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... but the Dissident Frogman is still waiting for someone to give him the suitable translations for his banners in Arabic. Any takers?

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If you are in Oxford on Saturday and want to join a protest against animal rights extremists, check this out. The Research Defence Society blog has more, as does the Social Affairs Unit and Laurie's own blog.

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Those who have felt left out by the various cartoon demonstrations recently, and fancy getting out on the streets in support of something they care about have a chance on Monday lunchtime. In my capacity as General Secretary of NO2ID, may I extend an open invitation:

NO2ID and Liberty will be holding an emergency lobby of Parliament on 13th February 2006, when the Identity Cards Bill returns to the Commons for consideration of Lords' amendments. Mr Blair will be wielding the whip for MPs to assent to the nationalisation of the people with as little fuss as possible.

The lobby will take place from 12 noon until 1:00pm on the sundial in Old Palace Yard. This is opposite the St Stephen's Gate entrance to the Houses of Parliament. [Location marked 'H' on this map (pdf)]

This will be your last chance to make a visible protest against the Bill before it goes into the final stages of negotiation between the two houses. And for Samizdata people, it is a rare chance to make common cause with a true rainbow coalition - the fabulous collective of security professionals and technologists, business-people and anti-capitalists, spooks and mooks, great and good, lefties, ultra-lefties, Greens, red-greens, nationalists, internationalists, peaceniks, Old Labourites, New Tories, LibDems, Europhiles, Euroskeptics, Muslims, evangelical Christians, not-so-evangelical Christians, outright pagans, constitutional wonks, geeks, babes, and Trots that are backing the NO2ID campaign.

As always, we shall be laying on some props, but please do bring your own (death-threat-free) banners and placards - the bigger and clearer the better.

To get an idea of numbers, for our own comfort and the helpeful people from Charing Cross police station. we'd appreciate a note to events@no2id.net to let us know if you're intending to come, though it is not obligatory.

End of commercial. Here's the musical version.

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This call [original link removed] for a rally in Trafalgar Square next Saturday is interesting. Does anyone know any more details of who is behind it? I would like to know more before leaping to any conclusions.

update: question answered - not worth supporting one group of (white) fascists protesting against another group of (Islamic) fascists

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Recently, a Greenpeace boat was rammed by a Japanese whaling ship. Or vice versa, depending on which side of the fence you sit on. Somewhere in my blogospheric wanderings, I stumbled over a Greenpeace blog purportedly authored by the crew on that particular mission. Since sparring with members of the crew and those peopling their fawning commentariat, I am reminded yet again how soft-headed, shallow and emotionally driven the anti-whaling argument is.

It continues to amaze me how, over the years, Greenpeace has pulled off such a remarkable public relations campaign in regards to whaling. They have successfully ensured the utter ignorance of many hundreds of millions of otherwise intelligent individuals on the matter of whaling. For most opposed to whaling, there is one species, "the whale", and it is being fished into extinction by those nasty Japanese. Forget the fact that some species of whale are not even close to endangered. The minke, for example, has an international population ranging somewhere between 500 000 - 1.1 million individuals. The minke is the most commonly harvested whale. Icelandic and Norwegian whalers only hunt minkes and the vast majority of the Japanese catch consists of minkes. Forget the fact that, when the Japanese hunt other species, each year they have never taken more than 51 Bryde's whales, 10 sperm whales or 100 sei whales. If you want to check the population levels on each of those whale species, please take a look at the earlier IWC chart I linked to. To suggest this tiny rate of harvesting will have a negative impact on whale populations is preposterous. Even if the Japanese follow through on their threat to double their cull of minkes to about 1000, and - let's be generous - add another 1000 taken by the Icelandic, the Norwegians and indigenous groups, this cumulative figure of 2000 is clearly sustainable given a conservative population growth rate of 1% and a highly conservative total population of 500 000.

Another point that the anti-whaling wailers do not like to concede and invert in their rhetoric; whaling in international waters is not illegal. Membership of the International Whaling Commission is entirely voluntary, and no member is bound to accept its rulings. For example, IWC member Norway has been catching minke whales under an objection to the moratorium on whaling since it was put in place in 1986. Japan, whilst almost certainly running a misleading campaign that asserts its catch is predominantly for scientific purposes, could withdraw from the moratorium on commercial whaling and start openly whaling commercially any time it wanted to.

