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]
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Mr Obama’s administration has released documents about details of “harsh interrogation techniques” that were used, or considered acceptable to be used, to deal with suspected terrorists. What is interesting is that Mr Obama does not intend to prosecute those responsible. I guess the difficulty here is that Mr Obama does not want to be drawn into moves to prosecute and go after senior officials in the previous Bush administration. But if there are to be no legal consequences – assuming that the use of such powers is clearly illegal as well as wicked – then it is hard to see what can be gained by all this non-action by Mr Obama. If there is insufficient evidence to launch a prosecution of those who sanctioned its use, then they are entitled to have that fact known, since a stain will attach to their name otherwise. On the other hand, if there was authorisation of torture, then the fact of there being no prosecutions will send out a message that such behaviour will not be punished and can happen again. Is that what “hope and change” meant?
(Update: or maybe Mr Obama and some of his supporters fear that punishment of torturers could be used against Democrats in the future if officials in Democrat-led administrations ever sanction such techniques, or are suspected of so doing. Mr Obama and his party are not consistent civil libertarians.)
Torture, and its use, is one of those “canary in the mineshaft” issues for me; it shows a government has no respect for law. Any attempts to try and domesticate it and limit it under strict guidelines are likely to fail. As we are finding here at home in the UK, if you give governments powers, then they will use them, sooner or later, against innocent people.
As a side-note, I would add that while some of the venom directed at the Bush administration was partisan grandstanding, there is no doubt that part of it was driven by a real worry about where the US and other Western governments were headed. It is not remotely comforting that Mr Obama has taken the course he has. We cannot be confident that torture is off-limits under his administration, and nor should we be. It is not as if he has, for instance, abolished indefinite detention of terror suspects, despite the much-touted plan to shut down Gitmo.
Some earlier thoughts by me on this issue.
“There’s something deeply amusing about egalitarian snobbery and its assorted conceits. The functions of the welfare state apparently include saving unprofitable drama productions from a disinterested public. Mere commercial forces and popular appetite must not impede work of such tremendous cultural importance that no bugger wants to see it. There’s an inescapable arrogance in the assumption that a given artistic or theatrical effort should somehow circumvent the preferences of its supposed audience and be maintained indefinitely, at public expense, despite audience disinterest or outright disapproval. And when that same disinterested public forks out its cash voluntarily for something it wants to see, this is something to be sneered at and blamed on former Prime Ministers.”
David Thompson.
Gordon Brown and his pack of malignant ZaNulabour jackals do not deserve all this negative sentiment and opprobrium. No, really they don’t. They deserve far worse.
I regard ZaNulabour as just about the worst thing to happen to this country since the Black Death and I share Brian’s manifest and meritorious glee at the now-very-likely prospect of Mr. Brown (together with his toadies and his cronies and his aunts) being given their marching orders and sent packing off to political obscurity. If we lived in a more civilised world then this story would end with each and every one of them staring up at the glinting, merciless blade of Madame Guillotine. But we don’t, so I will have to content myself with some sincere and noisy expressions of satisfaction at their demise together with a toast to Guido Fawkes, who did so much to bring it about.
But, what then? What follows next after Mr. Brown and his minions have been given the big, national elbow? Well, in due course (and perhaps even short course) Mr. Brown will be replaced by Mr. Not-Brown. And what lessons will Mr. Not-Brown have learned from the rise and ignoble fall of Mr. Brown? He will have learned that you can relentlessly plunder the wealth-producing sector of the economy in order to provide booty for your clients and be regarded as a visionary leader. He will have learned that you can establish a pettyfogging, pecksniffing, bullying surveillance state and be called a great statesman. He will have learned that you can hack at a once-prosperous economy with punitive taxes and onerous regulations until said economy collapses in an anaemic heap and be praised as an economic genius. And, crucially, he will have learned that you can get away with doing all of that, as long as you observe parliamentary protocols and refrain from seeking to smear your political classmates. That is unacceptable.
