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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Samizdata quote of the day – when the state starts saying the quiet bit out loud “When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.
“Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”
– Shabana Mahmood (£), Britain’s Home Secretary, explicitly states she wants to turn the country into a panopticon, quite literally a prison.
Jeremy Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher and social theorist, promoted the Panopticon as a circular prison with a central inspection tower from which a single guard could observe all inmates all the time while unseen.
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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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As you say. Saying the quiet bit out loud. Everything inside the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
It seems to me that a fair question is: does all this snooping reduce crime or improve crime clearance rates in the UK?
* Total recorded crime: 2013 4 million, 2023 6.7 million.
* Violence “increased substantially over the last decade”
* Fraud, up 34% over past decade
* Total crime clearance rates 6.4%
* Sexual offence clearance rates 3.7%
* Theft clearance rate 6%
* Murder clearance rate 61% (which is to say you have about an even chance of getting away with murder)
And so forth (source is all from Gemini).
It almost makes you think that Benjamin Franklin was on to something:
Jeremy Bentham was a wrong ‘un, but at least the panopticon was for surveiling convicted felons not the unconvicted populace at large.
The modern version seems to be aimed solely at keeping the plebs under continuous observation by Big Brother in case they get ideas about rapid undiversifying of the newly arrived with pointy objects.
Advantage would be, it would free up more cops for tracking down your non-crime hate thingies.