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]
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Why does it work? Because, as it turns out, the profitable level of a fish stock is above the sustainable level. More fish around, less diesel and time used to catch enough to feed the market. Profits are thus maximised at stock levels substantially above sustainable levels. That means more fish to gawp at while maximising profits.
Or, alternatively, George Monbiot has got the neoliberal capitalist attitude to fisheries entirely and wholly the wrong way around. The reproductive rate of money, within that neoliberal capitalism, is more fish in the sea than there are currently. Therefore, having neoliberal capitalism running the fisheries (some to many fisheries perhaps not all) would increase the number of fish to gawp at. Exactly and precisely the opposite of what George is claiming.
The problem is about George. For someone who keeps insisting that he’s just critiquing the neolberal capitalist attitide to the environment he knows fuck all about the neoliberal capitalist attitude toward the environment.
But then that’s such a strange thing in public intellectuals, isn’t it? Ignorance?
– Tim Worstall
“We have not built a reservoir since 1992 or a nuclear power station since 1995, but we have raised the age of using sunbeds to 18.”
– Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph.
OK, that headline from 11:45am has been superseded by Hezbollah’s admission that Nasrallah is indeed dead, but props to the Telegraph‘s headline-writer.
“And when Sue Gray, the former civil service head of “Propriety and Ethics”, having improperly and unethically defected to be his chief of staff, demands a salary larger than his own, Sir Keir gets furious with the journalists who ask him about it. “I don’t believe my staff should be the subject of political debate like this,” he told the BBC.
Though Prime Minister, he seems not to know that it is the first duty of our elected Parliament to question how and why public money is spent.”
– Charles Moore in the Telegraph.
Sue Gray was the civil servant, at the time much lauded for her impartiality, who wrote the “Partygate” report that brought down Boris Johnson. If she had then retired, or stayed in the civil service, or got any other private sector job than the one she did, her place in history as a minor avenging angel would have been secure. But what she actually did was leave the civil service to become Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Her failure to declare that she had been in communication with Labour over this job offer while still a civil servant was a breach of civil service rules. Even if it had been within the letter of the rules, it was an obvious breach of their spirit, as more than one angry civil servant has said to me. Of course her salary is up for debate. She did not pass out of politics by going to work for the Labour Party, she passed into it. And her salary in her current position of Downing Street Chief of Staff is paid by the taxpayer.
May have overstated. May!?!
Chief medical officer Chris Whitty has admitted that the government may have overstated the danger of Covid at the start of the pandemic.
Well, it’s a start, I suppose. However, they massively overstated it, destroyed our liberties and economy on the basis of their own panic and inability to follow through with a sensible, rational plan that was already in place. No may about it. They did. Big time and every one of the fuckers should be doing jail time including Half-Whitty.
– Longrider, with whom I agree entirely. There needs to be professional, financial and social consequences or nothing changes. Instead, the fuckers get knighted.
“When in a hole, stop digging,” the saying goes. They dug a lot of holes at Kamloops Indian Residential school but, as described in 2022 by Professor Jacques Rouillard, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, they have not found a single one of the 215 bodies allegedly buried there. Nor have they found any since.
They did not stop digging, though. They simply announced that “their investigation was proceeding but would remain confidential to preserve its integrity.”
(That Wikipedia article is quite something. In its current form it is full of talk about “denialists”. Wikipedia was not always like this.)
Some people might be glad to discover that, despite extensive investigation, there is no evidence to support rumours of the secret mass burial of hundreds of children. Not Leah Gazan, an MP with the New Democratic Party, though. As reported by the National Post:
NDP MP tables bill seeking to criminalize residential school ‘denialism’
OTTAWA — An NDP MP tabled a bill Thursday seeking to change the Criminal Code to criminalize downplaying, denying or condoning the harms of residential schools in Canada.
Leah Gazan, who represents Winnipeg Centre, presented her private member’s bill on Monday, a few days before the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
The wedding scene from Flash Gordon:
Celebrant: “Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this Earthling, Dale Arden, to be your empress of the hour?”
Ming: “Of the hour, yes.”
Celebrant: “Do you promise to use her as you will?”
Ming: “Certainly.”
Celebrant: “Not to blast her into space…” [Ming gives him a warning look] “…until such time as you grow weary of her?”
–
Sadiq Khan’s deputy mayor for environment pledges to curb plane trips after clocking up 40,000 air miles, the Standard reports.
Mete Coban, a 32-year-old former Hackney councillor, was appointed to the £147,769-a-year City Hall role in July that involves him leading efforts to make London “net zero” in terms of carbon emissions by 2030.
While Hackney’s cabinet member for the environment, Mr Coban was revealed to have clocked up 40,000 air miles in two years.