So Mr. Not-Brown has had his very simple manifesto handed to him on a plate, courtesy of his predecessor. All Mr. Not-Brown has to do is to pledge to ‘clean up’ politics and put a stop to all this lack of propriety and he is home and hosed. He doesn’t even have to keep his pledge because everyone will be so relieved that Mr. Not-Brown is not Mr. Brown that they will believe him. They will want to believe him and so he will get a free pass to do pretty much whatever takes his fancy. All Mr. Not-Brown has to do (for a couple of years at least) is to make sure that his toadies and his cronies and his aunts keep their cards closer to their chests while they get on with what everybody agrees to be the praiseworthy and important business of stamping on our faces.
In the fullness of time, Mr. Not-Brown will also be humbled by some scandal or other (brought to light, I am sure, by Guido) but by then he will have had his fun and he will shuffle away only to hand the baton of national-ruin over to Mr.Not-Not-Brown.
I am already celebrating the unfolding ZaNulabour train wreck and I cannot begin to tell anyone just how pleased I will be to finally see the back of them. But my joy is tempered with the melancholy realisation that a change of government on the basis of sleaze means no real change at all.
Once I was born a British citizen, and enjoyed the suzerainty of a long-standing liberal democracy. I knew my liberties as they were embedded in common law and understood the rights and privileges which were my birthright. This was a common culture that was shared in many forms by my fellow pupils at school, by my family and by those who desired to make this country their home.
In 1997 I was still a citizen. Now I am a subject: not a subject of the Crown but the subject of a new beast, one that stretches from Whitehall to Brussels. Roger Scruton has defined a subject as follows:
Subjection is the relation between the state and the individual that arises when the state need not account to the individual, when the rights and duties of the individual are undefined or defined only partially and defeasibly, and where there is no rule of law that stands higher than the state that enforces it.
This is a contentious argument, but our rights are overdetermined and overdefined on paper, arbitrary in exertion, incompetent in execution. Moreover, the European Union under the Treaty of Lisbon confers the authority of a bureaucratic state based upon a law no higher than itself, which can annul and strike out all rights, as power overrides law.
In practice, bureaucratic accretions, quangos and the vomit of regulation have encouraged a culture of subjection. This may have roots prior to New Labour but it acquired its final flowering under this pestilent regime, and discarded the final brakes upon its power: demanding that we are subject to them, civil servants in name, masters in form. ID cards, databases, surveillance and dependency.
The final transition can never be dated. It is not in the interests of the Tories to row back on such change, as they will lose the power that they have looked upon so enviously for a decade. So, when I vote in 2010, I will know that we are each capable of acting responsibly as a citizen, but we are now viewed as subjects, to be feared and controlled.
You probably missed it, because how the hell can anyone keep up with this stuff? But, I just happened to chance upon a couple of comments (numbers 269 and 276) on this at Guido’s, both of which had, copied and pasted into them, this:
Downing Street in ‘meltdown’
PRWeek – David Singleton 15-Apr-09
Downing Street was this week in ‘meltdown’ as Gordon Brown’s inner circle attempted to limit the fallout from the Damian McBride scandal.
Well-placed sources told PRWeek there was mounting fear in the heart of Downing Street that fresh revelations about senior MPs could emerge over the next few weeks and months leading up to the general election.
Brown’s close lieutenants such as Ed Balls, Tom Watson and Ian Austin are all believed to be vulnerable. It is feared fresh stories could be revealed by the handful of journalists who were fed negative stories by the Brown camp – or as a result of further emails that were sent to Labour blogger Derek Draper being made public.
One Downing Street insider said there had been ‘endless conference calls and crisis meetings’ since the story of McBride’s plans to smear senior Tories broke on Saturday.
The source added: ‘This is a full on disaster for Gordon – Downing Street is in meltdown. But it is more of a problem for Brown’s inner circle than it is for the Government more broadly.
