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]
Though this new far right will present as liberal progressive Islam, their ideology is closer to that of Reinhard Heydrich than Caroline Lucas. But white liberals are too blindsided by their hatred of the white working class to recognise the Nazism in their own ranks. They see the brown faces around them and applaud themselves for being inclusive and diverse, even if that means embracing Hamas supporters and cheering on rapists. Evil no longer shows up in black uniforms with skull insignia. It wears liberal institutions as a skinsuit and adopts their language
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Unlike white far right groups, the new Islamic fascist movement is highly organised, motivated, funded (by you) and unopposed politically. They’re competent and quite ruthless in ways white far right never could be. Our zombie political class doesn’t realise what’s happening, and wouldn’t act even if they did. The Labour party is only too happy to turn a blind eye to it when it suits them. As such, the Labour party are collaborators in what is a far right takeover of our cities.
Twelve months of mandatory national service would be reintroduced by the Conservatives if they win the general election.
Eighteen-year-olds would be able to apply for one of 30,000 full-time military placements or volunteering one weekend a month carrying out a community service.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he believed bringing back compulsory service across the UK would help foster the “national spirit” that emerged during the pandemic.
Back to the good old days:
As I walked out on London street
A press gang there I chanced to meet
They asked me if I would join the fleet
On board of a man-o-war, boys
They said that a sailor’s life was fine
Good comrades and good pay I’d find
They promised me a bloody good time,
On board of a man-o-war, boys
– Traditional sea shanty
The press-ganged sailors of the Napoleonic wars often did fight well. That might have been due to their national spirit. Or it might have been due to the disciplinary methods detailed in the next two verses of the song:
But when I went, to my surprise
All they’d told me was shocking lies
There was a row and bloody old row
On board of a man-o-war, boys
The first thing they did, they took me in hand
And they flogged me with a tarry strand.
They flogged me till I couldn’t stand,
On board of a man-o-war, boys
James Cleverly has insisted that “no one is going to jail” if they refuse to take part in National Service, but that the Tories would “compel” young people to participate.
Rishi Sunak last night vowed to create a mandatory scheme where school leavers will either have to enrol on a 12-month military placement or spend one weekend each month volunteering in their community.
But Mr Cleverly said that young people would not face any criminal sanctions if they did not take part.
Asked what would happen if someone said they didn’t want to engage, the Home Secretary told Trevor Phillips on Sky News: “There’s going to be no criminal sanction for this. No one’s going to jail over this…
“We want to make this compelling, we are going to compel people to do it, but also we want to make sure that it fits with different people’s aptitudes and aspirations.”
He added that “we force people to do things all the time” when pressed by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg about whether he was comfortable as a Conservative forcing teenagers to do something.
He told the BBC: “We force 16-year-olds who, as a society, for example, we recognise are not fully formed, and they still require education. So the decision was made that they remain in education or training.
“So we force teenagers to be educated. No one argues with that.
Scientists have warned that a court decision to block the growing of the genetically modified (GM) crop golden rice in the Philippines could have catastrophic consequences. Tens of thousands of children could die in the wake of the ruling, they argue.
The Philippines had become the first country – in 2021 – to approve the commercial cultivation of golden rice, which was developed to combat vitamin-A deficiency, a major cause of disability and death among children in many parts of the world.
But campaigns by Greenpeace and local farmers last month persuaded the country’s court of appeal to overturn that approval and to revoke this. The groups had argued that golden rice had not been shown to be safe and the claim was backed by the court, a decision that was hailed as “a monumental win” by Greenpeace.
But the Royal Society’s recent honours to some of the world’s most controversial scientific figures reveals the decline of institutional science into ideological blobbery.
– Ben Pile. The Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy, has honoured Anthony Fauci, and in doing so confirmed its role as the guardian, not of empirical discovery, but politicised institutional Science.
That the NHS has been able to avoid reckoning with its own catastrophic failure owes a great deal to how it has become sanctified in modern Britain. To the fact that it is treated and used by our cultural and political establishment as something close to a state religion. We’re not meant to challenge it. We’re meant to worship it. We’re not meant to question it. We’re meant to give ‘thanks’ to it, as we did during the early stages of the Covid pandemic.
The Tories are delivering us trussed up and oven ready for full on, overt socialism/globalism/neo-fascism rather than the underhand stuff we’ve put up with for the last 12 years.
– Spectator commenter MaryR accurately summing up the UK’s future for the next few years (£)
And (Winston Marshall) pointed to some glaring hypocrisies within the elite class. Like the fact they simultaneously berate the populists while taking tens if not hundreds of millions in funding from global corporations, big pharma, and big tech. Like the fact they talk endlessly about the deeply troubling events of January 6th while simultaneously ignoring the violence of radical left activists and Antifa in places like Portland, Oregon.
Like the fact they warn endlessly about the anti-democratic ethos of populism while simultaneously using overly restrictive ‘hate laws’, their links with big tech and expanded taboos to denounce free speech elites don’t like as ‘hate’, ‘misinformation’, and ‘disinformation’.
