A half-remembered phrase from a short story by C S Forester is lodged in my mind. The story is set in World War II. Some sort of British warship has to approach very near an enemy-occupied coast, do something or other heroic, and then get away before the German artillery can do its work. The ship, under the guidance of its iron-nerved captain, does so, and then – futzed if I can remember the details – stops or delays to do something else, to serve some side order of military misery to go with the main dish, the captain having calculated that it will take a certain amount of time for the defenders to wake up, realise this is for real, get orders and crank up the guns or whatever. Everyone else on the bridge makes their estimate of how long all this will take erring on the side that one does generally err on when the penalty for error on the other side is to be shot at by artillery, but the captain makes his estimate the way he would from his armchair at home. His bold guess is right, and the ship gets away. And then comes the phrase that shows clear among the fog of my other memories of this story: those watching on the bridge were awed by his sheer will to do the enemy harm.
I dare say in WWII there were many people, ordinary people, who really did spend a substantial fraction of their time thinking up ways to hurt the Axis. No doubt most of them ended up bombarding the War Office with absurd plans and inventions that came to nothing, but some of them found ways that worked. It must be rather interesting to live in a time and a place where it is good to let the will to harm the enemy run free.
We in Greater Europe do live in such a time and place. Don’t get excited. I am not advocating violence. In fact I get a little disturbed when Tim Worstall, the blogger whom I am about to quote, makes his customary appeal for a hempen rope and a strong beam. But when I read on his blog about this latest measure from the EU, all I could think was harm them. Bring them down. Please, I would be grateful.
I agree. It was also very wise to put in the bit about not advocating violence, because I was quite upset about this earlier this afternoon!
I do think it’s time for the libertarian community to move beyond blogging and into other (legal) ways of attacking leftism/statism. I’m not sure if a blog comments post is the place to do it though.
Sadly, I think the reply to your request is contained in the comments to DISCUSSION POINT XXVIII. I find it somewhat disheartening that a significant fraction of the comments on this site view the EU 4th Reich as something inherently good that just needs fine tuning to make it more efficient.
I admit that I am feeling more pessimistic than normal, given that we have our own ….. questionable regime about to be installed with concurrent damage to the Constitution and the survival of liberty worldwide.
I offer the further thought that as hard as it may be to find a place to go to; if fighting is not possible, flight is the only alternative to submission.
Making your assets as liquid and portable would be a good thing, as would considering alternate routes out.
Subotai Bahadur
Now they’re getting nasty. Stuff like this makes me wish I’d chosen to specialise in networking.
Blocking/circumventing this would be easy enough. An additional thing would be to now avoid any EU-made security software in case they’re forced to add a backdoor (although it would be economic suicide for them to). Opera Mini would help too (not because they couldn’t add a backdoor, but because i think they’d have a few more problems identifying you).
That’s not really the point, though. Yet another gross intrusion into our lives, and never one with such potential for abuse.
What would someone find if they scanned my PC right now, looking for anything law-breaking? Well, thanks to me reporting a user on another site for some disgusting photographs, they’d find some nasty stuff in my cache. Perhaps they’d find i’d visited some torrent sites, and grab me on suspicion of downloading something.
I reckon everyone has something illegal in their PC somewhere, be it an MP3 file copied from CD, a copyrighted image, or a 10GB file of bank account details, whatever. This is essentially eliminating the idea of the innocent citizen completely – if they want you, they can get you.
This little paragraph :
will be watered down pretty quickly – now they’re just trying to establish a precedent. Remove/redefine the word ‘serious’ and you’re done.
The defense against breaching freedom/privacy in this extraordinary manner would presumably be that it is in the “greater good”, and, given the Muslim terrorism that seems so rife in the UK, it is arguably not unreasonable. Thus these people – the police and other government-appointed authorities who have been assigned the job of maintaining national security – would generally be acting in the interests of the public good.
One could feel safer in the knowledge that they are doing this – and it could be a strong deterrant. Would the man on the Clapham omnibus be too concerned about it? Maybe yes, and especially so if he felt that he had something to hide. However, if it was seen to be in defence of his security, then he might find it acceptable.
Under these circumstances, harming or wishing harm upon the perpetrators of a perceived privacy/freedom infringement – and before it has even taken place – would seem to be a limbic response – one that, I suspect, even the man on the Clapham omnibus could well be concerned about.