‘The great fear of Brownites is that all of their activities over many years are suddenly now at risk of spilling out. It is an open secret that Gordon’s operation has been carrying out character assassinations, leaking documents and briefing against ministers and so on, but nobody has ever caught them red handed – until now. Now they have been caught out, it becomes legitimate to talk about all the other occasions.
‘It is a bit like getting Al Capone on his tax returns; it is actually one relatively minor misdemeanour – by no means are those emails the worst thing that Brown’s operation has ever done.’
Another source with close links to Downing Street said the PM’s defence was looking increasingly fragile: ‘Brown has had to stake his defence on this being a rogue operation, a single aberration that nobody else knew anything about.
‘The worry is that someone will produce evidence that it went much wider than this handful of emails and it went much wider than McBride.’
Which they will, because it did.
In short, matters are developing exactly as I told you they would in this posting. Brown’s ludicrous claim not to believe in dirty tricks has turned this from a few dogs chasing a small smear of dirt (The Emails and who knew what about them and whether anyone had tried to spread the particular smears in them) into a thousand dogs swimming happily in a quarter of a century of liquified shit, and now, too late, Downing Street realises it. But, like I say, it’s too late.
These people are smart enough to realise the terminal mess they are now in. Good. Nobody is smart enough to extricate them from it. Good again.
It occurs to me, reading this item about the decision by the authorities not to prosecute Damian Green, the Conservative MP, over his farcical arrest, that they decided that picking on this guy now that the UK government is in such a terrible mess might not be a runner. The police/Crown Prosecution Service might have been more confident of doing the government’s bidding when the government appeared all powerful. Now, I get the impression that in Whitehall, and across much of the government machine, arses are being covered, positions prepared. The police have probably woken up to the idea that soon, perhaps sooner than some imagine, their masters will be different, if only by political colouring.
This is how regimes die. Their toadies and functionaries start to turn on them.
Meanwhile, I wonder if we can persuade our American blogger friends to notice that the government of a G7 nation and NATO ally is, er, about to implode. I mean, I think that might even be of interest to The Community Organiser. Or maybe not.
Classic:
“I take full responsibility for what happened. That’s why the person who was responsible went immediately.”
This ridiculous Prime Minister of ours can’t now string two sentences together without talking drivel. If sentence one is true, then he is resigning, as Guido’s commenters are already queueing up to point out. But sentence two says he isn’t. Not yet, anyway.
The BBC gets a lot of flak from right-wing bloggers, but the BBC is now objectively anti-Brown. Just by solemnly reporting everything that this ghastly and now absurd man says, with or without any further comment, they are destroying him.
Brown’s problem, to spell it out, is that he created the atmosphere within which The Emails were exchanged, and we all know it. He has been a dirty trickster all his adult life. Yet, again and again, he is now taking every opportunity he gets to deny this universally known truth. Not only he is a liar, which in politics is very forgiveable. He is an obvious liar.
The BBC’s caption under the video of Brown’s latest bout of self-strangulation says this:
Mr Brown said he was working to clean up British politics
LOL. In fact that is my LOL of the month so far.
You probably read all this first everywhere else, the exact same quotes and the exact same complaints, but I don’t care. This is a chorus now. Maybe Instapundit, who does read Samizdata and link to it from time to time, will finally work out what’s happening over here (a libertarian blogger is destroying a Prime Minister) and copy out a chunk of something relevant and comprehensible. Here would be an excellent place to look.
See also: this.
The complaint now being widely voiced, referred to in passing in his recent posting about the nuclear ambitions of Iran by our own Johnathan Pearce, is that bloggers like me droning on and on about this Smeargate saga are perhaps falling into the trap of taking the contents of the “Westminster Village” (see also: “Westminster Bubble”) somewhat too seriously. There is, said JP, a world out there, as indeed there is. And blow me down if JP, just as I was finalising the links in what follows, put up yet another Smeargate-related posting here with one of those very same phrases, “Westminster Village”, right there in the title.