A further blow to the relevance of the anti-whalers' cause can be seen in the dwindling market for whale meat. Even arch enviro-moonbat David Suzuki concedes that the market for whale meat is falling in Japan. The same thing is happening in Norway, according to other environmental hysterics. Simply, the young don't much care for the stuff in Japan or Norway. The market for whale meat is literally dying. As for any potential non-culinary demand in the West, we no longer need whale oil, and there are far cheaper sources of pet food. When viewed rationally, whaling is a non-event, and its importance is further deflating.

Considering the above, the anti-whaling campaign seems like a ridiculous waste of energy if "saving the environment" is key. One of the eco-pirates on the Greenpeace boat claimed, in a response to my initial post on their blog, that "Greenpeace's position is based purely on the need to leave healthy intact ocean ecosystems for future generations." If they were truly a group concerned with preserving ocean ecosystems, they would be concentrating their efforts in South East Asia, where numerous fisheries are in various stages of collapse due to rampant overfishing. The whaling debate shows Greenpeace for what they are - a bunch of filthy hypocrites who ignore true environmental catastrophes to chase after high profile red herrings. Please pardon the pelagic pun.

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Incoming email:

Greeting!

Keith Burgess Jackson, a tenured philosophy professor, has just started a new blog designed to deflate thuggish far-Leftist blogger, Brian Leiter. Leiter has a lot of influence and uses it to harm people who dare to challenge him. So Keith wants to try to civilize him a bit. Apparently Leiter is obsessed with his reputation. Keith says that Leiter scours the Internet for references to himself and then writes to people to get bad references removed. He has also apparently hired a lawyer to get the University of Pennsylvania law students to take down their rankings blog. Keith wants to put him down, but only by saying true things about him. Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. If you would like to help, at least please blogroll the new blog so that it rises in Google's rankings, so that when people type "Brian Leiter" into Google, the new blog comes up. I myself have no connection with the new blog - just a wish to see it thrive. The blog is here: http://brianleiter.blogspot.com

Thanks

John Ray

Sounds like a laugh. Presumably this posting will help.

I have no idea just how much of a shit this Brian Leiter is, and how much he contributes to the "Brians are bad" syndrome, but I expect that he is indeed a shit to some degree. I will visit this blog a few times, and then decide if I want to keep reading it. If I do, I will then blogroll it, here.

Nearly forgot. Happy New Year everybody.

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From David Tebbutt:

This is the promise: "The Habitat JAM will gather your input and add it to thousands of others to identify actionable ideas for the Vancouver World Urban Forum agenda and influence the Forum's content. It will start conversations and build new networks that bring enormous potential to global problem solving."

It sounds more like a threat to me. At best, manipulated bullshit. Problem solving is a fine thing, but the fewer conversations and networks devoted to "global" problem solving, the better, I would say. This is, I think, because "global" bundles together lots of difficulties into one huge impossibility, which you then blame on global capitalism. But the way to actually solve problems is to do what actual capitalists actually do, which is break the problems up into solluble particles.

Still, "actionable" means that someone will at least be able to sue these people, yes? No. Non-responsibility for resulting chaos is of the essence of gatherings like this.

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In response to overwhelming popular demand (Julian Taylor can be a bit overwhelming sometimes) here is the text of the Marie Antoinette International Dead Liberty Award for the year 2005, which has been awarded by the Libertarian Alliance to Robert Gabriel Mugabe, and which I featured yesterday in one of these photographs.

Click on this:

I hope you (Julian Taylor) can read that okay, and that it need not be typed in, again.

So, since we are on the subject of Mugabe, how are things in Zimbabwe these days? Well, this story says quite a lot:

Harare, Zimbabwe, 11/17 - A magistrates court in Zimbabwe Thursday dropped corruption charges against President Robert Mugabe`s nephew, two weeks after his high profile arrest on suspicion of graft involving billions of dollars.

Leo Mugabe and his wife Veronica were arrested on charges of illegally selling flour on the local market and exporting it to Mozambique.

Trade in wheat and flour, both of which are in short supply here, is controlled and exports are banned to preserve stocks for the local market.

No evidence, according to the magistrate. I do not suppose that lack of evidence is usually much of a problem, in Zimbabwe nowadays. But this case must have been rather different.