Relax, Pedant. A commenter called Jack Coupal on the previous thread said, ‘Supposedly, when Ronald Reagan was president, he started off each day with the thought: “What can I do today to weaken the Soviet Union?”‘
I really do detest apologists where my rights are being infringed.
The question should not be whether being technically able to hack into PC’s is possible, but whether to do so outside of judicial oversight is acceptable.
Each and every authoritarian regime throughout history have always begun their reign of terror by first removing the role of the state and its agents from oversight and scrutiny by the judiciary.
If a ‘senior officer’ has enough ’cause’ to wish to hack a PC, then put it before a judge and obtain a warrant. Then at least it may carry some more weight that the rights of the many are being protected.
If Tim disturbs you, be careful about going to visit The Devil at his kitchen; it will probably scar you for life! 😉
I call my brand of libertarianism Prosecessionism, and now would be a good time for some party in UK (Hello, Conservatives?) to move Britain away from EU. So what if it has never been done before?
Could Britain survive outside Europe? Well, Switzerland seems to be doing alright, so why not the United Kingdom?
Pedant @ 10:36 AM
There might be grounds for the public accepting this intrusion if they believed that it was being used to fight Muslim terrorism. However, this is Britain under Labour. This is the government that denies that such a thing as Muslim or Islamic terrorism even exists, out of fear of stepping outside of the bounds of political correctness. The one thing that one can be assured of, is that this intrusion of the power of the state on the people will never be used against Muslims.
If you happen to want an election to validate the legitimacy of the PM and his government, or if you want to stroll in the vicinity of Parliament wearing a Guy Fawkes costume; you definitely are going to get the cyber-equivalent of a reaming. This is, after all, Britain where the will of the government and its minions is the highest law.
Subotai Bahadur
Somewhat over estimating hacking abilities of the police.
Is emigration a possibility? The fringes of Europe remain free of this Napoleonic/Hitlerian/Soviet entity… Croatia? Macedonia? Pray for the Poles and Czechs to take the lead on this… they’ve tasted the glories of bureaucratic centralism most recently. Perhaps Le Resistance begins in emigre communities outside the EU. It will of course, be necessary to resort to Aesopian language in this situation, since, as we all suspect, all communications may be “monitored for quality”… so, to ask it once, what does “Legal” really mean, “Under God”?
The trouble with lots of these governments is that we believe the spiel of ‘Government by the people’. This isn’t true- and it shouldn’t even be called ‘Democracy’. All our governments are by elected agents.
IF we still believe that governments are necessary, the best way to run them is to have all citizens time-share government functions- i.e. for one week, a citizen would enforce the law as a police-person (being retaught weapoms safety, etc.), and would then be allowed the next week to review existing laws and pass new ones (in conjunction with every other citizen who was on duty at this time.) Now that would be democratic government by the people! If another group of citizens repealed your laws, you could bring them back next time. Since you would take your weapons home with you for the rest of the year, an attempted coup should not be ever able to succeed!
I am proposing that if an adult wants to be a citizen, then a term in the militia would be required before you could share directly in law-making, and that this be required annually. Time-share government is an idea whose time is now.
Offtopic, but worth reading IMO:
http://www.saysuncle.com/archives/2009/01/02/but-guns-cause-murder/
(via Instapundit)
The state of North Dakota had 2 murders in 2008, neither of which was caused by gunshot… Guess how strict their gun laws aren’t…
For better or worse, “we” generally lack the edge of self-righteous “ends justifies the means” ideological shock troops of the collectivists.
America’s forefathers went to war for proximate reasons related to tax. They were willing to kill over theft, legal or otherwise.
Who here’s willing to kill for their tax money? Or the ever-present incremental attacks on their individual freedom?
I thought not.
“Don’t tread on me”!
Or what?
We’ll write and say harsh words? Bitch about the Constitution, natural law, or inalienable rights of man?
In my opinion it is frustration over this fact that causes so many on the “Right” to be so fervent about foreign affairs and turn it into an end in and of itself, because at least “there” they’re willing to bust some heads.
I think a good first approach would be to ask “Is it possible for an opposition parties accounts to be accessed via this method”? After all there was a fair stink about an English MP who had his office raided.
