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]
|
The slow awakening The cover of print version of The Economist is titled ‘Taking Britain’s Liberties’ and the issue discusses many of the very serious abridgements of our civil rights that have recently taken place.
But rather than link to any specific article, what interests me is that the truly grave situation is finally ‘front page news’ in a fairly mainstream publication. It is nothing less than amazing that it has taken this long for the seriousness of the situation to reach the collective editorial consciousness of any significant element of the media outside the blogosphere and other elements of the activist fringe.
|
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.
|
So how long before someone in NuLab remarks the Economist’s editor is “not quite all there”, then?
I think I’ll take time off from Frederick Douglass to read this issue.
Halelujah, someone’s noticed…
Michael Portillo said on Thursday that when he wrote in his Sunday Times column about this issue, he get no response at all. He thinks people just don’t care about civil liberties issues. It’s a serious problem for those who do.
A serious issue yes, but I was hoping this story would be about the EU. Don’t suppose The Economist will be doing that story any time soon.
I find myself in some difficulty over this issue. On the one hand there can be no doubt that our freedom is being very seriously curtailed. On the other, I’m deeply uneasy at the company one has to keep when complaining about it.
Many of those ranked against the various measures being taken (ostensibly) to combat terrorism are on the hard Left, whose motivation has more to do with sympathy for the Jihadis than it does any essential belief in libertarian principles.
I know it’s pretty feeble to judge a cause by its supporters, but…
If we are truly at war, then I am willing to put up with some temporary sacrifice of due process, for the sake of my increased safety, but are we? The government has not only failed to make its case – it has failed even to try.
It is obvious that ID cards, for example, have been on the back burner at the Home Office since they were scrapped after WWII and that the plans have been dusted down any number of times, on any number of pretexts, since. Neither do I doubt that some of the other moves planned have less to do with protecting us from Islamofascists than in breaking the legal system in the State’s favour.
The problem is, we do not know, because we are not being told, just what manner of threat we face. Until we know this, it is impossible to gauge which measures are justified and which are not.
Give that, one can only surmise that the reason we are not being told is because the truth would wreck the government’s case: that the threat is weak and the measures unnecessary.
But it would be far, far better to reach a judgement based on facts, rather than having to feel around in the intellectual dark, in the hope of grabbing a passing truth..
I think ID cards are a complete red herring in the debate – the most invasive loss of liberties in the UK are the loss of freedom of speach, loss of the right to hire and fire who you like and the endless petty regulations. Stacked against this lots, ID cards are insignificant.
Giles, why do you see them as seperate issues? Why not parts of a trend? If the government was above board on any of this (I know, I know, but in theory possible) wht not a sunset provision on any/all Law(s) affecting Civil Liberties?
The best think about the Homeland security act here in the States was the fact that it automaticly expires if not renewed. That allows for a needed review and the time to see what actually happens. Check out the ‘bullet fingerprint’ laws here in the States. After bunches of money it turns out that not a single crime was prevented nor criminal arrested. A good arguement can be made that the same money spent on more police officers WOULD have made a difference.
So give the pols their laws but only for 5 years, then examine the data and see if the laws did anything.
GCooper, the enemy we face is very weak compared to most sovereign states. Their main weapon is fear and a lrge part of that fear is not knowing the what and were of the next outrage. If the government knew what they are up to, it would stop them. If you had told anyone on 9-10 that some nutbags were going to kamakazi airlines into the WTC, they would have held you for observation overnight. Then arrested you the next day.
I have London in the Nuke a City pool.
My reasoning is; The most likely source of a nuclear weapon for Al Qaeda is one of the 16 torpedo warheads ‘lost’ when the Sovirt Union broke up. AQ has a number of ships that are owned by Oshama. The warhead was designed to sink America aircraft carriers and is hydrostaticly fused. London is a major port and easy to get to from Europe. Security is extremly lax. The UK is a major player and small enough so that one nuke would have an affect on it. The rest of Europe would see it as a warning. The UK might not respond, since there would be no State to respond against. President Bush has quietly let it be know that a nuke on American soil means vaporizing several Islamic cities, starting with Mecca, and for once those fools believed him. Hopefully I’m wrong, but one shouldn’t depend on religous fanatics being reasonable.
Er … perhaps because there might NOT be a government conspiracy to trap us all into servitude?
That was 14 years ago. Without wishing to restart the same technical discussions as previously held here, it is very unlikely that a nuclear warhead from a torpedo would still be in usable condition after 14 years of storage. They need specialist attention on a regular basis.
Do you not think that if AQ really had a nuclear capability they would have used it some time ago, rather than crashing airliners into tower blocks? Then it would have been easy, because nobody would be looking. Now people are looking.
EG
Next week’s Spectator cover headline:
Mafeking Relieved!
