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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I have seen the light. The man who convinced me of the truth of MMT was someone called Daron Medway, who replied to a tweet by Richard Murphy that said,
The government can never run out of money https://youtu.be/2m3BXdkDJYI?si=cjSA5MJ5AcDWkKgJ
Politicians, commentators and journalists all like to claim that the UK government could run out of money, but that is total nonsense. The UK government can always create the money it needs to pay its debts. It is the one and only organisation in the UK that can never, as a result, run out of money.
with this extremely persuasive point:
This is great! I guess I can keep all of mine then?
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.
“Speech is not violence. Words cannot injure or compel a person to hate or riot. Consequently, the state has very little business policing it, and the outcomes are usually dire when it tries.”
– Institute of Economic Affairs, in an emailed newsletter it sends out. It refers to recent commentaries such as here and here.
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?
One should aim to seek out good expositions of arguments with which one usually disagrees. I found an example via the UK Politics subreddit, this piece by James O’Malley: “No, the government isn’t planning to introduce ID cards”.
The article made me think slightly more kindly of the previous Conservative government and slightly less apprehensively about the plans of the new Labour government. Or have I been misled, and Labour’s resurrection of a failed Conservative policy is exactly as sinister as I always thought it was?
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?
I commend this article in Pimlico Journal for its unflinching analysis of where we find ourselves in the UK. Follow the link and read the whole thing, which is a grim tale I wish I could convince myself is excessively bleak.
The Narcissistic State represents a reversal of the key principal of the British social contract as outlined by Bishop Gilbert Burnett in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688: that ‘government is for those who are to be government’. As the state starts once again to exist for its own sake, its priorities diverge from those of its citizens, and it increasingly starts to fail them.
Yet, like individual narcissists, the Narcissistic State demands praise even in failure, as encapsulated in the language adopted by the NHS ‘heroes’ or the ‘painstaking’ work the Metropolitan Police put into failed investigations. Here we recall the citizens of the Eastern Bloc who were not only expected to endure cold, fear, and hunger, but also to applaud those who kept them in such a condition. It never accepts blame or criticism, and reacts sclerotically when confronted with either. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner himself physically lashed out at a reporter for asking him the question which is pressing most heavily on the mind of the public. Instead of looking to itself for answers, British law enforcement is going to the four corners of the earth to seek extrinsic causes for very civil unrest it has seeded. The Director of Public Prosecutions has suggested that foreign states might wish to extradite their citizens to Britain for departing from our state-sanctioned political narratives. Yet the same cohort will segue in the next breath to discussing the danger of Britain being affected by the authoritarianism of other governments; self-knowledge never being the forte of narcissists.
– Pimlico Journal
Earlier this month, the Met Office claimed that climate change was causing a “dramatic increase in the frequency of temperature extremes and number of temperature records in the U.K.”. Given what we now know from recent freedom of information (FOI) revelations about the state of its ‘junk’ nationwide temperature measuring network, it is difficult to see how the Met Office can publish such a statement and keep a straight face.
[…]
It’s almost as if the Met Office is actively seeking higher readings to feed into its constant catastrophisation of weather in the interests of Net Zero promotion. Whatever the reason – incompetence or political messaging – serious science would appear to be the loser. As currently set up, the Met Office network is incapable of providing a realistic guide to natural air temperatures across the U.K. Using the data to help calculate global temperatures is equally problematic.
– Chris Morrison
I came across this Substack essay by someone called Mick Ryan about the Ukrainian invasion of the Kursk region of Russia, a move that seems to have taken Moscow completely by surprise:
This Ukrainian operation represents a very significant effort on the part of the Ukrainians to reset the status quo in the war, and change narratives about Ukraine prospects in this war.
It is the kind of strategic risk-taking that I don’t think is well understood in many Western capitals anymore. For nearly two generations now, Western nations have been able to cut military spending. None of them have faced existential threats, even though the War on Terror did require a significant response for more than a decade after 9/11.
The slow decision-making cycles in Western military and political circles, and in military procurement, is indicative of institutions that no longer understand the imperative to act quickly and decisively while taking major risks.
This is not the case for the Ukrainians. They have faced an existential threat since February 2022 (and more broadly, for the entirety of their existence as a people) and have a very different political and military decision-making calculus than those of their supporters. A nation and a people who face an existential risk from their neighbour tend to think differently from those who do not.
The Observer’s Property section had a sad but interesting story last Sunday:
‘They encouraged us to insulate our home. Now it’s unmortgageable’
Householders are angered by the discovery they cannot remortgage or sell their homes after installing spray-foam insulation to cut energy use.
Jim Bunce thought he was doing the right thing for his purse and the planet: in 2022, as fuel costs soared, he and his wife decided to improve the energy efficiency of their house.
They discovered that the government had endorsed spray-foam insulation, a quick and unobtrusive technique by which liquid foam is spray-gunned into roof spaces and walls. Their loft was successfully treated at a cost of £2,800 and their gas bills duly fell.
Now, two years on, they have found that, by making their home more energy efficient, they have also made it unsaleable. “We are unable to borrow against it, or potentially to sell it, unless the foam is completely removed,” says Bunce.
I feel sorry for Mr and Mrs Bunce. My title was not intended to single them out as being unusually insulated from reality; until recently the great majority of the population would have assumed that taking up a scheme promoted by the government was a safe choice.
It isn’t. On the contrary, if a new type of technological product is being pushed by government in order to meet national policy targets, that means that it has not been through the filter of large numbers of people freely deciding to buy it and telling their family and friends that it benefited them as individuals.
A plethora of on-message communicators, embedded in governments and global organisations, are engaged in disseminating messages to the masses urging us all to change our behaviours so as to save the world from purported existential threats. Near the top of the pyramid of these influencers are behavioural scientists, with the U.K. hosting many such ‘nudgers’ skilled in the art of persuading the populace to comply with diktats to ‘save’ the planet from a looming viral or climate apocalypse. But do these various mouthpieces promoting globalist agendas ever pause to question the legitimacy their goals? Recent evidence would suggest not.
– Gary Sidley
My lack of current knowledge on the area means I felt no need to weigh in, but it seems astonishing how little reportage there is regarding what’s been happening in Bangladesh for the last few weeks, very much a side issue it seems.
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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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