As much as I hate to say it there will have to be 2 sets of arguements made.
One for those of a leftish persuasion “The fascists want to get the MP3s you downloaded and give it to the companies”.
And one for those on the right “They want to censor right news outlets”!
Neither of these positions have to be spoken together as you will lose 50% of your target audiance straight away. So one spokesman/shell organisation for one set of statements and a completely different one for the other. If this is seems dishonest so f@cking what. Its not a game and it needs to be played as hard as you can.
There has been one loon in Australia, an invalid pensioner, who set himself up as spokesman for an organisation. The fact that the organisation consisted of just him and some chickens sisnt matter to the media, who printed his every allegation as gospel as he made a convinient “cut out” for them to use.
Pull stunts, get a knowledgeable hacker and invite a reporter from the gaurdian and the daily mail to come along as you knock on MPs doors and ask to inspect their computers for anything unsavory. That would be cheap, easy and expose some of the promoters of this bill.
Far from me to suggest that a hacker might actively seek to crack an MPs home PC and publish what they found…..if you know what I mean.
This is why it always amuses me when lefties from Europe whine about the Patriot Act. Yeah, it’s bad, but remove the log from your own eye first.
Alexistan
Your choices at this point are either to flee or fight, unless submission is your thing. For a short period of time, you may be able to use encrypted messages online; but eventually your GCHQ is going to turn their attention to those committing online thoughtcrime. The problem is that you will never know when that moment is.
I suggest cash purchases of some of the various books extant on tradecraft. And the setting up of cell structures for your organization. One thing you will have to understand; once you begin the process there will be no going back. Resistance to the State is a crime that is not forgiven. Further, you will have to figure out how to deal with those who, in what I believe is your idiom, have “gone grass”.
As this is done, the organizers have to have a clear idea of, and agreement on, their goals, means, and methods. Once you start it is too late to find yourselves at loggerheads over those.
In another thread, I mentioned General Karl von Clausewitz; specifically Vom Krieg, book I, Chapter 1, item #24. It can be taken multiple ways. What Clausewitz intended was to point out the necessity of having the political end goals of the use of force consonant with the decision to use force and the means thereof.
I also want to note that all forms of politics, regardless of the system, are ways of resolving differences and allocating power and resources without violence or at least with violence within mutually accepted bounds. If any political system fails, if one side ignores the rules and makes its own, the only recourse is to the underlying threat of force. This is an immutable law at least as ironclad as gravity. Failure to recognize this is to accept defeat and death.
As I have said before though, I do not see anyone in any Western European country willing to fight for liberty. Nor for life itself. In fact the only group I see in Europe who recognizes the relationship between politics and force are the Muslims.
This does not bode well for those who remain.
Subotai Bahadur
Every report of this I have read has comprehensively missed the point, assuming (1) there are new powers and (2) that they are to be attributed to the EU – both of which are false premises.
None of this is new. The power derives from the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2001. (And in essence is the same one that permits police to bug you without a warrant.) What’s new is the Home Office and ACPO have chosen to announce they’ll be doing more of it. The evidence they have the capacity is lacking. The announcement has a political purpose.
Nothing that the Council of Ministers has done affects what the Home Office policy is on spying on the public. It simply is an agreement to encourage cooperation between investigators in the vaguest terms. That may lead to some pernicious data-trafficking and surveillance policy laundering in due course, but there aren’t any powers created or legal consequences.
We simply do not know which member states were driving the decision, but if history is anything to go by, the British Home Office will have been in the vanguard, where intrusion upon privacy is concerned.
Pedant:
Then let them go and get a warrant. Let them go and find a neutral judge and demonstrate under penalty of perjury, that there is competent evidence of known providence that would lead a reasonable person to believe that some particular item of evidence of a serious crime is probably stored on a particular hard drive.
It shouldn’t be so damn difficult, unless the proponents are too stupid to live. (Entirely possible, with anybody with the word ‘chief’ in his job title…)
You might lay hands on a copy of a book called ‘The Secret War’, by Gerald Pawle, published in the US under (some other title). It tells the story of the department of the Admiralty which dealt with all of those odd suggestions that the public came up with during WW2 to ‘do the enemy harm’. This department was staffed by a ragtag collection of misfit officers from all walks of life, and itself came up with a stunning selection of unorthodox weaponry, much of it highly-effective against an enemy whose conventional planning had never considered such unconventional modes of attack.
