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.
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“UK supermarkets accused of ‘bombarding’ shoppers with cheap meat”, whispers the Guardian’s Denis Campbell in shock:
Britain’s biggest supermarkets stand accused of “bombarding” shoppers with offers of cheap meat, despite pledging to promote more meat-free diets to improve health and tackle global heating.
They are using money-saving promotions, such as two for the price of one, as a way of “pushing” meat, at odds with moves in the UK and globally for consumers to eat less of it, research found.
Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons are each offering scores of deals every week on meat products such as burgers and sausages to drive sales and boost their profits, according to a report from the
Marketing directors of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons? Apparently not. This disturbing news comes from the…
charity Eating Better. It is an umbrella group representing more than 60 organisations including WWF UK, Greenpeace, public health bodies, dietitians, the RSPCA and food charities.
I was going to say the rot goes deep in Scottish politics, but it ain’t just Scotland.
It started with a minor story about a senior member of the Scottish National Party getting into hot water. Until this story broke Dr Tim Rideout was the SNP’s currency guy. Quoting the Times:
“Nicola Sturgeon ‘will root out racism’ in SNP after adviser Tim Rideout suspended”
Nicola Sturgeon has pledged to “root out and condemn toxic racist political discourse” in the SNP after a senior party member said that Priti Patel should be “sent back to Uganda”.
Tim Rideout, a member of the nationalists’ policy development committee, was suspended from the party after the controversial social media posts about the home secretary came to light.
Pam Gosal, the Conservative MSP and the first Indian Sikh member at Holyrood, urged the first minister to condemn the “appalling racist comment”.
Pam Gosal was right. It was a nasty bit of snide directed at the Home Secretary solely because of her ancestry. I already knew Rideout was a twit on financial matters – here he is speaking at some sort of Modern Monetary Theory conference – but I had thought better of him than that.
A Conservative MSP angrily saying that a Scottish National Party official has said something appalling, when he has, is normal politics. What shook me, because not that long ago it was not normal politics, was the remark from the (Labour) Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Murray:
Ian Murray, the shadow Scottish secretary, has called for police to take action against Rideout. He added: “These are truly horrendous and outright racist remarks from a key advisor to Nicola Sturgeon.
Once laws against “hate” unaccompanied by any clear crime are passed, as the SNP has done in Scotland, it does not take long for the policing of political speech to become literal.
It is telling that so many cosmopolitan liberal globalists now care about sovereignty for Ukraine, yet spent years telling Brits sovereignty was some kind of fascist fantasy. It’s now okay to be a ‘flag shagger’ if you’re from Lviv or [Kyiv], but not if you’re from Leeds or Kings Lynn.
– Commenter Martin
I have considerable respect for the Guardian‘s John Harris. Though a Remainer himself, he was one of the first left-wing journalists to see that the campaign to leave the European Union had popular support, particularly among the working class, and the reason he could see that while others could not was because he and his colleague John Domokos did what others did not and put in the legwork to report from “Anywhere But Westminster”.
But respect does not mean agreement. Mr Harris writes that “Nigel Farage’s hard-right faction won Brexit. Now net zero is in its sights” like that’s a bad thing.
Start fracking.
Arm Ukraine.
Fuck Putin.
– Tony Parsons
Strange days make for strange allies.
Christians in MP Steve Baker’s seat pray for him to quit role on climate thinktank
Protesters gathered in High Wycombe on Friday to implore their MP, Steve Baker, to quit as a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a thinktank that has been accused of being one of the UK’s leading sources of climate scepticism.
When it says “protesters gathered”, we are not talking about the First Crusade. The gathering process probably took less than three seconds.
Those assembled, including local children and members of the local Lib Dem, Labour and Green parties,
I see something missing there.
said they hoped the MP would be voted out at the next election if he did not change his mind on net zero. Baker currently has a majority of 4,000, which means his seat could be marginal.
The MP, who is a member of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group and has called for the government to rethink its policy of decarbonising the economy using renewable energy, came out to
Smite the idolaters?
join the gathered protesters in prayer and answer their questions.
All very civilised, and these doubtless well-meaning folk, all fifteen of them, have every right to make their protest, and I am glad that Mr Baker smote them not.
But if we’re gonna be doing political prayers, here’s mine. Oh Lord, open their eyes: we need fracking and nuclear power for the sake of the poor and the peace of the world.
As Andrew Neil writes in the Mail,
While Putin was making these painful preparations to withstand sanctions, what was Europe doing? Why, increasing its exposure to Russian energy, of course.
In 2013 the European Union bought 135 billion cubic metres of Russian natural gas. Six years later, despite indisputable evidence that a revanchist Russia was on the march, annexing Crimea — a 21st-century Anschluss — and occupying parts of Georgia and eastern Ukraine, the EU had managed to increase its purchase of Russian gas to 166 billion cubic metres.
Despite pouring billions of euros into wind and solar energy, the EU has also managed to import a lot more coal from Russia.
And, of course, it just can’t get enough Russian gas, hence the German enthusiasm for a new gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, from Siberia through the Baltic Sea to Germany (currently suspended — but not abandoned — in the wake of the invasion).
