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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The following editorial was published in the latest Economist:
The ability to recognise people automatically by analysing bodily characteristics such as fingerprints, faces and eyeballs – collectively known as biometrics – has long been a goal of technologists and governments alike.
Plans for large-scale projects to incorporate biometric scans into passports, ID cards and visas are now under way in several countries. From January 5th, America will begin scanning foreigners from particular countries as they arrive at its airports. Both America and Europe plan to start issuing biometric passports as soon as next year. Biometric ID cards are being adopted in Hong Kong and Oman, and Britain plans to follow suit. Politicians seem to be transfixed by the technology.
Typical was the recent declaration by David Blunkett, Britain’s home secretary, that biometrics “will make identity theft and multiple identity impossible – not nearly impossible, impossible”. This claim is absurd. Current biometric technology is not the answer to the world’s security fears.
→ Continue reading: Economist throws doubt on the current value of biometrics
Says Dave Barry of this apprehended spamster: “Let’s see how large his penis is.” Ho ho. And I know the feeling. I’m sure we all do.
A man alleged to be one of the world’s most notorious spammers was arrested yesterday in North Carolina, accused by Virginia prosecutors of falsifying the origin of e-mails that pitched low-priced “penny” stocks and home-mortgage schemes.
Jeremy Jaynes, also known as Gaven Stubberfield, of Raleigh, was charged with four felony counts as prosecutors seek to increase the heat — by bringing criminal penalties — on spammers for deceptive e-mail marketing.
The case marks the first time Virginia’s criminal provisions for spam have been invoked.
This anti-spamming activity has to be watched, I say, precisely because so many people are crying out for it, flaming torches in hand. What if they make a law which ends up making my Brian’s Fridays list illegal? This is the one that gets you invited to my last Friday of the month soirées. You know, just to make sure they get all the bad people. There are lots of complaints doing the rounds already that what Europe is doing about spam now is not enough.
They wouldn’t do that! Of course not. Ah but they might. More realistically, what they might do is make Brian’s Fridays list a bit illegal (like, I have to “register” it or something), and then they do me for not registering it when I say something truly hurtful about them, on a completely different subject. Or, I get scared that this might happen and refrain from my criticising. And other potential nuisance makiers do the same.
I really have no idea whether this will work or not. But whether it triumphs or bombs (so to speak), I think this is probably Europe’s biggest story today. Certainly it’s the most portentous for Europe’s long term future.
Muslim headscarves and other religious symbols are almost certain to be banned from French schools and public buildings after a specially appointed commission told the government yesterday that legislation was needed to defend the secular nature of the state.
The 20-member group, appointed by President Jacques Chirac and headed by the national ombudsman, Bernard Stasi, recommended that all “conspicuous” signs of religious belief – specifically including Jewish skullcaps, oversized Christian crosses and Islamic headscarves – be outlawed in state-approved schools.
La France! You’re either part of it, or not, and not is not an option. (By the way, I love that France’s “national ombudsman” is called “Stasi”. You truly wouldn’t dare to make that up.) And since the French state and its doings are just about the most important thing in France, what the state ordains is a very, very big deal.
Meanwhile, here in the lackadaisical old UK, we don’t do anything very much to ensure that the U bit continues to happen. (See also my previous posting immediately below.) We just do to our human imports whatever we would have done anyway. We show them the Premier League, Coronation Street, the All New Top of the Pops (yes Samizdata is always at the cutting edge of what the youngsters are excited about) on the telly, and if they want to join in fine. If not, fine also. That’s how things are done in Britain. We just squirt all over them the general joy and misery of being British, and they swallow it or shake it off to taste. Whatever these soon to be ex-newcomers do to fit in, or don’t do, we then decide to be a Great British Tradition.
It will be interesting to see which of these two profoundly contrasting methods does the business better. And when I say “interesting” I really do mean interesting. I don’t mean I’ve already decided but want to hedge my bets, I mean I really will be fascinated to see how these two dramas work themselves out. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to live to be a hundred and fifty, to see how it all turns out.
Both approaches have their extreme hazards. Both could work out well.
What’s the French for fingers crossed?
Arts & Letters Daily links to this article by Leo Marx in the Boston Review. Here are its first two paragraphs [their italics in our bold]:
When I was teaching in England in 1957, Richard Hoggart, a founder of the British school of cultural criticism, told me about having met a young Fulbright scholar who identified himself as a teacher of something called “American studies.” “And what is that?” Hoggart asked. An exciting new field of interdisciplinary teaching and research, he was told. “But what is new about that?” It combines the study of history and literature. “In England we’ve been doing that for a long time,” Hoggart protested. “Yes,” said the eager Americanist, “but we look at American society as a whole – the entire culture, at all levels, high and low.” Hoggart, who was about to publish The Uses of Literacy, his groundbreaking study of British working-class culture, remained unimpressed. After a moment, in a fit of exasperation, his informant blurted out: “But you don’t understand, I believe in America!”
