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Not “less human”, but yes to all the rest. I guess I must be a sanist.

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Beatrice Adler-Bolton
@realLandsEnd

Sanism names a deep, pervasive belief that ppl who appear out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis are not trustworthy, less human & fundamentally disruptive to social life. It’s a hierarchy of credibility and belonging, where visible distress = danger/contamination

1:59 AM · Feb 23, 2026

https://x.com/realLandsEnd/status/2025752283435196882

This tweet by Beatrice Alder-Bolton, co-author of Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, has been garnering interest, as it was intended to do. As the title says, while I never doubt the humanity of people who appear “out of control, incoherent, or in psychiatric crisis”, I do think that while they remain in this state in public places they are disruptive to social life. I also think that while in this state they are untrustworthy.

Beatrice Alder-Bolton would like us to believe that she trusts them. If she had said that she sympathised with people visibly in psychiatric crisis, I would have believed her. I also sympathise. If she had said that she tries to engage with such people in order to help them, I might have believed her. I have met a few kind souls who habitually respond in this way. I admire them (the kind souls) from a safe distance. But when Beatrice Alder-Bolton implies that she thinks the man having a psychiatric crisis in front of her on public transport is trustworthy, I do not believe her. Her body goes onto high alert just like anyone else’s. And speaking for myself, you bet I don’t trust the crazy guy. You bet I think he might be dangerous. And if he has just emptied his bowels or his bladder in the carriage I do indeed fear contamination.

But in order to be worthy of trust myself, I cannot simply dismiss Beatrice Alder-Bolton as a high-functioning mad left-winger of the sort that even other left-wingers are beginning to realise are poisonous to their cause (“I am begging leftists and liberals to not do this again. It is normal and smart to be nervous and on high alert when someone behaves in a profoundly anti-social way (peeing on the subway) and/or a threatening way (screaming on the subway). The more cities tolerate this, the fewer people ride public transport, the worse that transport gets, and eventually it gets to a breaking point and people wind up voting for right-wing politicians who come in and crack skulls and way over-police.” – Jill Filipovic), I have to acknowledge that when Alder-Bolton’s way of thinking is described as “left libertarian”, the “libertarian” part is perfectly real.

I wrote about the influence that the libertarian writings of Thomas Szasz had and continue to have on me in a post called “Ideology and Insanity on the New York Subway”. Just as certain chemicals are harmless in themselves but dangerous in combination with others, the way that Szasz’s* libertarian ideals combined with the dominant suicidally empathetic ideals of our time has produced results like the random murder of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown.

There are ways to respect the equal humanity of those who cannot function in society while, well, continuing to have a society. Private property is one, and if that is too much for modern sensibilities, the rediscovery of the right to exclude mad people from public property. To use Ms Alder-Bolton’s word, sanism. The rediscovery of proud, unapologetic sanism.

*You say it “sasses”. In Hungarian the digraph “sz” has the same function as the English letter “s” and the letter “s” on its own is pronounced the same way as the English digraph “sh”. Confusingly, Polish is the other way round.

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gangsterofboats
47 minutes ago
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When Jeremy Corbyn hears a medieval blood libel, he believes it

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This tweet (https://x.com/nicolelampert/status/2026017118341263795) from Nicole Lampert shows a 45 second video of Jeremy Corbyn, former Leader of the Opposition and twice the Labour Party’s candidate to be Prime Minister. In it, he says,

‘[I got a message] from the director of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza. And he said there had been a delivery of boxes to the hospital by the IDF. A large number of boxes, 60 or 70 boxes. And after the IDF had gone off, they opened the boxes. And each one contained the skull of a Palestinian who had been killed. And there were also delivered [sic] of bodies of dead women in Pala- in Gaza – that had been opened and some of the organs removed. I mean, it’s hard to describe this. That is what is happening to the people of Palestine.’

As Alex Hearn said said in the comments, “He won’t believe British intelligence about a Russian chemical attack in Salisbury but he’ll believe a fantasy from Hamas run Gaza.”

There is a slightly longer version of the same video from CAMERA UK here: https://x.com/CAMERAorgUK/status/2026229835803107332. This starts a few seconds earlier than Nicole Lampert’s video and includes Mr Corbyn saying that he got the message from the director of Al Shifa Hospital on Thursday or Friday morning.

In case you are wondering, no, I do not believe the director of Al Shifa Hospital (who appears to be Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya, although I would like Mr Corbyn to specify who gave him this message) for a moment. Not just because he is the head of an organisation controlled by Hamas, although that would be enough in itself to make me disbelieve him, but because this claim is identical in form to a centuries long stream of anti-Jewish blood libels about Jews murdering Christians or Muslims to harvest their bodies. The old version, exemplified by Little St Hugh of Lincoln had the Jews killing Christians as human sacrifices, usually with the additional detail that the Jews baked the victims’ bodies into their matzos, the unleavened bread served at Passover. This religious version of the blood libel is almost dead in Europe but still commonplace among Palestinians, including academics like Dr Samar Maqusi, formerly of University College London. The slightly updated version drops the matzos and has organ-harvesting as the motive instead. This one is very common among Palestinians and increasingly common among Westerners – witness the Right Honourable Jeremy Corbyn MP speaking in February 2026.