I wonder how Robert Mugabe himself feels about this. I do not assume that he will automatically side with his nephew. As I wrote here, a while ago, I was briefly acquainted with another relative of his, and I can report that the Mugabe family is not the proverbial big happy one. They do not all stick together. They quarrel. And Robert Mugabe is easily stubborn enough and self-righteously cruel enough to throw a relative to the wolves, if he decided that this was the right thing for him to do, just as he has decided that wrecking Zimbabwe is the right thing for him to do and will stubbornly continue with that, until death or ruin stops him.

In other words, this Libertarian Alliance prize will change nothing in Zimbabwe, nothing at all. But, future recipients of the award may perhaps be influenced by it.

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The whole issue of Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize in 1932 has always pissed me off. It just rankles that he got away with it, so the least we can do is blacken the bastard's name posthumously for the sake of the millions of dead Ukrainians he lied about.

Now that Harold Pinter has won a Nobel Prize for literature, I guess the tradition of lionising men of letters who are apologists for mass murdering leftists is still alive and well.

Want to make your voice heard on the issue of Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize? Take a look at Cyber Cossack (and check out their great site banner) and if you are in the NY area, consider lending your hand to a bit of activism.

Better late than never.

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Tomorrow (Wednesday) the issue of trade justice will be topical. Free-market NGO Global Growth is looking for volunteers in London who would be willing to help with a stunt outside the French Embassy. If you are free in the middle of the day tomorrow, e-mail your details to info at global-growth.org. Please include your mobile number.

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Reporters without Borders has produced a useful handbook for blogging in an unfree environment. We will be adding a sidebar link to this useful resource which has some technical tips that may be of interest to people in places where Big Brother tries to controls everything you read.

It can be purchased or downloaded for free from here.

The guide to dissident blogging

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James Waterton of the Daily Constitutional sees the need for more hardcore activists to spread the word for classical liberal values... and he also sees the need for more people to read his excellent articles. We agree with him on both counts

I was having a chat today with two friends about the nature of a market society. Both guys are intelligent, open minded and lacking ideological zeal. After talking about this and that, the discussion turned into me defending the free market of commerce and culture. Neither of them are heavily interested in politics, however they both articulated their positions with cognisance and we had a good discussion.

Because of the above discussion and the assumptions my friends held of the free market, I came to realise that - as enthusiasts of the free market - we do very little to actively promote the cause and its benefits. We hope our continually improving lives do the talking for us. Trouble is, these benefits can be twisted by people who do not agree with us. We are getting rich, says Green Left, at the expense of those in the third world and/or in our underclass. This is rubbish, of course, but it is an easily grasped concept, no matter how misguided. A group like Resistance goes out to a lot of schools to talk to students about the beauty of socialism. It is rich pickings for them there, because the simplistic truths of socialism appeal to minds that are neither sullied with the realities of human nature nor self-supporting adults. It is not hard to make a teenager feel bad about our society. Ask them if they lead a comfortable life. Show them a few pictures of starving African children. Let them join the dots. Child's play.

Trouble is, as we all know, widespread socialism was a dismal failure, and the few countries that continue to fly the banner are collapsing failures. However kids - especially compassionate kids - are still easily conned. Okay, maybe conned is the wrong word. They are just not offered an alternative point of view, and what they are being shown by our leftist friends is easy to understand and makes sense prima facie. I was a high-minded socialist back in the day, and I believed a whole manner of things that I find utterly repugnant today. For example, I considered that an absolute majority was always right. Someone backed me into a corner once and posed the following scenario - if an absolute majority decided that it was okay to kill me, would I have a problem with that. I sacrificed sanity for consistency and answered, no, I would not, if that is what the majority wanted.

I have found that this kind of woolly thinking is common in politically aware teenagers, and I believe it is because they are never offered an alternative. Socialism appears to make sense. No one tells them how it produces undesirable outcomes. Even when the aforementioned teenagers embrace adult reality and do away with socialism and the chimeric solutions it offers, most still retain a general distrust of free markets into their adulthood, even though they more often than not have trouble justifying their position if prodded. In regards to my friends, I was presenting a model that they did not know a great deal about. They knew its ostensible failings, but knew little of its strengths. They would possibly never considered, and certainly never accepted, the moral argument for a free market. They knew my case was logical, however the conditioned response of the average young adult to free markets made them still suspect that "something was wrong" with capitalism, free markets, individual responsibility etc. even though more often than not they could not put their finger on what it was. This syndrome is politically important, because when multiplied across society, it has implications on policy and how far the remaining vestiges of the socialist state can be rolled back - for the good of all.

