Samizdata
A blog for people with a critically rational individualist perspective
- Website
- samizdata.net · all feeds from this site
- Feed URL
https://www.samizdata.net/feed/
Read it in your FeedListing reader
Or add to: Feedly Inoreader Raw feed
Latest posts
-
Samizdata quote of the day – Cancel that Oxfam subscription, right now
Oxfam started out as famine relief – a good, Godly, righteous thing to be doing. Get food to the starving – bonzer. Then two things happen. One, we find out that shipping food to the starving – except in the most obvious cases of outright famine – isn’t really the way to do it.…
-
Some analysis on the political upheaval in Poland
Make of this what you will
-
Political earthquake in Poland
I have been wading through various sources to try and make sense of the political confrontation in Poland. Any actual experts on Poland’s political scene care to weigh in? If so, keep it focused please, rather than hitting us with diatribes rather than analysis.
-
Samizdata quote of the day – Wikipedia: the tragedy of the commons
Before 7 October 2023, the English-language Wikipedia article on Zionism opened by describing a movement that emerged to “espouse support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Since then, the opening has been reworded to say that this homeland…
-
Samizdata quote of the day – Russia and Britain vastly overestimate each other’s influence
For their part, Russian commentators and politicians today seem to have an absurdly exaggerated idea of Britain’s power, the puppet-masters behind American global domination, still pulling the strings, rather than a country run by naive humanities graduates who place our…
-
Samizdata quote of the day – How Britain became the place to do business
The ASI published a paper that recommended the wholesale privatization of local government services, starting with bin collection. Thatcher liked it so much that she had it photocopied 10,000 times and sent a copy to every Conservative councillor in Britain. Thatcher didn’t like…
-
Samizdata quote of the day – Riotous Assemblies (a history of recent English aggro)
The subject of public disorder seems strangely topical, as I’m writing as rioting in France quietens down. Events in Paris and elsewhere have, inevitably, prompted a number of “what if?” comparisons with the UK. Our tradition of protest is significantly different from that of…
-
Samizdata quote of the day – What’s gone wrong with Britain?
One is we’ve just let state spending drift up too high. It’s 10 percentage points higher as a share of GDP than it was in the early Blair era. That in itself is enough to take 1% off growth, probably. Second, the markets are all gummed up. All our markets of all kinds are simply…
-
Samizdata quote of the day – whatever happened to the Guardian? edition
In the course of a fairly long working life I have seen the newspaper as an institution grow from small things to very great things. It has grown with the growth of popular government in the country. I don’t think that is a mere coincidence. The one can hardly exist without the…
-
The CoastSnap Project and the Surface Stations Project
“How citizen science is tracking changes in shorelines around the world” is a report in the Guardian by David Hambling. He writes, The shoreline changes with the weather. Tracking these changes over time is a labour-intensive task, and an army of citizen scientists with camera…
-
Samizdata quote of the day – giving the POTUS a kicking
Nixon incurred a generation’s outrage and mockery for insisting to interviewer David Frost that, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump, within the first month of his second term, asserted on social media that, “He who saves his Country does not…
-
Let’s help disadvantaged pupils do better by hiding how badly they are doing now!
“What comes next: A fairer approach to primary assessment” is a paper by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a progressive think tank. Here’s the IPPR’s own summary of its report: We set out four recommendations for immediate implementation from the 2027/28 academic year.…
- On this day in 1805…
-
Another fake polling firm created to be a “wake up call”? Or just a fake?
In a post last August called ‘Fake polling as a “short term social experiment”’, I discussed how a company called Median Strategies deliberately released fake polling data that put progressive Francesca Hong ahead in the primary to find the Democratic nominee for governor of…