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The UKâs energy crisis results from years of neglect, unrealistic ambitions, and misplaced priorities. MPs are more interested in their public profiles. Industry lobbyists push profitable yet impractical solutions. And the media constantly prioritises speed over substance. As we edge closer to inevitable blackoutsâif we indeed continue to follow the aggressive push toward âcarbon neutralityââ the question isnât if the wheels will come off but when. December 17th, 2024 | 36 comments
 “Jeremy Corbyn egging: Brexiteer jailed for 28 days”, the BBC reported on 25th March 2019. “Woman sentenced for hurling milkshake at Farage”, the BBC reports today. Notice that the BBC report about Jeremy Corbyn’s attacker specified in the headline exactly how long John Murphy was sent to jail for. In contrast, today’s BBC report about Nigel Farage’s attacker, Victoria Thomas Bowen, just says she was “sentenced”. Most people read only the headlines of news stories, and therefore are probably left with the impression that she was sentenced to jail time, as John Murphy was for a similar crime. She wasn’t. Victoria Thomas Bowen was given a suspended sentence. Oh, and one mustn’t forget that she must complete 15 “rehabilitation activity requirement days”, which usually means something like an anger management course, and pay Farage a massive victim surcharge of ÂŁ154. Two British MPs, Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, have been assassinated in recent years. After both murders we heard fervent declarations that attacks on politicians were utterly unacceptable in Our Democracy. Of course we now know that neither Murphy or Thomas-Bowen intended to kill or seriously injure their victims. But when a person is struck by something thrown at them, they do not know at the moment of impact that the missile is harmless. UPDATE: When I first saw people on Twitter pointing out the judge’s South Asian name, I dismissed the comments as the sort of snide racism that bedevils right wing Twitter. However Toby Young has assembled a list of six judgements by Senior District Judge Tan Ikram that are more than enough to give a rational person cause to doubt his impartiality. He was last in the news six months ago:
(While I was making this update, commenter John independently brought up the topic of Judge Ikram’s record.) December 16th, 2024 | 15 comments
Danny Cohen was once the Director of BBC Television. When he writes in the Telegraph about the way that the BBC currently reports on Jewish and Israeli issues, one can sense the anger of someone who has been let down by former colleagues. In his latest article he writes,
Related post: Examples of spectacular historical ignorance. I will take the liberty of quoting one of my own comments to that post:
December 14th, 2024 | 31 comments
“Argentinaâs Javier Milei has made a horrible mistake”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph. The article can also be read here.
A commenter called Krassi Stoyanova says, “Well, Ambrose, having listened to Milei and his plans for the Argentine economy, I have far more confidence in him than I do you.” I want to agree. But, truth to tell, I do not have a good understanding of this branch of economics. Some of you guys do. What do you think? December 13th, 2024 | 28 comments
“But there is a limit to how much we can gain from a combination of long-term reforms and controlled disruption. The deeper problem with the public sector is not the people who run it but the people who use it. The combination of an ageing population and a stagnant economy means that a growing number of countries can no longer afford the largesse of the post-war era. And the only viable long-term solution to this problem (barring a productivity miracle) is to cut big entitlements rather than to pretend that we can force the public sector to produce miracles. What really needs to be disrupted is not so much the workings of government as the publicâs expectations.” December 12th, 2024 | 30 comments
The BLM lobby is still dominated by Afro-Caribbeans. More Africans have sympathies with the Conservative Party than Afro-Caribbeans (even if they donât necessarily vote for them) â just look at Kemi Badenoch. Now, like most Pimlico Journal readers, I have no time at all for her. However, she does have the potential to help obliterate any future prospect of reparations. All she would need to do is ask that Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia foot half the bill for reparations, and black solidarity would immediately dissipate. Very suddenly, the Fulani will see themselves as tanned Tuaregs; the Somali as Cushitic; and Leroy from Montego Bay will forgo his chicken shop Shahada because Moroccan poon tang just isnât worth that sort of money. Once you distract them from the easy punching bag that is the white man, they can start fighting each other; meritocracy sorts the rest out. December 11th, 2024 | 10 comments
Just not in the way the Guardian thinks.
What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet. When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try. December 10th, 2024 | 28 comments
The brutal Assad regime has collapsed. That is one on the eye for Russia, always a good thing, seeing the end of the Russian navy’s only base in the Mediterranean. And one in the eye for Iran, also a good thing, meaning they have little to no ability to continue supporting what is left of Hezbollah… but the motley crew who have toppled the Ba’athist Syrian regime have more than a few black ISIS/Al-Qaeda flags in their midst, so regardless of very conciliatory statements by HTS towards Syria’s non-Islamic population and even Israel, it remains to be seen how this will shake out. As a side note: when Patricia Marins predicted the rebel offensive would go nowhere, I became confident the rebels were headed for victory a week ago đ December 8th, 2024 | 64 comments
I saw this comment by Paul Marks to the previous post and thought, “This is huge. Why isn’t this story the main headline on every news outlet?” It is being reported, somewhat less prominently than the Princess of Wales going to a carol concert. Heartwarming though that is, I would have thought that the fact that a Romanian court has annulled the first round of their presidential election because the Russians allegedly “ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round” was bigger news. So what if they did? Where did this idea come from that the people of a country are not allowed to watch, read or listen to foreigners attempting to persuade them how to vote? Well, certain foreigners at least – those who promote this information Juche never seem to have a problem with the European Union’s taxpayer-funded propagation of its opinion. December 6th, 2024 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
And not just “on the agenda” in general, on today’s agenda at the European Council, “where national ministers from each EU country meet to negotiate and adopt EU laws”. They never give up, and with “they” being the European Union, they only have to win once. Tech Radar reports,
That’s today, kids.
December 6th, 2024 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Whether Jaguarâs new electric car flops as a result of all this remains to be seen. It would hardly be surprising if Jaguarâs traditional audience â the people who actually buy its cars â give up on the company in response to all this insufferable virtue-signalling. After bending the knee so readily to the trans cause, that would be the least Jaguar deserves. December 5th, 2024 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
What might ChatGPT or other such tools derive from an analysis of the Samizdata blog post archives? To focus this on something timely: ask it to do the analysis and propose policy ideas for the new Trump Administration, ideas consistent with the perspectives and ideas of the Samizdatista community. Or at least the broad consensus of that community about liberty and limited, less regulatory government. There are other ways this might be posed to an AI, e.g., “which proposed policies of the Trump administration are consistent with the broad governance perspectives at Samizdata.net and why? Which are not and why?” How would you set up such an analysis to have the model have the best chance at producing something useful? I am not interested in an experiment that assesses if ChatGPT is a good model for this or a good model in general–I want a good analysis! If the product of such an inquiry was not compelling to enough samizdatistas, if it did not pass a laugh test, we stop there. Maybe there is a better choice of large language model than ChatGPT; maybe ChatGPT is not optimized for this sort of analysis but other models are? If you have some knowledge here, please chime in! December 4th, 2024 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
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