So, why this fascination? Why do I and so many other bloggers just now seem able to blog about little else?
Where to start? One place to start is by saying that, while this Westminster Bubble-stroke-Village indeed shouldn’t be that important, it actually is very important. The people inside it dispose of at least half our money. Arguably, given recent financial events, they are now disposing of just about all of it. They are the people who must give their attention – if they have any to spare from their smearing of each other and of anyone else whom they take against – to such things as the nuclear ambitions of Iran.
A classic tactic of our current gaggle of rulers, when they are caught out doing something wicked, is to let the complaints about whatever piece of nastiness they just did rumble on for a day or two, but then to say: okay, okay, enough. Now we must “move on”. We mustn’t be obsessed with the Westminster Village, the Westminster Bubble. For yes indeed, these very phrases make up one of the key memes that is used by our present government to protect itself from sustained scrutiny. If like me you drone on about their latest petty atrocity, this means that you are indifferent to all the other ills of the world and want those to continue and get even worse, is their line.
And indeed, if I thought that this current government was doing anything good, I might see the force of this argument. As it is, even the few vaguely good, maybe, perhaps, things that the Government is now attempting, concerning various “reforms” of the sort favoured by the likes of James Purnell, will only serve to discredit such reforms in the future, and in the meantime they will be bungled. The only thing I want this government now to do is drop dead, not just because of Smeargate, but because of, well, everything.
With far greater force, as was appropriate to a far greater evil, I felt this about the old USSR. The USSR, I believed, was smashable, and I believed this before it was actually smashed. I further believed, during the 1980s, that smashing the USSR was one of the very few big yet almost unambiguously good things that the world then was capable of administering to itself. Magic buttons in politics are rare, but here was one. The USSR, then and ever since it had begun, blighted everything. Nothing else could be effectively dealt with until it was dealt with. All the other problems (notably Islamic terrorism) were being inflamed by that one big problem, namely the apparently relentless arm-wrestling that then dominated world politics, between the USSR and the civilised world. And, to repeat, that one big problem, the continuing existence of the USSR, had one huge advantage over most other problems then or since. It was fairly easily solvable. The USSR was worth breaking because, in the word of Gordon Gecko, it was breakable. A few more well-aimed shoves and over it would crash. Accordingly, I and all other anti-Soviet elements at that time brandished whatever weapons we could find at that evil empire, threw whatever mud at it that came to hand. In my case that meant writing and publishing little pamphlets about such things as how the USSR was both worthy of being broken and breakable. (I probably contributed even more by have an unusual surname and a father, “Sir Robert” if you please, who was once upon a time in MI6. What else was I doing? Nothing as it happened. But they didn’t know that.)
In my recollection, nobody accused all us anti-Soviets at that time of being obsessed with the “Moscow Bubble”, but we were certainly accused of being obsessed with the USSR, and told that there was a world out there, full of “real problems”, and that we should stop being so monomaniacal about just the one mere government, disagreeable though it was. I agreed entirely about all those other problems, but believed that a huge step in the right direction, a huge step towards making all those other problems that little bit easier to get to grips with, would be to sweep the USSR from the board. Just smash it to rubble. I rejoiced then when that was done. I rejoice still that it was done. The post-Soviet news agenda hasn’t been a hundred per cent good, but it would take a month of blog postings to even begin to count all the ways in which the USSR’s collapse has made the world a better place.