I didn’t know that the London Borough of Hackney had a cabinet, let alone a cabinet member for the environment with worldwide responsibilities.
He said the “majority” of trips related to his job at an organisation, My Life My Say, that aims to get young people interested in politics and democracy.
But asked by Tory assembly member Thomas Turrell at a City Hall meeting about his travel habits, Mr Coban pledged to avoid “unnecessary” flights and to “lead by example”.
He told the London Assembly’s environment comittee: “I’m very clear that the majority of those flights relate to my previous role as chief executive of My Life My Say, where we are standing up for young people across the country, but also globally, to stand up for democracy.
“I don’t make any apology for making sure I am banging the drum for young people at some of the highest institutions, including the United Nations.
The need to make speeches at “the highest institutions” located in Miami, Dubai, Guatemala, Istanbul, Washington DC and Malta allowed “High Carbon Coban”, a member of the political class, to have 40,000 unapologetic air miles before he felt obliged to say that he would “avoid” flying while in his present role. Except when flights are absolutely necessary for his work as Deputy Mayor of London for Environment and Energy, obviously.
Leftists weaponise these so-called ‘local identities’ by trying to emphasise their supposed distance from other ‘local identities’ in England. In the process of doing this, they (if only tacitly) also try to decrease the distance of these ‘local identities’, and indeed Britain as a whole, from genuinely foreign cultures: ‘a Cockney, a Brummie, and a Pakistani; all totally unique, but all Very British in their own way.’ An alternative, though slightly different, formulation of this strategy can be found in the attempt by left-wing Welsh nationalists to completely distance ‘Welsh’ from ‘English’, while readily accepting people into ‘Welshness’, no questions asked, with zero connection — ancestral or otherwise — to the British Isles as a whole. It is telling that one of the favourite pastimes of these socialist deviants is to have ethnic minorities put on a performance for them, getting them to memorise a few words of their funny language, entertaining the Welshmen while also stroking their egos. This is quite obviously unethical behaviour, although no-one has called them out for it yet.
– Pimlico Journal
I did not expect to see anything like this on a fairly mainstream site like “Conservative Woman”: “Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes” (Via Sara Hoyt on Instapundit.) Andrew Bridgen, for those not familiar with him, is the former MP for North West Leicestershire. He has had a chequered career. He was expelled from the Conservative Party after criticising the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. He then joined the Reclaim Party but resigned from it a few months later. He then lost his seat in the 2024 election – which in itself was no surprise, but the spectacular scale of his loss, dropping from 63% of the vote to 3.2%, was unusual.
I said I did not expect to see this piece on the CW website. I would not be entirely surprised if I am soon unable to see it anywhere but Twitter/X. After the US election of 2020, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (before it was owned by Elon Musk) had a policy of deleting any discussion whatsoever of the possibility of electoral fraud. Even arguments that fraud had not been significant were censored. Most of the UK media followed suit, as it usually does.
If anyone reading this has power or influence over the censorship policies of British media organisations, I humbly beg you not to repeat that mistake. My argument does not depend on taking any view on how many votes Andrew Bridgen got in the UK election of 2024.
When “Stop the Steal” and similar Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were deleted overnight after the American election of 2020, what effect do you think it had on the beliefs of members of those groups? Do you think they concluded that since they could no longer discuss their suspicions, those suspicions must be groundless?
Of course it had the opposite effect. A majority of US voters think it is “likely” that cheating affected the outcome of the 2020 election. That includes 45% of Democrats. The censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and of the hypothesis that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory (the first of which is no longer contested and the second of which is accepted as a probable hypothesis by the US and UK governments) only reinforced this.
Censorship destroys trust, and the loss of trust is not limited to the subject being censored. Once people know they are being censored in one thing, they inevitably ask, “What else aren’t they telling us?”
And they can work out that if all accusations of a particular crime are censored, it makes it more likely that that crime will be committed in future.
Related posts here, here and here. In fact, that entire category of “Deleted by the Woke Media” is related.
Edit 25th September: The man who replaced Andrew Bridgen as Conservative candidate in North West Leicestershire, Craig Smith, has responded strongly to the Conservative Woman piece:
Mr Bridgen seems to overestimate the weight of any candidate’s personal vote. In elections most people vote for the party with a personal vote of – somewhere around – a couple of thousand votes for the candidate themselves. It’s arguably why I did marginally better than Conservative candidates in demographically similar constituencies elsewhere, because I had something of a personal vote as a truly local candidate. A personal vote is why Mr Bridgen received around 1,500 votes. To provide Mr Bridgen with a similar example to his own in 2015 Rochdale’s MP, Simon Danczuk, then standing for Labour received 20,961 votes. In 2017, expelled from Labour and and standing as an independent he received 883 votes. Using Mr Danczuk as a base Mr Bridgen could argue that he outstripped expectations!