Time, perhaps, for another appeal for unconventional means of subverting a serious threat to liberty.
llater,
llamas
Llamas, apparently the U.S. title of that book is “Secret Weapons of World War II,” and it does sound interesting. I shall add it to my list.
Also on that list is Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” It’s been the radical left’s “bible” for decades; we should be using their own techniques against them. (Another fun one is “The Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook,” by Claire Wolfe. I’m sure there are others.)
In her essay Natalie goes out of her way to pre-emptively assert that she is “not advocating violence.” If we’re not willing to even advocate (let alone personally employ) violence in the defence of our freedoms or property (MlR’s point is well taken), at the very least we should all be throwing as much sand into the government’s gears as is possible. Perhaps that’s a topic for another thread; I imagine that the collective Samazdatariat (is that the correct term?) could come up with a lot of very creative and effective non-violent resistance techniques.
I agree entirely Laird.
In this regard the humorlessness of our enemies(as anyone who’s ever spent any time on a university lately, for instance, should well know) is a critical vulnerability.
Give us 100 South Parks and we’ll be well on our way to talking the culture back.
@Sunfish:
I stand corrected. I think yours is the correct approach.
If we followed my approach, then we might have our freedoms taken from us as we slept.
I say this after reading this interesting item in Slashdot:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F06%2F0351202&from=rss
Now that is scary, if true.
Sunfish’s robust declaration about due process opens a further avenue of thought, and it is this:
When a person is accused, or even merely suspected, of some very-heinous crime, it is not too hard for John Q. Public to understand why that person should have the very fullest protection that the law provides – the presumption of innocence, the advice of counsel, reasonable bail, access to process to advance his defences, and so forth. If the penalty is very great, then the reasonable man thinks ‘this person should be given every opportunity to prove his innocence, lest we send an innocent man away in our zeal to punish those who do commit such crimes’.
But that concern on the part of the average citizen for the rights of the innocent has begun to erode very sharply, to the point where there are some areas of wrongdoing where mere accusation or suspicion is apparently more-than-enough reason to apply sanctions – sometimes very serious sanctions – to persons who have not been convicted of any crime and may never be. And the public is often just fine with that – no measure is too extreme if it stops drunk-drivers/child abusers/terrorists/wife-beaters and whichver-other particular group of sinners is in vogue today.
Asset forfeiture on ‘suspicion’ of a wide range of wrongdoing. Court orders based solely on the accusation of an alleged victim. Sanctions of all sorts triggered solely by the fact of being arrested upon certain charges. In the UK, summary stop-and search and stop-and-account powers which are often simply excuses for fishing expeditions. In the US, summary stop-and-account measures like check lanes, many also organized based upon flimsy pretexts and likewise used as fishing expeditions. Warrants served with the most extreme violence, which all-too-often appears to be intended as a punishment in-and-of-itself. And so forth.
The state and the authorities love this complacenecy, which they will always exploit to maximize their activities and (if left unchecked) to serve their organizational goals rather than their societal goals. We may see this in the UK, as for example in the zeal with which anti-terror laws are used to catch people who fail to recycle correc tly, or who try to send their children to the school they would prefer. Similarly in the US, where the ‘War on Drugs’ and similar hejirae have led to all sorts of assaults on individual liberties and the rights of the accused. It is especially-bad in the US because of the practice of ‘plea-bargaining’ has encouraged the criminal justice system to make the process of becoming embroiled in its tentacles so onerous (even when one has not been convicted of any offence, and oftentimes without even having been charged) that many people will ‘cop a plea’ to a lesser offence just to escape its clutches.
The tolerance of the public for these abuses of the presumed-innocent has been expanding for years, and shows no signs of abating. Especially in the UK, one can read daily stories of the most disproportionate excesses of law-enforcement against the obviously-innocent – many of them driven by the target-driven culture of the UK police, or by PC madnesses – and yet there is no grounswell of opinion for change. In the US, gross overcharging – with the proportionally-more-heavy extrajudicial sanctions that heavier charges bring – has now become a way of life, simply to make people plead to a lesser charge.
