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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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As most of you will know, I covered the sentencing of the Southport Killer live on Twitter/X as event unfolded in the courtroom on 23 January 2025.
During the hearing, I created a timeline recounting what happened on the day of the attack, minute-by-minute, so that the public could see the full horror of this attack, and what had been kept out of the media.
This was followed by indirect criticism from Merseyside Police who claimed the families had asked for the details of the case not to be published. This had been a lie, told for the convenience of the Police who did not want a riot to breakout as a result of their lies and inaction.
– Charlie Bentley-Astor
Read the whole thing.
Keep comments relevant.
The first lockdown in the UK did not technically have legal force until three days after Johnson’s address. But that didn’t stop police going after people almost immediately. This may sound like a trivial oversight, but it does underscore the authoritarian nature of how lockdown rules were made and imposed. For a brief period at least, police were arresting people on the basis not of laws passed democratically in parliament, but on the mere words of the prime minister, merely because they had been uttered in a television broadcast. This really did bring Britain into ‘police state’ territory.
– Fraser Myers
Why? How many real-life, off-screen cases of femicide has Tate actually been provably linked with? Not as many as a casual newspaper reader may be led to presume. Andrew didn’t bomb all those little girls to death at the Manchester Arena a few years back, did he? Mere days after Adolescence went up on Netflix, the UK’s counter-terrorism tsar, Robin Simcox, released a report into 100 convicted UK-based terrorists arrested between 2004 and 2021, analysing their “mindset material”, like social media activity. This found that, of the 100 studied, 85 could be classed as Islamists, 14 as ‘far-Right’ (whatever that even is now) and… one as being an incel. Appropriately enough, really, for such a committed breed of professional loners.
– Steven Tucker (£)
Defining the benefit of spending as who gets the money rather than what gets bought is economic insanity. We might have a little insight there as to why government control of the economy ends up impoverishing.
– Tim Worstall
Robbie Collin in the Telegraph actually gave it three stars:
Disney’s Snow White: Not too woke – and better than Wicked
“And they all lived adequately ever after” is not the fairy-tale ending Disney was presumably originally gunning for. But at this point, the studio will surely take what it can get.
[…]
…I’ll say this for the result: it’s better than Wicked. The opening act sets out just how existentially tearing our heroine’s existence is under Queen Gal. (With apologies to Milan Kundera, call it The Unbearable Snow-Whiteness of Being.) And for the most part, this section is fairly beige and dull. But once Zegler scuttles off to the forest, where she teams up with two chirpy septets – the digitised dwarfs and a zany gaggle of bandits, who may have been dwarf replacements in an early draft – it really picks up.
The new versions of two classic numbers, Heigh-Ho and Whistle While You Work, are stylishly choreographed and rousingly performed, while a handful of the new songs, from The Greatest Showman’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, just about keep pace. (I loved Princess Problems, a teasing ode to Gen-Z prissiness which delivers about all the culture-war the film is prepared to wage.)
In contrast, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian gives it one star, and I get the feeling that if he had free rein he’d have given it one asteroid:
Snow White review – Disney’s exhaustingly awful reboot axes the prince and makes the dwarves mo-cap
That title [Snow White] is a description of the page on which new Hollywood ideas get written. Here is a pointless new live-action musical version of the Snow White myth, a kind of un-Wicked approach to the story and a merch-enabling money machine. Where other movies are playfully reimagining the backstories of famous villains, this one plays it straight, but with carefully curated revisionist tweaks. These are all too obviously agonising and backlash-second-guessing, but knowing that at some basic level the brand identity has to be kept pristine. This is particularly evident in the costume design, with which the wicked witch gets a pointy dark crown and skull-hugging black balaclava and Snow White is lumbered with a supermarket-retail tweenie outfit with puffy-sleeved shoulders.
[…]
There are some changes: the hero is no longer a prince, but a more democratic citizen who leads a Robin Hood type insurgency from the forest against the witch’s tyranny with SW joining in on a Maid Marian basis. But he still gets to do the controversial non-consent kiss once our heroine has gone into her picturesque coma. But the dwarves? Will this film make them look sort of like everyone else, like the Munchkins in Wicked? No. This Snow White feebly makes them mo-cap (motion-capture) animated figures, but it also – heartsinkingly – duplicates their presence by giving the prince his own gang of seven live-action bandits, in which people with dwarfism are represented. This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.