If someone had have presented me with the case for free markets when I was in high school, I would have probably dismissed it out of hand. However, planting the seed is half the job done. As it happened, I changed my stance a couple of years after graduation. It took about one and a half years of a relentless bombardment of logic from a bunch of Objectivists to bring me round. I am not an Objectivist myself, however they certainly influenced my current liberal outlook. The people I was talking to earlier today are probably where I was when I encountered the Randroids. Those guys took a year and a half to convince me; I wouldn't have even started to turn my friends around. On the whole, people do not radically alter their views easily. However, this process would be a lot easier and quicker if the pre-existing cynicism towards the free market that my friends held was not there.

Which is where we free market enthusiasts come in. The morality of Adam Smith's invisible hand is more sophisticated and is not as easily digested as the ostensibly moral "perfect equality" socialist model, however Free Marketeers should debate Green Left, Resistance and those of their ilk at schools or wherever they appear. Just taking a quick peek at their publications and arguments, it is quite obvious that anyone with even a thimble of debating flair could wipe the floor with these lefty halfwits and their demented, unreal truisms. Their creed is barren, it lost its dynamism long ago. However, it could rear its ugly head again with enough support. There are signs that it's happening already with governments across the world reversing the Thatcherite/Reaganite trend towards smaller government. I believe this has something to do with the fact that socialism's pallbearers are much better at spreading their message than the unknowing footsoldiers of capitalism toiling in banks, brothels, barnyards or any business large and small. The beneficiaries of the free market - that is pretty much everyone, even though realistically I could only expect enthusiasts to rally - need to understand that their right to trade freely is not inextinguishable. We should be making a stronger effort to communicate the superior free market message to the youth, if only to ensure that our way of living continues. The free market system is the hope of the world. Those who understand that should spruik its benefits to the neutrals and unbelievers. We should try much harder to sign up the former and sway the latter.

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Hate the idea of ID cards? Do not keep your views to yourself.

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I will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge.
- Phil Booth, NO2ID National Coordinator at PledgeBank

Deadline is 9th October 2005, 2,934 people have signed up, 7066 more are needed. Those in the UK, please sign up.

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Incoming email from Sean Gabb:

Dear Brian,

I know this is not the best time or place for the debate – I believe much of the audience wants to leave afterwards to wander up and down outside Parliament waving candles or some such. I hope to be abed by then. But it may be an important event. If you cannot attend, please circulate.

Regards,

Sean

I could attend but do not want to. I am going through a quietist phase just now. But I am happy to pass it all on:

Free Trade v Fair Trade

A Debate Organised by Christian Aid
St Margaret's Church, Westminster (Near Parliament)
Friday 15th Aril 2005 – 11.50pm to 1am

What is best for poor countries? Do they need global free trade in goods and services? Or is this just a cover for western neo-imperialism? Do such countries instead need fair trade – a system in which local producers are encouraged to develop without competition from larger foreign countries?

Come along and listen, and have your say.

Chair: Alan Beattie, The Financial Times

For Free Trade: Dr Sean Gabb, Libertarian Alliance; Alex Singleton, Globalization Institute

For Fair Trade: Martin Khor, Third World Network; Prosper Heoyi, Oxfam

For further details, contact:
Leo Bryant
Campaign Events
Christian Aid
020 7523 2264
camtemp3@christian-aid.org

Sean adds the following:

Assuming other speakers will give permission, Sean Gabb will video the whole event, and will make DVDs available. He will certainly record his own contribution.

This flyer was put together by Sean Gabb on the basis of limited information. He had nothing to do with what he considers the dreadful time and place of the debate, but is told that around 700 people will attend.

Good luck gentlemen. I look forward to viewing the DVD.

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Another of my friends has succumbed to the inevitable and started a weblog, this time my Austin, Texas-based pal Alan R. Weiss. Alan is a tremendous dynamo of a character; he is a former vice president of the Free State Project and still closely involved in that venture. Alan is also a businessman an innovator who has harnessed cutting-edge venture capital financing techniques to accelerate the writing achievements of noted libertarian author and campaigner, L. Neil Smith. My girlfriend and I spent a wonderful long weekend in Austin staying with Alan's great family last September during a marathon trip around the country. I can strongly recommend Austin as a place to visit.

Oh, and he is also a big Firefly fan. Does the guy have no flaws?

