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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“There is no ‘right’ to undo another nation’s existence. There is no international principle that compels one people to surrender sovereignty so that their state can be destroyed — a state created as a haven for a people nearly annihilated, and after a defensive war they won. Until the Palestinian leadership abandons this claimed right of return, there will be no peace and certainly no two-state solution. Because the refusal to abandon this made-up ‘right’ means they don’t want two states. It means they want one. And they want the Jewish state to vanish.”
– Micha Danzig
For those interested, I can recommend this overview about some of the issues from a pro-Israel, but not uncritically so, writer – Noa Tishby.
Another book by two authors, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, dissects, in painstaking detail, how the “right of return” claim lies at the heart of why two-state solutions to the Israel/Palestinian conflict have foundered in the past. Here’s a review of that book.
Yesterday the Green Party announced that Zack Polanski (who used to say he could enlarge women’s breasts by the power of his mind) had been elected as its new leader. The party also announced that “two high-profile local councillors had been elected as co-deputy leaders. One of these deputies is Mr Mothin Ali, formerly a local councillor in Leeds. If he is a dab hand at the mental embiggening of ladies’ boobs, he has not mentioned it, but he has said other things that might prove equally controversial.
The video to which I link was posted by “Howli! Now” in May 2024, with the title “Leeds city council member Mothin Ali shares thoughts on events of October 7th” and the caption, “Mothin Ali is the Green Party councilor who shouted ‘Allahu Akbar!’ as he was elected to the Leeds city council. This is what he had to say on October 7th:”
The video includes an automatically generated transcript. I “cleaned up” some obvious errors in that transcript to produce what follows:
So, right at this very minute Israel has launched one of the biggest attacks against the civilian population that we’ve seen for many years. Now they’re going to use the pretext of the fightback by Hamas fighters – or supposedly Hamas fighters – this morning.
Now, remember the situation in Palestine and especially the situation in Gaza: it’s an open-air prison, it’s the biggest concentration camp the world has ever seen, millions of people have been rounded up into a tiny area. They’re living on top of each other, they’ve been – they’ve been forced to live off scraps that the international community sometimes donates to them.
Now, the dignity of a indigenous population we haven’t seen being stripped away in this way, just like the Europeans did to the Native Americans, or, um, how the Europeans did throughout the colonies. Remember Israel is a colonial, settler-colonial, occupier. It’s been trying to erase the history and trying to erase the legitimacy of a native population – every single person, every single people have a right to fight back, every single people have a right to live free of occupiers.
That includes people who are brown, that includes people who are Muslim, that includes people who are Arab. Just because they’re brown and Arab doesn’t mean that they don’t have a right to fight back. You saw the Western support for Ukraine when they fought back against Russia. Palestinians have equal right if not more. They’ve been under occupation for over 70 years, they’ve literally been wiped off the map. They talk about wiping Israel off the map, they’ve wiped Palestine off the map, they’ve put millions of people into refugee camps. They use the pretext of rockets and they use the pretext of people resisting an occupier to further destroy a civilian population and any prospect of a Palestinian home state. They talk about a land free for the Israelis – what about the land for the Palestinians? You’ve taken it all. You’ll see the Western media support Israel, you’ll see Western propagandists on the media presenting some kind of victim narrative. They’re not victims they’re occupiers, the colonialists, they’re European colonialists, it’s one of the last European colonies in the world and that’s why they, the European people, don’t want to let it go.
They use the weapon of anti-Semitism so effectively that anyone who criticizes Israel is labelled an anti-semitic. We see through those lies, we see through that propaganda. People of the world stay strong: support Palestine, support the right of indigenous people to have freedom and to fight back against occupiers.
Edit: I got so involved in doing the transcript that I forgot the whole point of the post. It is this: I support Mr Ali’s right to justify terrorism, not least because I want to know what people like him are saying. But given that Hamas was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in 2021, meaning that, in the words of the gov.uk website, “members of Hamas or those who invite support for the group could be jailed for up to 14 years”, when can we expect Mothin Ali to be treated as Graham Linehan was?
Second edit: On a different tack, these lines from Mothin Ali’s speech jumped out at me this morning:
It’s been trying to erase the history and trying to erase the legitimacy of a native population – every single person, every single people have a right to fight back, every single people have a right to live free of occupiers.
Leaving aside the question of whether Jews or Arabs have the better claim to be regarded as “the native population” of Israel, has it never occurred to Mothin Ali that the arguments he uses above to justify Palestinians violently attacking Israelis could also be used to justify White British people violently attacking British Muslims?
Five, apparently. That’s five armed police officers, of course. Heaven knows how many unarmed officers it would take to bring down a mighty warrior like Graham Linehan.
– says former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton in a Guardian article called “The EU surrendered to Trump over trade tariffs – now it’s in danger of capitulating again”.