In a very real sense, the EU has paid for Putin’s Fortress Russia defences. With oil prices spiking at over $100 a barrel, $700 million a day in oil revenues is pouring into Kremlin coffers. Germany’s dependence on Russian energy is close to complete: 50 per cent of its coal imports, 55 per cent of its gas, 35 per cent of its oil — all from Russia.
Added later: From Tipp Insights, “Anti-Fossil Madness Funds Putin’s Ukraine Aggression”
“The draft Online Safety Bill delivers the government’s manifesto commitment to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while defending free expression”, says the gov.uk website. It would be nice to think that meant that the Bill would make the UK the safest place in the world in which to defend free expression online.
The text of the draft Bill soon dispels that illusion. Today’s Times editorial says,
In the attempt to tackle pornography, criminality, the promotion of suicide and other obvious obscenities rampant on social media, the bill invents a new category titled “legal but harmful”. The implications, which even a former journalist such as the prime minister appears not to have seen, are worrying.
It is sweet to believe the best of people, but that “appears not to have seen” is either sweet enough to choke on, or sarcasm.
Could they give the censors in Silicon Valley power to remove anything that might land them with a massive fine? That would enshrine the pernicious doctrine of no-platforming into law.
Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, has expressed alarm at what he fears the wording could do to his publication. Any digital publisher who crossed the line might find an article on vaccine safety or on eugenics, or indeed any topic deemed controversial, removed without warning, without trace and without recourse to challenge or explanation. The decision would not be taken by human beings, but by bots using algorithms to pick up words or phrases that fell into a pre-programmed red list.
The editorial continues,
The bill specifically excludes from the category [of “legal but harmful”] existing media outlets. If Facebook or another platform took down an article from a British newspaper without explanation, Ofcom, the media regulator, could penalise the platform.
That’s us bloggers dealt with then. Notice how the article frames the threat to free expression almost entirely in terms of its effect on newspapers. Still, in the current climate I am grateful that the Times has come out against the Bill. If self-interest is what it takes to wake them, then good for self-interest.
However, social media giants operate on a global scale. In any market such as Britain, where they have a huge following and earn billions, they will not risk a fine of 10 per cent of their annual turnover. They will simply remove anything deemed “harmful”, or, to counter the bill, downgrade its visibility or add a warning label. Given that America’s litigious culture will influence those deciding what constitutes harm, this could include political assertions, opinions or anything the liberal left could insist constitutes “fake news”. If Donald Trump can be banned, so can others.
Members of the Behavioural Insights Team and other such ‘nudge’ units around the world need to pay a social cost for the last two years. It’s not like we don’t know who they are. They need to be motivated to hide what they do and who they work for, because people should spit on the street in front of them when they are recognised. They want a ‘new normal’? Ok then, lets give them the new normal they deserve.
– A Chatham House Rule remark by a certain journalist in the last week at a rather bad tempered event. The room was filled with a mixture of nodding heads and a few looks of establishment horror. People are starting to realise they really do have have to pick a side.
As I set out in my book A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic masks are a nudge, even described as a ‘signal’ by David Halpern, the director of the UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team. Similarly, Professor Neil Ferguson said that masks remind us ‘we’re not completely out of the woods yet’. They serve as a visible public reminder of the pandemic, turning us back into walking billboards pronouncing danger. My source concurred: ‘Masks are a behavioural psychology policy. We need to stop pretending that it’s about public health. Nudge is a big thing in government.’
– Laura Dodsworth
“So too is the Tory party a tragic paradox. It is led by a professional optimist, but weighed down with an almost superstitious pessimism, as commentators prophesy a shift in the “natural political cycle”. It believes in individual free will, but has surrendered to the apocalyptic terrors of climate change, and the inevitability of welfarism in an ageing society. It is repulsed by radicalism, but champions Net Zero and draconian lockdowns to stay in vogue with certain voters.”
– Sherelle Jacobs.. She is writing in the Daily Telegraph (£).
I wrote this post about the proposed ban on 7th December 2021, when the deadline for responses to the government’s consultation document was given as December 10th. The deadline was then extended to February 4th 2022, which is tomorrow. Did I mention it’s tomorrow?
There was a lively debate on the nature of human sexuality in the comments to that post – but, fascinating as the contributions were, for me that issue is beside the point. The point is that the government seeks to ban people from attempting to persuade other people to do something that is not a crime by talking to them.
The police are corrupt. The government is corrupt. The opposition is corrupt. Parliament is corrupt. The print and broadcast media are corrupt. The medical and scientific establishment is corrupt. I cannot think of a single public institution in which I have any faith at all. Until fairly recently, I believed that the courts were not corrupt, but their refusal even to hear Simon Dolan’s case against the most extreme and dictatorial policy this country has ever seen is clear proof of their grotesque corruption.
The truth is almost too shocking to contemplate. When faced with a public health emergency, those tasked with running the country did not think for a moment about how they might act in the public interest to protect the vulnerable. They already had a scientifically rigorous plan, carefully worked out over many years, which would have done that. Instead, they jettisoned this plan immediately and concentrated exclusively on two objectives: profiteering and totalitarianism.
[…]
On Christmas Eve 2020, I looked up the guidance on the NHS website for people who were suicidal. It was three years old and suggested spending time with family and friends. What was this? Gross incompetence? Complete indifference to the mental health of a suffering nation? A very sick joke? Who knows.
– Alastair Cavendish
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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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