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Last night I attended a fascinating talk about the libertarian movement in Spain, hosted by Tim Evans in Putney, and given by Gabriel Calzada, who had been known to me before last night only as the author (maybe – I was unsure) of this essay.

The message Gabriel delivered to a small but very attentive group of London libertarians can be briefly summarised as follows: the Spanish libertarian movement is extraordinarily big and is doing extraordinarily well.

Gabriel started his talk with some history, concerning the Salamanca school of Natural Law theorists, mentioning the names of Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco de Suarez, and Juan de Mariana. Here is a famous Mariana quote:

Taxes are commonly a calamity for the people and a nightmare for the government. For the former they are always excessive; for the latter they are never enough, never too much.

But that was a very long time ago, and that kind of thing only influenced modern Spain indirectly, via its influence on the Austrian school.

It became very clear as the evening went on that the enormous Spanish anarchist movement that flourished about a century ago is crucial to any understanding of the current Spanish libertarian movement. Anarchism as a political force in Spain was eventually decapitated by the supposed allies of the anarchists, the Communists, for being insufficiently obedient to Stalin, but the climate of opinion – what we here at Samizdata call the meta-context – of anarchism lived on in Spain. Whereas the typical political question in other countries is something like: How shall we govern ourselves?, in Spain the question is: How shall we be free? How, as it were, do you do freedom? With a question like that, it makes sense that the libertarian answer to that question (one word summary: property) would attract a mountain of enthusiastic attention, and it has.

Perhaps another reason for the dramatic impact of libertarianism in Spain is that Spain has, until challenged by the libertarians, been intellectually dominated by Communism. Anarchism having been wiped out, and anti-Communism having become so tainted by Francoism, that left the lefties ruling the media roost in Spain, in the form of such mass media giants as El Pais, the biggest national newspaper in Spain, which makes the Guardian seem to Gabriel like a centrist/liberal kitten by comparison. Lots of libertarians are converts from leftism, and Spain is very full of people who have been raised in a leftist manner but who are looking for different answers.

It may also have helped the rise of libertarianism, although this was not mentioned by Gabriel or in discussion, that Spain is now economically so vibrant, compared to earlier times.

Gabriel, interestingly, preferred to focus on the achievements of two individuals: Jesus Huerta de Soto, and Federico Jimenez Losantos. Huerta is the key scholar, and Jimenez is a key media performer, and both are men of "contageous enthusiasm", a phrase Gabriel used several times.

He also mentioned the vital role that the Internet has played in this story. Again, summarising brutally, whereas the Communists owned the old media, the libertarians own the Internet, to the point where the Communists are getting seriously worried.

Gabriel mentioned two internet sites in particular, liberalismo.org (scholarship) and Libertad Digital (current affairs). Both have astronomical hit rates, of the order of a million a month (sorry but I am bad at numbers). When those Communists type any Spanish 'issue' into their search engines, time and time again, the first few hits are libertarian analyses. No wonder they are so anxious, and have been saying that something ought to be done about controlling the Internet.

Jimenez is also doing extraordinarily well on the radio.

I could attempt to go on, on the basis of my scribbled and inadequate notes, but I will leave it at that for now, hoping that Gabriel will regard this report as better than nothing. (Antoine Clarke, also present, might like to comment about all the things I missed, and maybe clarify some of the numbers involved in this story, people, hit rates, etc.) I will add only that whereas there are now no Spanish libertarian sites which also present themselves to the English speaking world in English, this is apparently about to change. There will soon be an English language site devoted to Spanish affairs, written by Spanish libertarians. Gabriel has promised to inform us as soon as it gets going.

Altogether a fascinating, and most encouraging evening.

Afterwards we had a late supper at Tim and Helen's, which is where I took this photo of Gabriel.

Hayek (on the left in black and white) is saying: what is that greenery doing in front of me? Gabriel is a great enemy of greenery, having recently penned a denunciation of the Kyoto Treaty, so particular apologies for that blemish.

Oh, and did I mention that Gabriel Calzada has also just been made a Professor at the University of Madrid?

If ideas have consequences, and they definitely do, then Spanish libertarianism is going to have some very big consequences indeed.

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The No2ID campaign has established an e-petition aimed at 10 Downing Street demanding the end to plans for imposing mandatory ID cards and pervasive state databases recording a vast range of what you do in your life.