Has anybody reading this actually done that thing we used to do with films before the internet?
“The Russians are deemed to have agency: the could stop the war. Hamas are treated as if they lack self-determination: they are not held accountable for their crimes or expected to release hostages. Excuses are found for them, in a classic case of the racism of low expectations. Every attack on Israel triggers demands that Jerusalem surrenders territory, that it helps those seeking to exterminate it; things are that are (correctly) never demanded of Ukraine.”
– Allister Heath, in an excellent take-down of the double-think that seems to operate with the UK government and much of the political/chattering classes about what is going on in Ukraine/Russia and Israel one against various Islamist forces. (Article is behind paywall.)
Elon Musk should understand that the priority here is that no more Teslas get burned, and that he should not have provoked aggressive lunatics in the first place. He should be told by GM and Toyota, who are brokering a truce, to surrender his ownership stake immediately.
– Tim Newman
“I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. I send them over land and sea, I send them east and west; But after they have worked for me, I give them all a rest.
>I let them rest from nine till five, For I am busy then, As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea, For they are hungry men. But different folk have different views; I know a person small— She keeps ten million serving-men, Who get no rest at all!
She sends’em abroad on her own affairs, From the second she opens her eyes— One million Hows, two million Wheres, And seven million Whys!”
– Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories (1902)
There is something deeply wrong when a law passed with cross-party consensus and endorsed by Britain’s most trusted charities has made it impossible to run an internet forum for hamster owners.
— Sam Dunitriu, as screenshotted by atlanticesque to point out the wilful obtuseness of an opposing view.
“Councils begging for your savings isn’t a net zero innovation – it’s an embarrassment”, writes James Baxter-Derrington in the Telegraph.
In an attempt to plug the ever-increasing funding gap, bankrupt-adjacent local councils have dusted off the begging bowl and covered it in tinsel.
Under the guise of investment, Green-led Bristol has become the latest council to offer what smells like a voluntary council tax to fund responsibilities that should be met from their existing budgets.
[…]
But in a demonstration of phenomenal gall these local bodies have launched their own Kickstarter for Councils, asking not only their residents, but anyone across the country, to foot the net zero bill – in exchange for below-market returns.
These green bonds can be found on Abundance Investment, a platform that facilitates these loans for a slice of the pie – 0.75pc of the total sum raised alongside an annual 0.2pc fee. The website proudly declares that it offers investments with councils “in a solid financial position”, despite Bristol councillors declaring just two months ago that the body faced bankruptcy if it can’t close its £52m funding gap.
Samizdata is not often seen as the go-to place for investment advice, but, on balance and after careful consideration, I would suggest that readers seeking a home for their money avoid “Bristol Climate Action Investment 1” like the plague and avoid “Hackney Green Investment 2” like Hackney. (“Does ‘Murder Mile’ still deserve its name?” asked the Hackney Post after a lull. Short answer: Yes.)
Nonetheless, I salute these councils for seeking to raise additional money by asking for it instead of demanding it with menaces. I would salute them even more if they moved entirely to a voluntary system. Though the prospect is unlikely, I hope the investors make their money back with interest, so that this trend towards councils raising money by ethical means might spread.
Blog is getting hit hard with spam so the anti-spam defences have become a bit less discriminating. If your comment fails to appear, it might be because we think you are a blogroach, but far more likely it’s the algorithm taking umbrage rather than us.
“UK hoping to work with China to counteract Trump’s climate-hostile policies”, writes Fiona Harvey in the Guardian.
The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and a host of developing countries, to offset the impact of Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies and his sharp veer towards climate-hostile countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
A “new global axis” with the People’s Republic of China. Who could possibly object to that?
The article continues,
Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, arrived in Beijing on Friday for three days of talks with top Chinese officials, including discussions on green technology supply chains, coal and the critical minerals needed for clean energy. The UK’s green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, but access to components and materials will be crucial for that to continue.
What they mean by this is that the number of people paid to make government regulations, interpret government regulations, comply with government regulations, check that others are complying with government regulations, and punish those who do not comply with government regulations is increasing three times faster than the rest of the economy, which for some mysterious reason is growing more slowly than expected at the moment.
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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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