It is stirring stuff:
How long are we, citizens of the EU, going to tolerate these threats? Submit to those who want to impose their rules, their laws, their deadlines on us? Surrender to those who now presume to dictate our fundamental democratic and moral principles, our rules for how we live together and even how we protect our own children online? Why and in whose name would we agree to cast aside our twin digital regulations, the DSA and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which were voted into law with clarity, courage and conviction by a landslide in the European parliament?
and
Because regulating the information space is not optional: it is a sine qua non for turning the narrow mercantile logic of a few into a genuine contribution towards human progress and the common good.
Throughout history, humanity has managed to regulate its territorial, maritime and airspace. This is the prerogative of sovereign states. It is the essence of sovereignty itself. To renounce, today, the task of regulating the fourth domain – the digital space – by leaving it to a handful of private actors would be a historic abdication of the public sphere, of political will, of the democratic promise.
Sorry, what promise was this? I’ve heard of “the social contract”. Discussion of that has been around for centuries. I’ve heard of “the military compact”, which in a British context is a phrase used to describe the obligations of the government towards soldiers in exchange for them risking their lives on its behalf. However my self-education in political theory did not include this apparently well-known promise made to its citizens by every democratic state worthy of the name that it would interpose itself between them and the horror of seeing Elon Musk interview Donald Trump on Twitter.
Regular readers will recall that Commissioner Breton was a leading promoter of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which has good reason to be described as “the single greatest threat to free speech in Europe”.
There are a lot of people out there who have it in for Nigel Farage. Most are on the left but a growing number are on the right. The thing is, as far as I am aware there is no great ideological difference between Farage and his right-wing critics. So, what’s going on?
If we are looking for clues we could do a lot worse than look at some of his bust-ups. Rupert Lowe is a recent example. But you have also got Ben Habib, Douglas Carswell and – if you go back far enough – Alan Sked, the founder of the United Kingdom Independence Party.
My theory is that Farage is incredibly jealous of his position. If he detects a threat to it – real or imagined – his instinct is to react with fury, to remove the threat as completely and as loudly as possible and damn the consequences.
That is not to say that Farage is a one-man band. Clearly he has had a very effective working relationship with Richard Tice over the years. I suspect that Tice knows that he could not do what Farage does. And I suspect that Farage knows that he knows.
I have some sympathy with Farage. The prospects for UKIP did not look great in the early 1990s. Or for a long time to come. But Farage stuck at it. It was a lonely existence. He suffered all that – well, a lot of what – the establishment could throw at him and in the Brexit referendum – with a bit of help – humiliated them. And now, he is on the cusp of becoming Prime Minister. And some people think that they can take it away from him when it is he, Farage, that’s done all the bloody work!
There are consequences of Farage’s jealousy. The upside is that Reform does not have to worry about factional in-fighting. There is only one faction, only one opinion that matters: Farage’s. The downside is that it is Stalinist in nature. No one is allowed to disagree. Anyone who attracts the attention of the media or Hope Not Hate – the supposedly anti-racist pressure group – is out. In my local branch the chairman was recently removed for “something” – we were never quite sure what. And then he was brought back. And then fired again. And then brought back.
What it means is that talent is being driven away. This could be really quite serious. Dominic Cummings – former advisor to Boris Johnson – and someone I think is well worth listening to has expressed his scepticism of the effectiveness of “one man and an iPhone” when dealing with an institution as vast and hostile as the British government.
It may be the case that Farage has been listening to us and the plan is to close down vast parts of the British state: education, NHS, Ofcom, FCA. That would make the government more manageable. But I think that unlikely, in which case Farage will be able to do very little given that – due to the size of the task – he will have to delegate to people who have been promoted on account of loyalty rather than ability.
It may be the case that we have to look to Farage’s successors on the right. The good news is that there will be plenty of them.
I came across this interview with US academic Cass Sunstein, whose views on behaviouralism – including the area known as “behavioural economics”, have been immensely influential on governments in the past 25 years or so.
The idea of “nudging” people via policies to doing certain things (auto-enrolment in savings for retirement, messaging about the dangers of certain lifestyles, etc) has become a default piece of wisdom. It accords with the tendency of a managerialist political class that sees the wider population as only partially rationally self-interested. Sunstein, as shown in this video (conducted by the Hoover Institution in the US) notes how he disagreed with the Chicago-based economics folk such as Nobel Prize winner George Stigler and others about the idea of rational expectations. The behavioural school thinks that human motivation is not like that; in the financial services space, for instance, there is a school of thought known as behavioural finance that looks at crowd behaviour in times of stock market booms, busts, etc. And there are temptations to try and “fix” these behaviours.
I see a few dangers, and maybe Sunstein does too now (it is worth seeing the whole video). For example, it is easy to see how a government, even if democratic and accountable, can grow into a monster if driven by even well-meaning people that think that people aren’t necessarily fully rational, and need to be nudged, or guided, into doing the “right thing”.