The No2ID campaigners have taken the line of principled objection, given that the government seem to have decided that there is no longer any room for public debate and refuses to engage with serious - and growing - civil liberty and privacy concerns with the scheme. The Home Office have not met once with civil liberties organisations yet say their concerns have been addressed whilst at the same time avoiding public meetings but at the same time having private briefing with technology partners for introducing the schemes.

Take a stand and make your voice heard while you still can at www.no2id-petition.net. Time is fast running out.

The state is not your friend.

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The No2ID launch was held in the basement bar of The Corner Store in Covent Garden, a spacious restaurant/pub catering for the tourist trade. The attendance was good, with more and more interested parties walking in as the clock crept past midday until the small room was overflowing.

The two speakers were Neil Gerrard, Labour MP for Wolverhampton, and Debbie Chay, the Chair of Charter88, representing the civil liberties movement, now repackaged as civil libertarianism, to distinguish itself from the Real Thing. Both provided telling anecdotes on the idiocies and dangers that an ID system would represent. Nevertheless, there was a telling gap in their analysis. Both were unable to provide a convincing story as to why the government was introducing this measure. Without understanding the motives behind the development of the ID scheme, it will prove far more difficult to halt or reverse.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Guy Herbert, a name not so unfamiliar here. His own fear was that the ID scheme will depend upon the establishment of databases that will require a far greater intrusion into the private lives of citizens if the state is to monitor them effectively.

My conclusions on the meeting were hopeful and fearful. As with any new campaigning organisation, there is a lot of work to be done in order to achieve the aim of defending civil liberties in the UK. Mark Littlewood, their National Coordinator, quipped that there were few organisations which could boast the Libertarian Alliance and Globalise Resistance as supporting organisations. Yet, as I talked with a couple of campaigners from the Left, they proved unresponsive to my thesis that they had to attract the middle classes: people who read the Daily Mail or supported the Countryside Alliance, if they wished to succeed. Since most of the activists were Left rather than Right in orientation, this may skew the activities and demands of No2ID.

Secondly, the lack of analysis may prove a boon for libertarians. Neil Gerrard asked "why anyone would wish to introduce ID cards?". The answer is complex: strategies to control the individual by the state, which has an increasing need to obtain information (once deemed private) in order to further this end. Boondoggles such as the evil machinations of private capitalists who could make vast profits from any contracts awarded by government should remain a sideshow. They will not convince people fearful of a terrorist bomb. Libertarianism provides the strongest resource for crafting a message that can appeal to all of those affected: from men with the wrong colour of skin who will be stopped even more often and asked for some form of ID to the yound, single professional who never encounters the state, until this drops through their letterbox.

However, if there is a bomb in the United Kingdom on the scale of Madrid or the WTC, all bets are off. The government will argue that a terrorist atrocity requires the development of the surveillance state, backed up by authoritarian laws.

Crossposted to White Rose

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The stunt pulled by pro-hunting protestors of intruding into the inner sanctum of the House of Commons has produced a large number of very predictable responses. MPs and other establishment figures harrumphed that "Parliament's privileges have been infringed!" and "This is an attack on democracy itself!" and "We must protect this most important of our institutions!" and "The protestors must not alienate people by acting so despicably!"...

Well I have a suggestion for the pro-hunt protestors: ignore all those remarks because the only way to win is to fight your battles on ground of your choosing. As David Carr pointed out earlier with regard to when one of the protestors in the Commons shouted "This isn't democracy. You are overturning democracy." - Wrong. This is democracy in action and you are on the receiving end of it.

What they really, really need to understand is that the majority of people in Britain are urban folk who are at best utterly indifferent to the protestor's concerns and frequently somewhat hostile to them. The hunters and their supporters cannot hope to convince a majority that hunting is something that is either important or even needs to be tolerated.

Do not waste your time making arguments about 'country livelihood' or 'managing pests' because not only do most people not believe you (such as me, for example), most simply do not care because they feel no particular affinity with you. It is preposterous to argue that the only effective way to put down vermin is to chase them on horseback with hounds.

It is simply not a matter for highly questionable utilitarian arguments but rather for arguing for free association to do what you will on private property. That is the only coherent and more importantly resonant argument to make.

If gay men can congregate together in clubs to do things the majority of people find deeply distasteful, without having to worry about being raided by the fuzz, why cannot foxhunters congregate together to do things the majority find distasteful without worrying about the Boys in Blue showing up? Successfully point out to gay rights activists that making the prejudices of the majority the law of the land is not something they should be comfortable with... and suddenly the class warriors behind the hunting ban might find it much harder to 'bash the toffs' as the implications of where this is clearly heading starts to dawn on altogether different groups.