On a far smaller scale and in a history-repeating-itself-as-farce kind of way, I now feel the same thing about the Gordon Brown government. Yes, there are a thousand problems out there that the British government and the wider British political debate ought to be addressing. Of course there are. And I will continue to try to find time and brain-space to blog about them too, just as I often wrote about other things besides the desirability of smashing the USSR during the 1980s. I would be very sorry if all other Samizdatistas were as monomaniacally fascinated by Smeargate as I now find that I am, and note with satisfaction that they are not. Nevertheless, here is a battle that both should be won and can be won. Quite soon now, it will be won. And the sooner it is won, and the more completely and dramatically and unforgettably it is won, the better. Once it is, we can all get back to arguing about all the other important stuff, without the chaos that is this present government screwing everything up, by the simple, sordid fact of its continuing existence.
So now, about that Derek Draper fellow …
A comment on this posting made me think that our US/non-UK readers value this blog’s coverage of the whole business of the scandals now hammering the UK government on a daily basis. As Iain Dale, the political blogger, said the other day, we are entering a period not unlike the fag-end of Richard Nixon’s time in power, with Gordon Brown playing the Nixon role, and his various acolytes, toadies and henchmen in the various roles of shit-stirrers and frighteners.
Another day, another twist. A few months ago, a Conservative MP, Damian Green, was arrested by anti-terrorism officers after he had received material, concerning illegal immigration, that was leaked to him by a civil servant. Some of the material claims that illegal immigrants have managed to get jobs that bring them close to the very heart of government. Whatever you think about immigration – I am a defender of free migration BTW – this is a legitimate issue for a politician to make a fuss over.
Yesterday, a committee of MPs concluded that the use of such anti-terrorism powers was grossly excessive. You don’t say. Of course, not all aspects of Mr Green’s behaviour, or indeed that of the civil servant, are above reproach. But given that journalists, MPs and other potential “whistle-blowers” on public problems cannot do their job unless leaks occur, it does seem rather rich for a Labour-led government to operate in this way. But they just love their anti-terrorism powers, do they not? Just ask the government of Iceland.
I must admit that in recent days I have tried to post stories that take one out of the Westminster Village, not simply because I wonder whether this is a bore, but because reading constantly about the doings of Gordon Brown and his circle makes me want to take a shower to feel clean and human again.
Update: Damian Green will not be prosecuted. It should never have come to this. The position of the Speaker of the House of Commons, a product of the Labour thugocracy from Scotland, is untenable.
Further thoughts on the vileness of the government from Fraser Nelson in The Spectator, which also has a picture of Guido Fawkes on the front cover. Question to Paul Staines: when do we get the movie?
The American Tea Parties were a huge success. Just go visit Glenn Reynolds for a great roundup with links, stills and videos.
Onwards to July 4th!
Reader ‘CountingCats’ reports that the next developmental stage of the Polywell fusion device has been funded.
Now let us cross our fingers, and perhaps the more religious among us do their thing, that the next scale up version continues to show positive results. If it does, then we will have plenty of cheap energy at the top, from small local power stations, as well as at the bottom.
God, this is an interesting time to be alive!
We are approaching the days of magic, the long ago predicted days when computing and electronics technology ceases to be visible and vanishes ‘into the walls’. One of the key solutions required for that disappearance is in the process of being solved.
If you are going to have an ‘intelligent environment’ around you, the computing elements involved must not only be small but they must have a source of energy. If we are truly talking about ubiquitous computing, there will be thousands of nodes in a home, millions in a neighborhood, billions in a town or city. You cannot feasibly wire them to external power and you can also not have thousands of folk running about changing a billion batteries every week or two.
That is where environmental energy scavenging comes in and it is not a future technology. It is here and several different types are purchase-able off the shelf from AdaptivEnergy, Texas Instruments and others. The systems work by picking up small amounts of energy from vibration, tiny amounts of ambient light, temperature differences and even the broadcasts from the local TV station.
Some applications are already in use for sensors in factory environments but the threshold is nigh where applications will move into businesses and homes. Tiny gadgets that you install and then forget about because they just keep doing their job for year after year with no maintenance, no battery changes, no replacements and no attention. They will effectively become invisible adjuncts to daily life.
According to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. We are just about to cross that threshold.
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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.
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