Why does Corbyn think the IDF would bring these boxes of skulls and dismembered corpses to Al Shifa hospital? [Update: OK, someone in the comments to the CAMERA post says the ceasefire agreement required the IDF return unidentified human remains to Gaza. But in that case the director of Al-Shifa hospital would know perfectly well what was going on, and it does not explain why there were claimed to be boxes of skulls in particular, nor why a medical doctor would specifically claim that women’s internal organs had been removed.]

Did Corbyn think to ask the director of Al-Shifa Hospital what he did with them? If the IDF ever deliver any boxes of skulls and corpses with missing organs to me, I’ll be sure and contact all the world’s most eminent forensic pathologists so they can carry out post mortems and give the evidence to the world.

Another update: This was no “misspeaking”. Jeremy Corbyn has publicly made the same allegation in more detail within the last few days. In the comments to the CAMERA post, someone called SHO_MY links to a video posted at 3:03pm on 23 Feb 2026 (https://x.com/EL4JC/status/2025949713292296383) from a pro-Corbyn account called #EL4C @EL4JC:

In the video Corbyn is addressing a public meeting. In his speech he says,

‘I’m going to read something to you. If you’ve already heard it, please be patient. If you haven’t, please be prepared to be shocked. I got a statement this morning from my good friend Doctor Mustafa Barghouti who’s an independent member of the Palestine National Initiative, a member of the Palestine National Assembly, and he’s forwarded me a statement by the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, Gaza, and I’m going to read it to you. “The director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex stated that approximately 10,000 individuals remain missing underneath the rubble across the Gaza Strip. Of these, around 5,000 persons are unaccounted for and their fate remains unknown. He further reported that 66 boxes were received yesterday from the occupying authorities – that’s the IDF – containing only the skulls of deceased victims. In addition, the bodies of women were handed over with no information provided regarding the location or circumstances of their abduction. According to the director, some of the returned bodies showed signs of severe mutilation including severed hands, while others had their abdomens surgically opened and subsequently restitched. Thus these findings raise great, raise grave concerns. He warned of credible indications of organ theft from the bodies of martyrs in the Gaza Strip, describing these acts as serious violations of international humanitarian law and human dignity.” And that I just received this morning. Just think about that statement. And I’ve no reason to disbelieve anything Mustafa Barghouti says, or the director of Al Shifa Medical Complex.’

I do.

And I ask again, what has the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex done with these bodies that he says show credible indications of organ theft? What action has he taken to get what he believes to be evidence of a horrible crime out to the world so that impartial outside observers can assess it? What is he doing to get these “credible indications” of organ theft either proved or disproved?

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gangsterofboats
48 minutes ago
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Samizdata quote of the day – the only party which can restore Britain is Reform UK

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The basic justification that Lowe’s online supporters offer for abandoning Reform at precisely the moment when they seem poised to destroy not one but both of the established political parties and usher in a government of a new party for the first time in a century is that the party as a whole, and Nigel Farage in particular, cannot be trusted to deliver on the priorities of the right, especially regarding immigration and demographics.

[…]

This is an attitude which plagues the British Right. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Politics is not a game in which the loser receives a consolation prize and a pat on the back. The stakes now are too high. Either we take power, by whatever means, or we’re done for. A future where there is no right-wing government in 2029 looks incredibly bleak. I do not want to risk backing the weaker horse, especially when its policy is practically identical to that of Reform, just because some of its leaders say the words I want to hear more vehemently and care less about the political impact of doing so. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened at the precise moment when the path became clear on both sides for Reform to win a victory at the next election. The desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is palpable.

Pimlico Journal

Read the whole thing.

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gangsterofboats
48 minutes ago
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Samizdata quote of the day – On Right-Wing Reshuffles

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A conservative is actually despairing of finding himself having to call himself ‘conservative’ in the first place.

James Alexander

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gangsterofboats
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A war a day

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Friday 27th February 2026: Pakistan declares state of ‘open war’ after bombing major Afghan cities

Saturday 28th February 2026: US and Israel launch attack on Iran, as Trump says ‘major combat operations’ under way

Lot of it about these days. I was going to make a rather tasteless metaphor about it being like the Gorton and Denton by-election, with the Greens winning and Reform coming second, displacing the established parties. But of course the surprise war – to all but the very old – was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Given Iran’s participation in proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and its hostile actions against Israel, Saudi Arabia, and probably other countries that I’ve forgotten (even leaving out Western ones), I’m surprised this didn’t happen earlier. As for Pakistan and their former protégés the Taliban, he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.

Update: Israel says that Ayatollah Khamenei has been found dead in the rubble of his compound. For the sake of the Iranian people, so many of whom have been murdered by Khamenei’s regime in the recent protests, I hope that this is true. In contrast, Zack Polanski of the Green Party says “This is an illegal, unprovoked and brutal attack that shows once again that the USA and Israel are rogue states.” Illegal, Zack? If the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran wanted the protection of international law, they should have renounced and made recompense for taking diplomats hostage. In the absence of that renunciation the international community should have put them down like rabid dogs forty-seven years ago.

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gangsterofboats
49 minutes ago
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Godspeed

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“When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take. This will be… probably… your only chance for generations.

For many years you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No President was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a President who is giving you what you want. So, lets see how you respond.

America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action: do not let it pass.”

POTUS Donald Trump.

Back on January 31st, I asked “So… is help on the way for the Iranian protestors or not?” – We now have our answer. I have my differences with Trump on trade, Ukraine, and threats against Greenland, but on this issue… Godspeed.

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gangsterofboats
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