In short, stop making invocations to the graven idol called 'Democracy' because it will not hear your prayers. Accept that you are a heretic and raise up an idol of your own. Call it, say, 'Liberty' and then challenge your enemies to denounce it.

If you want to defend your liberty to do things in free association with likeminded folk on private property, you will have to come to some very sobering realisations.

Firstly, realise that you will always be a minority and may never be a match for the political machine arrayed against you. However that does not mean are alone. There are millions of people who support your views with far more intensity than the many million more who oppose them.

Secondly, accept that The System which the Barbour jacket, flat cap and green wellington set always assumed was, when push comes to shove, there to protect them, is in fact run by people with whom in many instances you have about as much in common culturally as Osama Bin Laden. Moreover, a great many of those people who are oiling the machine under which your aspirations are being crushed are actually members of the Tory party and some of your friends are in fact members of the Labour party. That said it is true that most of the people behind what is happening are indeed Labour and LibDem drones... so just stop thinking it terms of party politics because political parties, any political parties, are just components of the system you are going to have to confront. If you think a mere change of government can make your problems go away forever, you are sadly mistaken.

Thirdly, democratic politics is not the only way to cause political change. Cast your mind back to the days of the Poll Tax and also try to take a dispassionate look at the political realities in Ulster. It is not really violence that is the issue but the fact substantial activist minorities simply refused to accept the verdict of the democratically sanctified political process and yet ended up with at least a significant part of what they were after.

What you need to understand is that you cannot trust to democratic politics: in fact you must confront democracy and be prepared to say that your liberties are not something that the political process can legitimately abridge in this manner, regardless of how many people vote for it. It is the system which allows this to happen that you must confront, not just whatever party happens to be running it right now.

If there are some liberties you are simply not prepared to surrender, then you must be prepared to refuse to accept the authority of the state to impose its institutional will on you and accept the possible consequences of that... I say 'possible consequences' because Sinn Fein/IRA, the Animal Liberation Front, various 'Traveller' groups and all manner of other people have demonstrated that consistently and collectively refusing to obey the law is by no means a guaranteed road to ruin. I am certainly not urging activists to blow anyone up, invade anyone's property or terrorise anyone's family like the groups I have mentioned are prone to do, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that working well and truly outside the democratic system of politics in various ways is both less dangerous and considerably more effective than the Establishment would like you to think.

However regardless of what the pro-hunting protestors and activists decide to do, it seems that Britain may be about to undergo a dramatic and quite possibly earthshaking change, which most people will of course remain oblivious to just so long as it does not interrupt the flow of reality TV shows and sporting events - If the government does indeed use the Parliament Act to impose certain laws when there is clearly no state of emergency, then we must accept that Blair has shattered Britain's constitution (with scant opposition) and we are in a situation a thousand times graver than I would have ever dreamed possible just a few weeks ago.

Moreover I suspect even this will not rouse the Tory party from its torpor and induce them to actually make a coherent civil liberties based argument and promise a policy of non-cooperation. This is vastly more serious than the issue of red jacketed country folks galloping around the fields in pursuit of small mangy quadrupeds. If the Parliament Act is used, we are suddenly living in a country with no checks and balances on the ruling party's power other than the one on Election Day. That is not alarming, it is terrifying.

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NO2ID is launching its activities publicly:

Saturday, 18 September 11:00am - 2:00pm
The Corner Store
Covent Garden
33 Wellington Street,
London, WC2E 7BN, Map

There will be a couple of speakers before lunch, including a Labour 'rebel', Neil Gerrard MP followed by campaigning around central London, i.e. handing out leaflets, setting up stalls on the street in a number of locations until mid-afternoon.

Please join them to Stop ID Cards and the Database State!

The NO2ID Coalition, who are trying to make sure Blunkett fails in his attempts to introduce mandatory ID cards, argue that:

• An ID scheme won't stop terrorists
• An ID scheme will not control illegal immigration
• An ID scheme won't enable you to have anything you do not already have
• An ID scheme will cost billions in taxpayers money and achieve nothing
• An ID scheme will mean your most intimate details will be controlled by the government forever
• An ID scheme will cost everyone £75 every year

Cross-posted from White Rose.