‘The government has not only failed to make its case – it has failed even to try. ‘
‘The problem is, we do not know, because we are not being told, just what manner of threat we face’
Why are you relying on the Govt to tell you what to believe?
The truth is out there.
db writes:
“The truth is out there”
Good. So no doubt you will soon be revealing to us the full detail of the covert surveillance work undertaken by MI5, Special Branch, GCHQ et al.
” it is very unlikely that a nuclear warhead from a torpedo would still be in usable condition after 14 years of storage. ”
If someone had told me on Sept.10 2001 that Arab terrorists would be able to highjack three seperate aircraft on the same day and succesfully fly two of them into the World Trade Center I would have said that was very unlikely.
I dont think my country and my people should rule out any possibility. Human lives are at stake.
To give the Economist credit, it has been writing about the slow erosion of liberties in Britain for years. It has been excellent on this issue, in fact, way ahead of the rest of the MSM. The trouble is that the Economist is only read by CEOs, private entrepreneurs and smarter types of business journalist and private individual. That’s it.
I agree with a commenter above about putting the ID issue into perspective. The other assaults on our freedoms are far worse. The ID card issue does, however, have a nice way of summing up the issue in one hit for the average Joe. (Sorry if that last sentence sounds terribly patronising).
But technically possible.
The point about the nuclear weapons is not whether the terrorists would be prepared to use them, but whether they would actually work. Radiation degrades the structural metals making up the warhead, and more critically has an effect on the conventional explosive and electronic components. This will happen the more quickly in a relatively small device, such as something that will fit in a torpedo or even worse a demolition/suitcase device, due to the comparative lack of shielding.
From a purely technical point of view, the successful use of 14 year old nuclear torpedo warheads by a terrorist organisation is highly implausible. It has nothing to do with what they may or may not want to do, but rather with the laws of physics.
EG
Trouble is, only patients of upmarket foreign dentists read The Economist these days. When was the last time you saw it quoted by any other British paper or broadcaster?
Most people are as uninterested in “freedom” in the abstract as in any other political abstraction. All the more so in Britain, home of the empirical, illogical and makeshift.
”Good. So no doubt you will soon be revealing to us the full detail of the covert surveillance work undertaken by MI5, Special Branch, GCHQ et al.”
What’s really worrying is that you think they should.
Kim – V good!
It is happening in America in the name of the drug war.
The Biggest Cover Up of All.
Nice Frederick Douglas quote in there too.
An improvised nuke would not be too hard to build.
Some tubing. Some HEU. Some explosives. A few bags of cement. A neutron source (a couple of hundred ionization based smoke detectors would supply the required radioactive material) A two story flat with a basement. Two or three neutron detectors to get it all set up properly. If you wanted to be really clever a neutron shield/reflector would make the whole set up more effective and harder to detect.
Not hard at all. The HEU is the only difficulty. It is not very radioactive.
Analog Science Fiction Magazine detailed the general idea in one of its science fact articles.
I go into the UF6 issue here.
The danger of giving out nuclear fuel .
Euan, as you yourself say, “highly implausible”.
That kinda proves my point. You did not rule it out as impossible and the evidence is that its not. Implausible means possible.
Your still living with a pre-911 mindset.
We have to dream dark dreams, no matter how implausible. The terrorists sure as hell are.
It’s a little more complex than you suggest, at least if you want the thing to actually produce a fission reaction and not just blow bits of uranium around the neighbourhood.
Having said that, it seems there was a German idea in WW2 to build a simple bomb using plates of uranium separated by liquid paraffin, the whole lot collapsing into a supercritical mass when the thing hit the ground. To make any fission device work, you need to bring the subcritical parts together with sufficient energy – the idea here would be a high altitude release and supersonic impact. Even if you didn’t get a nuclear explosion, you would still be more likely to get a horrible supercritical mass than with the explosive type of bomb.
However, a home made terrorist nuclear device PROBABLY would not work, and would essentially be a dirty bomb. Given that uranium isn’t all that dangerous, this is not the grave threat it is made out to be.
Possible, but very unlikely. Instead of worrying about unlikely things, it would make more sense to go after principally the far more plausible (since easy) type of attack such as water supply poisoning, infrastructure disruption and conventional bombing.
I’d see it as more not being paranoid or assuming AQ has the capability of a state. Whilst AQ and similar organisations are not exactly neutered, it is reasonable to say they are much less of a threat than previously, and of course increased vigilance by various western governments makes it all the harder for them to do much. You will of course still get things like the Madrid train bombings, but they are less likely now than before – although far more likely than nuclear attacks or another 9/11.
Having said that, American security is still rudimentary compared to the kind of things European governments have been doing for a long time. Still, we’ve had to do that kind of thing over here for years & are pretty much used to it. Terrorism was not invented on 9/11 and Europe has been living with it for several decades.
As I suspect America will discover soon enough, it is very hard to defeat and you cannot go on indefinitely spending billions on homeland security for no real result.
EG