basque Roads, victories thrown away by commanders unwilling to close. It has its prize-court corruption in the procurement billions that vanish without a ship, a road or a reactor to show for them. Above all it has its Stock Exchange trials. Ask the sub-postmasters. Ask the infected blood families. The machine that ruined Cochrane, the machine that would rather destroy the innocent than admit error, has never been better fed. His modern heir would fight it as the original did, by knowing it better than its own officers. Cochrane was an engineer’s son and an inventor to his fingertips, and his heir would read a procurement database the way Cochrane read Spanish gunnery, as a system with a blind spot waiting to be boarded. He would use parliamentary privilege to name names. He would be unclubbable, immune to honours, indifferent to the lobby. And he would accept the price, to be ruined at least once, publicly and with relish, by the people he had frightened, and to come back over the prison wall.
In fact, RICU has actively become biased against entirely mainstream right-wing beliefs. According to the 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent, while its ‘products related to Islamic terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology…much of the material covering Extreme Right-Wing falls well below the threshold’. Shawcross mentioned that he ‘saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on Right-Wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”.
The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon’. Shawcross also describes RICU analysis of a ‘cohort of social media users it termed “Actively Patriotic and Proud”, listed a prominent Conservative politician and former member of the government as being among figures “associated with far-right sympathetic audiences, and Brexit”’ (who I understand to be Jacob Rees-Mogg). This then, is RICU now. An organisation which seeks to ‘counter extremist narratives’ and maintains ‘contingency communication’ materials ‘for rapid deployment after major incidents’. The methods they deploy are ‘never published’.
When I was a teacher, many years ago, the Times Higher Education Supplement was on every staffroom table and was considered the voice of the progressive establishment. Perhaps I should not be surprised to see its modern incarnation, Times Higher Education, receive the sort of treatment that was once reserved for the tabloids when they got too nosey about people in power. Progressivism always has the progressivism of a generation ago among its prime targets. Jack Grove of Times Higher Education writes, “I was reported to police over Arday case. I was just doing my job”:
[…] I decided, on second thoughts, to take the voicemail at my desk, about 10 minutes away in Holborn.
I was shocked to hear it was from the Metropolitan Police, asking me to call them back. Why? Nothing remarkable had happened to me in the previous year. When I rang back the officer explained a complaint had been made against me regarding the University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, but the matter was now closed.
But it was important, the officer explained, that I didn’t contact him again, because it was affecting his mental health.
However, I hadn’t emailed Arday in four months – my last direct email had been in September, offering formal right of reply to allegations that he had plagiarised his PhD.
That allegation was not made lightly: I had assembled a 63-page report which detailed how he had apparently used, without proper citation, huge chunks from a thesis written in 2009 by another student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, now a highly respected education academic at Brunel University of London. Further checks found passages that seemed to be lifted from the work of researchers based in the US, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the UK. In total, I submitted 97 pages of evidence to both Cambridge and Arday’s awarding institution, Liverpool John Moores University, for their investigation.
Serious allegations, certainly. Deeply embarrassing and distressing, definitely. Although Arday was eventually cleared of plagiarism by an LJMU review, a frenzy of coverage led to Cambridge opening an investigation into Arday’s academic record and CV, followed shortly afterwards by Arday announcing his resignation.
But were my inquiries grounds for a criminal complaint? That was hugely troubling to me as a reporter who specialises in examining issues of research integrity and ethics.
As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive and allege some sort of thought crime, particularly if one writes about anti-Jewish racism and violence, free speech, the Middle East, Islam or trans issues. I write about all of them.
I recognised the moment for what it was. A rite of passage, and an attempt to place a boundary around my speech. Informing her as I did so, I reached for my phone and began recording, as much for posterity as for evidence.
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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