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Funny how one posting leads to another. There I was going on about books, and now, as David Carr has already flagged up in a posting below, here come a thousand books.

I agree with David that this Liberty Library is a very important development, with potentially enormous long term significance to the cause of liberty. And it so happens that when I was in Brussels earlier this year, in addition to snapping the new EUro-parliament, I also took photos of, among many other interesting people, the two men in charge of this other and far better project.

Here is the techy of this operation, CNE webmaster James Rogers...

... and here is the academic supremo, Dr Hardy Bouillon:

Good as Hardy Bouillon is at this kind of thing there are almost certain to be some omissions, and there may even be the odd mistake in what is up there already. In either event, Hardy wants to know.

As it happens I think I may already spotted an error, in the form of a duplication. Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice by Tullock, Brady and Seldon, seems to get two entries, the one right above the other. That is no big disaster, two mentions of this fine volume being greatly preferable to no mentions.

There is no explanatory verbiage attached to each title. It is just a plain and simple book list, with subject area (economics, history, literature or whatever), title, author, and link to where you can buy it and where you will find explanatory verbiage. A simple idea, simply done. I am told that it will be possible to search for an individual title, or to search for all the works of an individual author, but I cannot now find that facility. Unless this is just me, these further features have yet to materialise, but presumably they will very soon.

The sort of people who find books rather heavy going to plough through, and who prefer lighter reading of the sort supplied by things like Samizdata, are prone sometimes to underestimate the importance of books. We want action not words, blah blah blah. And it is true that people who already have classical liberal or libertarian opinions, and who have their lives and careers all up and running and who hence have only so much time to be reading books, are probably not the target readership of this site, although if that description fits you and you still want liberty-inclined books, got there and click away. But students, meanwhile, and younger people generally, with their opinions as yet unformed and their entire adult lives still ahead of them, are likely, insofar as they have been persuaded to look at this site at all, to be profoundly influenced by it, that is, by the enormous volume of writing to which it now provides easy access. I wish the project all the best. It can only make the world a better place.

I only discovered David's post about the Liberty Library just before I was about to put this up, and of course I then had to scurry back to the drawing board, so to speak. And I obviously considered not bothering with this post at all. But, like that Government Failure book mentioned above, if this Liberty Library is good enough for one mention, which it definitely is, two mentions, although a trifle confusing, can do no very great harm.

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I have been invited to join a panel discussion on Nanny State .vs. Personal Responsibility scheduled for 10.00pm UK time tonight on BBC Radio Five.

I do not know the identity of my protagonists yet, nor do I have any idea as to whether or not the broadcast is available outside of the UK.

Should be fun, though.

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Although transhumanism is a broader church than libertarianism, it does approach many issues from a similar background: challenging current obstacles that prevent individuals from deciding that they wish to fully benefit from the range of cutting edge technologies that are now moving from speculation to experimentation. Like all movements, it has many variations, from those who champion pragmatic, short-term, measures to those who take a more visionary stance, dwelling upon the joys of uploading.

The United Kingdom has always provided a sympathetic culture and activists for transhumanism, notably its libertarian variant, extropianism. However, after the early 1980s, there does not appear to have been any group within the United Kingdom, which could organise and focus the efforts of likeminded individuals to provide an alternative voice to those organisations that wish to retard technological progress and promote the precautionary (reactionary?) principal.

In the last few two years, people interested in transhumanism have been meeting on a monthly basis in London and listening to guest speakers on various subjects. This social exercise, called Extrobritannia, has proved extraordinarily successful at providing links and full kudos to its founder, Fabio, who continues to put in a determined effort to engage a series of strong speakers. Past speakers have included Nick Bostrom, who argues that we may live in a computer simulation, Aubrey de Grey, a gerontologist at Cambridge (whose interview with Glenn Reynolds can be accessed here) and Alex Ramonsky, a wearables experimentalist and neurohacker (in the lexicon).

Most of the regulars to these meetings have become increasingly concerned at the influence of groups inimical to the development and application of technologies beneficial to humanity, whether they be environmentalists or bioconservatives. To combat these trends and to provide an alternative voice, we have decided to set up the UK Transhumanist Association as a non-profit organisation that will, hopefully, publicise and act as a coordinator for interested parties within the United Kingdom that can recognise the benefits of current and future developments within science. The papers were signed today.

At the moment, the UK Transhumanist Association is an embryonic organisation, with ambition rather then experience, but there is a role that needs to be filled.