Mr Smith goes on to say that of course he was not happy with the result – he lost to Labour – but he is convinced it was fair. He then makes some quite detailed observations about electoral procedures, both in general and specifically for that constituency. I thought he came across well. His use of Simon Danczuk in Rochdale as a comparator for assessing whether it is credible for an MP expelled from their party to have such a large drop in votes was reasonable.
That is how it should be done. That is how it should have been done in the US. Don’t forbid discussion, contribute to it. I repeat my plea for there to be no censorship of the claim that the election was rigged against Mr Bridgen.
This is why the Whiggish calls you used to hear that ‘Islam needs a reformation’ in response to Al Qaeda, Hamas, ISIS, Taliban etc were very misinformed.
Al Qaeda and co are the Islamic reformation.
– Commenter Martin
On August 11, the Sunday Times reported that the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, was under fire for a ‘fawning’ letter to Iran’s new president:
Irish president sent his ‘best wishes’ and congratulations to Masuoud Pezeshkian in a communique that has drawn criticism from Fine Gael.
If the story had ended there, I would have been on the Irish President’s side. Diplomacy inevitably involves sending polite greetings to despots. Though looking at a screenshot of the letter, I do think that President Higgins was a little more oleaginous than he needed to be. Perhaps he felt it would protect the staff of Ireland’s new embassy in Tehran from being taken hostage.
The story did not end there. Yesterday, 22 September, TheJournal.ie reported that, “Michael D Higgins has accused Israel of leaking his letter of congratulations to President of Iran”.
Higgins was asked by a member of the press today about the criticism he received for the letter to which he responded: “Yes, why don’t you ask where it came from?”
The President then accused the Israeli embassy in Ireland of circulating the letter.
When asked how he thought the embassy obtained the letter he said he had “no idea”.
Fortunately the rest of the world does have an idea. The whole controversy started when a woman called Karen Ievers saw the letter and and commented unfavourably about it in this tweet on 28th July. And if you are wondering by what dark arts she saw it, the Iranian embassy in Dublin put their nice letter from President Higgins on their website.
In my second country of Malta, which I visit regularly, it is hard to miss the fact that the island’s national flag bears the George Cross. The GC was awarded, collectively, to the island during the Second World War by the British government because of how Malta had withstood the bombardments of Italian and German air forces. The bombing of the island from 1941-43 was greater in total than the ordnance hurled at London during the Blitz. Malta was a major British naval base: it was able to intercept and destroy Axis shipping to North Africa and hence was key in tipping the scales against Rommel’s Afrika Korps in its attempted invasion of Egypt. Malta mattered.
It appears today, in these “decolonisation” times, that some of the citizens of Malta – a country sadly tainted by issues such as corruption and the murder of an investigative journalist in 2017 – want the GC symbol to be removed.
On a Facebook page that I follow, a person (who will remain nameless), put up this comment:
If we really and truly want to celebrate this important milestone [Maltese independence], all we need to do is remove that stain from our national flag and send that bloodstained cross to Buckingham Palace. I will volunteer to act as a courier pro bono.
I was glad to see that the vast majority of responses from the locals were hostile to this person, if not enlightening.
I tried to raise the tone a bit, because the person concerned might be stupid as a bag of rocks, but it is good to put these points into places where someone might pick up on them:
I sort of understand why people who live in Malta today think that a British person (although with scores of Maltese relatives, British navy ancestors, and the rest of it) should not be talking about these things. People can be prickly about someone from abroad talking about their country.
But history is what it is: Malta was a naval and military base coveted by great powers from the dawn of time. Hitler and Mussolini would have tried to take it over and subdue it; neutrality on the Swiss model wasn’t likely and even the Swiss would have been forced to go along with terrible things eventually as a price. (And the Swiss, to their shame, later became known for shielding money looted from Jewish people.) Malta’s position in the central Med was vital for control of the sea. A successful Allied liberation of Italy/southern Europe, launched from the sea, would have required a base such as that of Malta to be in friendly hands. We can see what happens when a place chooses neutrality as in the case of the Republic of Ireland. It massively hampered the ability of the British to counter German U-boat attacks in the eastern Atlantic shipping lanes, costing thousands of lives and loss of material.
What sort of things about the war are taught in Malta today, if at all? As a journalist of 36 years’ professional experience, working around the world, and a student of history, it strikes me as interesting to know how many people think that the symbol of the George’s Cross is somehow a stain on the Maltese flag, rather than a symbol of honour and supreme courage.
I can recommend Sir Max Hastings’ book about the Operation Pedestal convoy as a good study about what was at stake in the Mediterranean campaign.
Here is a decent history of Malta for those who are interested.
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