It’s all very troubling. Jefferson would be outraged, but we aren’t.
llater,
llamas
@Llamas
You put it pretty much how I would have said it – and thereby saved me the trouble. I hope you don’t mind if I use some/all of what you wrote!
The Orphan Works Bill going through approval (has it been approved?) in the US looks like an example of a loss of rights via what would essentially be a new form of legalised corporate theft. Good sound clip on it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqBZd0cP5Yc
By the way, that idiotic New Zealand copyright law that I referred to above is described here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/245/1050245/daft-kiwi-copyright-law-could-be-adopted
There is a petition/lobby against the law here:
http://creativefreedom.org.nz/
@Natalie Solent
I hate to say this, but I feel a limbic response coming on…
“America’s forefathers went to war for proximate reasons related to tax. They were willing to kill over theft, legal or otherwise.”
Taxation was only part of the cause.
The Founding Fathers went to war to defend “the rights of a freeborn Englishman”,the right to a jury trial,etc,etc.
Errr….didn’t Blair take that right away some years ago?
Lair,
It seems that “The Secret War” by Gerald Pawle will be republished and available on February 200 under the title “Wheezers and Dodgers: The Inside Story of Clandestine Weapon Development in World War II”.
Why the slavish devotion to the nonviolence fetish? What if the solution necessarily ends up being violent? While it’s not preferable, and should probably be a late if not last resort, there’s certainly precedent for it.
Is the story you are thinking of The Ship(Link)?
Perhaps you’ll approve of what Israel’s Foreign Minister replied when the Russians offered to pass on a message to Hamas:
“We are serious in our intention to harm Hamas and we have no intention to give them legitimacy and pass messages on to them. We have nothing to discuss with Hamas”
The only reasons I do not currently advocate using violence to defend domestic liberties are purely utilitarian: I do not think it would be effective at this particular time. I am certainly not a pacifist however.
Non-violence/pacifism?
As Pogo put it:
We would hate and harm ourselves for what we do to ourselves.
In a democracy such as this, even one so devalued, if you ever have the numbers necessary to justify, mount and sustain a violent revolution, there would be no need, for you could simply vote instead.
“…for you could simply vote instead.”
Never. I am not about to leave moral principles to the gamble of a majority, which cannot in any case determine a right.
Out of the question. To hell with that.
IWP wrote:
‘Lair,
It seems that “The Secret War” by Gerald Pawle will be republished and available on February 200 under the title “Wheezers and Dodgers: The Inside Story of Clandestine Weapon Development in World War II”.
I highly recommend it. The MonkeyWrench Gang had nothing on this lot. Their insouciant tales of travelling on the Tube with briefcases packed with high explosives would make the modern-day anti-terror coppers blanch.
And when you have done reading that, you might find yourself copies of two novels by Nevil Shute, entitled ‘Most Secret’ and ‘Landfall’. In his other life, Shute served as LtCdr N. S. Norway RNVR, attached to the DMWD – the Wheezers and Dodgers – and his novels tell the possibly-fictional stories of two of the projects he worked on while serving there. ‘Most Secret’ was embargoed by HMG until the later part of the war because its content was considered too suggestive of the realities of the planning for the resistance to Operation Sealion. ‘Landfall’ is said to be inspired (in part) by the developments which culminated (in part) in the Aphrodite programme of the USAAF and the untimely death, among others, of Joseph Kennedy Jr.
‘Landfall’ was made into a not-half-bad movie in 1949. Good luck finding a copy of it . . . .
llater,
llamas
In America, the will is building.
It is not happenstance that weapons are now dear, and ammunition is precious.
You in Britain should keep on exulting in the victory over the Eu attempts to impose metrics! The fact that you can now use imperial measures is a victory over conformity!
Just stating facts like this will do a lot to instill pride, and the subtle lesson against statism will slip quietly into their minds.
The story collection that Natalie is recollecting is called “Gold from Crete”; the verbatim quote is: “There was something fascinating and magnetic about their captain’s determination to do the enemy all possible harm.” It is, as you say, a memorable passage.
The collection, as with all Forester’s work, I highly recommend.
Hm. If this were happening in America, I’d invest some free cash in Smith & Wesson. Since it’s happening in the UK instead, I suppose I should invest the cash in Apple.