Like the fact they routinely criticise Donald Trump for refusing to accept the outcome of the election in 2020 —an outcome he should have respected—while simultaneously ignoring how elite Democrats did the same thing in 2016, describing the election as “hijacked”, how the establishment in Britain refused to accept the legitimacy of the Brexit vote, and how elites in Brussels routinely force voters back to the ballot box to vote again at referendums when they delivered the ‘wrong’ result the first time around.
Without fail, at the end of the class a few students tell me that the content of the course was diametrically opposed to what they had been taught so far. Prior, they had class discussions about the exploitative nature of the market system and its inherent unfairness; the evil and greed of corporations; and the fight of exploited workers against oppressive capitalists.
I point out to them that these paradigms imply a zero-sum world in which wealth can only be created by taking it from others, whereas they live in the positive-sum world of markets, in which wealth is created by exchange. Markets have deposited a magic wand in their hands, which allows them to freeze moments in time, observe what is currently happening in foreign lands, and conjure loved ones for a face-to-face conversation out of thin air. Kings would have given half their kingdom for such a wand, but now anyone can have it for the low, low price of $69.99 per month. Or about five hours of student work. This is how we got wealthy.
The only way the jobs can go is if the machines are now doing the work formerly done by humans. Which means that we gain the same output without the human labour input. That’s an increase in the productivity of human labour – the main driver of increases in human wealth.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, sorry Humza Yousaf, sorry John Swinney wanted a turn at the podium.
Declaring an emergency is a signal to government that the current situation is not working and there needs to be intervention.
The councils cited issues ranging from pressure on homelessness services, rising property prices and high levels of temporary accommodation.
By declaring an emergency, the Scottish government is formally recognising the housing problem and calling for cuts to its capital budget to be reversed.
However, there are no practical effects that automatically happen due to a declaration being made.
The one declaration they will not make is the one that would have an effect; the one reversing the stupid thing they did that brought about this “emergency” in the first place.
I have some news for the Scottish Government. “Bah! Humbug!” Rent controls simply do not work.
UK data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released on 17 April 2024 reveals the largest increase in average rents since 2015, was in Scotland. Rents which have had a cap since September 2022, have increased more than in any other country in the United Kingdom.
ONS figures show that during the year to March 2024, average monthly rents in Scotland went up by more than in England, which went up by 9.1%, while Scottish rents rose by 10.5% to £947pcm. This is proof enough for me that rent control in Scotland has had the opposite effect from what the Scottish Government said was intended.
More and more mainstream journalists (maybe we need to retire the term “mainstream” as it begs many questions) are sitting up and taking notice of the Argentinian president, Javier Milei. His openly declared support for radical classical liberalism and “Austrian economics”, for thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, FA Hayek and Milton Friedman are a breath of fresh air in these increasingly unpleasant, statist times. His package of reform moves, including slashes to the budgets of the Argentinian state, are inevitably attracting criticism and pushback.
This is to be expected. When Ludwig Erhard, the former West German economics minister, put the Deutschemark on a firm footing, ended price controls and cut forms of intervention, the UK occupying authorities, for example, thought he was nuts; when Poland pivoted sharply towards free enterprise in the early 90s, things got tough for a while as a lot of formerly concealed unemployment surfaced. The same happens in many other nations that adopt the “shock therapy” of moving off the morphine drip of cheap money. Imagine, if you will, the likely pain if Venezuela moves away from socialism; the UK had a tough time when Mrs Thatcher enacted reforms in the 1980s, and fashionable opinion thought she was mad and could not succeed.
It seems rather typical of this cycle, then, that Daily Telegraph economics writer Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argues that Argentina is engaged in an “extreme” form of Austrian economics, and argues that it is all going wrong. AEP is a Keyensian; he sometimes writes intelligently but a lot of his predictions are way off base. He’s predicted the crackup of the eurozone so many times that his credibility is shot on that issue. He’s all for Net Zero and the policies to make it happen. But there is more than a grudging respect for Milei here – AEP knows that Argentina’s statist, Peronist culture is awful and needs to change. And AEP does argue that maybe Milei ought to take a leaf out of Erhard’s book on the issue of the currency. Unfortunately, AEP is a full-on fiat currency guy, who presumably agrees with Keynes that gold is a relic, etc.
In any event, people are noticing Argentina now. Its currency and debt is more highly valued; thousands of civil servants have been fired, and Milei is pushing to end a lot of controls. He faces resistance, and may not succeed. But here he is, more than six months into power, and I hope he succeeds. A prosperous, liberal Argentina would be a refreshing contrast not just to the Argentina of many recent decades, but to the horrible regimes of other Latin American states. And who knows – it would be nice if the UK could improve relations with such a country, maybe work out something over the Falklands, and forge closer trade ties with a country that the UK helped to build a century ago.
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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