This helps explain, in some ways, why the “administrative state” is what it is. It would not have got so big had it been a clearly evil project. Most people who drive all these changes and programmes think they are doing the right thing. Some might be bad but most aren’t. And yet here we are, with a bloated set of governments in the West, with skyrocketing debt and all the rest of it.
I think a major flaw in behavioural economics is the hubris of the “nudge” advocates about how they think they can handle all this. And as we have seen, politicians who lean towards tax-and-spend policies love some of these ideas because they can sit alongside what they want to do anyway. I am not even sure it makes sense to describe these as “liberal” because some of this “nudge” stuff does not seem to accord with ideas about treating people as individuals who need to be held accountable for their actions.
It is arguable that the “nudge” crowd hew to a form of soft determinism, or maybe “soft paternalism” – the notion that we are not really volitional creatures with agency, but buffeted by internal and external forces, and often emotional first, rational second. But even if that latter point is true, a rational person with choice-making capacity can realise that he or she is prone to making unwise/foolish choices, and like Odysseus who lashed himself to a mast to avoid being tempted by the Sirens, adopt rules and protocols to not screw up. (I know an alcoholic who avoids parties and certain events to avoid getting into trouble, to give one example. Another might be a stockbroker who turns off the noise of the daily news and makes better investment decisions over the long run.)
Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, and all that.
Ray Sanders has produced solid evidence that suggests the Met Office is inventing temperature data that it is using for political Net Zero purposes. Claiming his thorough, well documented investigations are “vexatious” will no longer wash. It must reply with realistic explanations and evidence of its own to retain public trust in its work.
– Chris Morrison
I used to say “Other than weather reports, don’t believe anything the media says without looking at multiple sources”… well even the weather reports are deeply suspect now.
For Farage and Reform, Musk’s attack is sunlight, the best disinfectant. It clarifies the divide: Reform as a broad church for disillusioned patriots, not a niche for extremists.
– Gawain Towler (£)
These are not smart taxes in a service economy that desperately needs to increase productivity. We need a tax policy that encourages people to work longer hours, in the highest-paying, private sector jobs they can find. We need a tax policy that encourages money to move from unproductive assets to more productive investments, which hopefully make a profit and pay dividends. We need a tax policy that enables small and medium-sized businesses to continue to operate, employ people and pay taxes. We need a tax policy that encourages the global wealthy to live in the UK and spend their money here.
Worst still, besides risking the bulk of UK taxes by discouraging businesses and driving the rich out of the country, these tax increases still aren’t enough to pay for the Government’s additional spending. Which brings us back to the opening paragraph of this essay: A doom loop occurs when government policy reduces economic activity by over-taxing it, over-regulating it, or allowing unconnected third parties to stifle it with litigation. Lower economic activity lowers tax revenue, which in turn causes a debt spiral if the government can’t or won’t cut spending, which leads to increased debt and higher debt costs. In the 2024/25 financial year, the UK public sector net debt was £2.8 trillion, equivalent to 95.1% of GDP. Public sector net borrowing was £151.9 billion in 2024/25, £20.7 billion higher than the previous year and equal to 5.3% of GDP, up from 4.8% in the financial year 2023/24.
– Catherine McBride
“Mr. Merz is doing what no one else in the top ranks of Western politics seems willing to do, which is broach the fundamental dilemma of the modern West. Nations have built welfare and entitlement states that are so large they have outstripped the ability of slow-growing economies to pay for them. Yet because the entitlement cushion is so broad and reaches deep into the middle class, it has become nearly impossible to reform.
This is true among conventional politicians of the left and right. But it’s also true of the supposed radicals of the populist right. From Marine Le Pen in France to the U.K.’s Nigel Farage, the AfD in Germany and Donald Trump, the populists dodge difficult reforms of the broken welfare state.”
– Wall Street Journal ($) editorial, reflecting on the recent statements on the German welfare state by the country’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz.
What began as scattered acts of defiance has blossomed into a nationwide movement: St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks hoisted on lampposts, motorway bridges, and public spaces from Birmingham’s Shard End to Tower Hamlets in east London, Southampton to Brighton, and even Cannock. Roundabouts painted red and white, zebra crossings marked with the cross, symbols of England asserting themselves in the urban landscape. Last night I cycled through London’s Labour stronghold of Lambeth, and road markings have been transformed with the St George’s Cross, a quiet but bold reclamation in one of London’s most diverse boroughs. Dubbed “Operation Raise the Colours” by organisers (though it is hard to describe the phenomenon as organised), it has seen thousands of flags raised, with fundraising efforts like Birmingham’s £16,000 drive sustaining the effort. I support this gentle uprising, for it breathes life into symbols long marginalised.
– Gawain Towler
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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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