Why leave Albania – parts of which are beautiful – for an unprepossessing bedsit in a dispiriting London borough? The experts I sounded out, friends and a friend of a friend, interestingly don’t focus primarily on the economy to explain the exodus – because it really is an exodus of the younger generation. Rather, it’s to do with Albania being a failed state: the absence of the rule of law, the sense that the place is being run by a corrupt coterie for its own benefit, the hopelessness about the prospects for change, the narco-economy. One recent paper put the
…continue Samizdata quote of the day – Albanian edition
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November 7th, 2022 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Today’s Guardian warns: Twitter’s mass layoffs, days before US midterms, could be a misinformation disaster Internal chaos at the company – and the decimation of its staff – has created ideal conditions for falsehoods and hateful content. The mass layoffs at Twitter, that diminished several teams, including staff on the company’s safety and misinformation teams, could spell disaster during the US midterms elections next week, experts have warned. What would the woke do without experts – for example Paul Barrett, described as “an expert in disinformation and fake news at New York University”. I’m sure he’s very committed to it, November 5th, 2022 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mr Sunak…..explained how the minutes from Sage meetngs were edited so that dissenting voices were not included in the final draft. (Report from the Daily Telegraph.) In other words, the committee – Sage – that was created by the government to oversee COVID-19 policy deliberately suppressed views from one of the most important departments of state – The Treasury – because it did not go with the lockdown narrative. I am not a particular fan of former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, one of the two senior figures running for leadership of the Conservative Party. We have August 25th, 2022 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
There’s a great deal of vanity involved in all of this. Our political elites, encouraged by a priestly caste of experts, love to pose as miracle-workers. To them, and to us who elect them to office, I would every day recite Ormerod’s final dictum: “We may intend to achieve a particular outcome, but the complexity of the world, even in apparently simple situations, appears to be so great that it is not within our power to ordain the future.” Only when this lesson is internalised will we begin to emerge from the age of failure. – Martin Gurri …continue Samizdata quote of the day August 10th, 2022 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The WHO has proclaimed Monkeypox a global health emergency. A major study in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that Monkeypox is being driven overwhelmingly by sex between men. Yesterday the CDC reported the first two child monkeypox cases in the US: “California toddler and an infant in D.C. were likely infected by ‘household contacts’ and both had contact with gay or bisexual men, CDC chief says” Although the report is consistent with the study, I suspect Ian Miles Cheong thinks the phrase “between men“ may be understating the age range involved. “Are we allowed to ask any questions?”, July 24th, 2022 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian has acknowledged there might be an elephant a mule in the room. Trump’s ‘big lie’ hits cinemas: the film claiming to investigate voter fraud 2000 Mules has been resoundingly debunked by factcheckers, but the film has earned praise from Trump and other Republicans Not having seen 2000 Mules, I will offer no opinion on how convincing it is. But I do have some advice for the Guardian, and other media outlets too, and it is advice that would be exactly the same whether the claims made in Dinesh D’Souza’s film turn out to be right or wrong. If May 30th, 2022 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some Texan childcare social workers are so “distraught” that a new law regulates their handling of trans kids that they say they will resign! (We’ll see if woke bureaucrats’ promises to resign are worth more than woke celebrities’ promises to quit the US if Reagan/Bush/Trump became president.) If anything could be more where all is most in their self-revealingly woke article, it is the moment (about half-way through) where a social worker tells of their horror at the thought of having to investigate a report of a parent giving their child trans drugs. Previously any such report had instantly been May 1st, 2022 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
Most people prefer experts, of course, especially when it comes to health care. As a surgeon myself, I can hardly object to that tendency. But a problem arises when some of those experts exert outsized influence over the opinions of other experts and thereby establish an orthodoxy enforced by a priesthood. If anyone, expert or otherwise, questions the orthodoxy, they commit heresy. The result is groupthink, which undermines the scientific process. From Against Scientific Gatekeeping, an excellent, measured essay for Reason magazine by Jeffrey A. Singer. He draws on his own experience of changes in medical best practice during his April 5th, 2022 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
As the restrictive form of a poem sometimes forces a clearer expression of a thought than less demanding prose, so the need to present his belief in the scientific process as a request for religious exemption to the vaccine mandate forced physician Joseph Fraiman to create what Sarah Hoyt called “one of the more interesting pieces of writing i’ve seen in a while.” Given my faith in the scientific process, I do not claim that this observational data is a good representative of reality; however I also cannot claim with certainty that it is false. Without randomized controlled trial data April 4th, 2022 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
For the international community there is a danger that Bucha is seen as an isolated atrocity deserving of a unique response. It certainly deserves investigation and, if possible, criminal accountability. But treating Bucha as unique risks much effort being put into fundamentally performative responses. Bucha is not special. It is indicative of how Russia intended to occupy and repress Ukraine. If there are to be as few other towns as possible to suffer the same fate, then the priority is to maintain the consistent armament of the Ukrainian military to drive the invading Russian army from their communities and to April 4th, 2022 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The message was simple: Question the COVID narrative, and there will be consequences. But there were still many brave enough to buck the mob mentality. And as time has gone on and scientific data on COVID and pandemic restrictions have become more accurate, it has become clear that the dissenters were right. Lockdowns didn’t save lives; in fact, they likely cost more lives than they saved. Masks, specifically the cloth masks experts pushed on the public, are ineffective at stopping the spread of the virus and are harmful to children’s development. Hydroxychloroquine might actually help COVID patients in some cases. February 17th, 2022 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has a dire warning for us. There was a time when it was “bourgeois freedom” or “freedom to starve” or something. There was a time when they felt the need of some fig-leaf to cover their real meaning – to the masses, and (sometimes, I think) even to themselves. But now, their ‘experts’ proclaim their core belief: “Freedom? Far-right, man!” I think we should spread this warning far and wide. 🙂 February 15th, 2022 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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