“That was it!” Hoggart said to me, “then I did understand.” It was unimaginable, he dryly added, that a British scholar would ever be heard saying, “I believe in Britain.”
Of course it could just be coincidence, but I reckon this contrast does illustrate rather nicely the power of academic ideas.
Britain is now ruled by an elite which is busily breaking it into fragments and melting them into the European Union. I’m not saying that this is necessarily as terrible an idea as some writers here think it is (although personally I think it’s a pretty bad one), but it is nevertheless beyond denial that this is what they are doing.
The USA, on the other hand, is still very much together.
Granted, in 1957 there was a lot less Britain to believe in than there was, or still is, USA, but still …
On the other hand, I dare say that “American Studies” perhaps now means something rather different to what it meant in 1957.
The President does not want to end slavery. The Congress does not want to end slavery. But the Lord God Jehovah wants to end slavery, and slavery shall come to an end.
– The father (a bishop) of Orville and Wilbur Wright, just when the Civil War was getting started. Check out the context in this fascinating Friedrich Blowhard posting, about that, but mostly about the aviation achievement of the Wright brothers.
In the week of the increasingly embarrassing Turner Prize, here (I found it via these people) is news of some art that Samizdata can really get behind:
Since 1998 Italian artist Antonio Riello has been making very special weapons as artworks. Assault rifles, pistols, machine guns, carbines, sub-machine guns, hand grenades, rocket launchers and any kind of contemporary military guns are restyled by the artist as high fashion accessories for sophisticated ladies.
And for a certain sort of gentleman, I’m guessing. (Although those ball and chain things at the top of the picture collection don’t look to me like they’re for self defence at all.)
Weapons from all over the World are used: American M16, Russian Kalashnikov, Israelian UZI, Italian Beretta and many others. Recently also armours in steel, plastic and Kevlar are made to protect ladies against urban dangers.
Globalisation. Good.
In this artproject the glamour of fashion system is mixed with the common perverse and morbid fascination for weaponry.
Yeah yeah. They have to say that.
These works – made using leopard skins, brightly lacquered colours, jewels, furs, trendy fabrics and special technological appliances – play along the thin line between fashion and trash.
Miami Vice aesthetics you might say.
LADIES WEAPONS are a sort of hybrids born from the most outstanding contemporary Italian features: the obsession for personal security and the passion for elegance and fashion.
I would have preferred passion for personal security and obsession for elegance and fashion, but like I say, they have to say that guns are bad. This is Italy remember, not Arizona.
Every artwork has a name of a woman (“CLAUDIA”, “TAMARA”,….) and exists only in one exemplar.
Where is allowed the artist uses real weapons, in the countries where is forbidden artworks are based on perfect replicas.
“Where is allowed.” There’s your problem. And of course, “perfect replicas” are only allowed “where is allowed” also. This art is presumably illegal wherever replica guns are flaunted in places “where is not allowed”. Oh well, it all adds to the buzz.
My guess is that the Art Nazis, to coin a phrase, won’t allow this stuff to qualify, because it is itself far, far too “obsessive” about guns to be allowed into polite Euro-society. As “art”, it will never catch on. It’s typical Euro-trash half-baked goodness/uselessness, in other words. More work is needed.
This guy should stop titting about with “only in one examplar” nonsense, go to America, and mass produce these things. Forget art. Embrace the gun culture, and help to make it (even more) fashionable.
When he gets there, he will course have to deal with the fact that in America they presumably have a lot of this kind of kit already, selling healthily (not to say obsessively), with no thought of art at all.
(By the way, and flying off at somewhat of a tangent, “Art Nazis” is a phrase I recently invented, which I think may have a future. I say invented, but I googled for it after thinking of it for myself, and I did find this use of the phrase, to describe the idiot/villain art critic at the centre of Tom Wolfe’s splendid little book The Painted Word.)
Those wacky guys at b3ta.com, or one of their many photoshopping friends, did a paranoid, Robocopish rethink of how speed cameras might soon be operating. The pictures may still be there (left hand side – scroll down) but will soon be gone if they aren’t gone already. It’s that kind of site.
If you can’t find anything speed camera related, I’ve stuck the pictures up on my Culture Blog, so that White Rosers can give the matter some more prolonged thought. (I don’t think I’m allowed to stick up pictures here, which is probably a good thing.)
Today’s NYT on moves to restrict freelance surveillance:
CHICAGO
WHAT grabbed my attention,” said Alderman Edward M. Burke, “was that TV commercial when the guy is eating the pasta like a slob, and the girl sends a photo of him acting like a slob to the fiancée.”
The commercial, for Sprint PCS, was meant to convey the spontaneity and reach afforded by the wireless world’s latest craze, the camera phone. But what Mr. Burke saw was the peril.
“If I’m in a locker room changing clothes,” he said, “there shouldn’t be some pervert taking photos of me that could wind up on the Internet.”
Accordingly, as early as Dec. 17, the Chicago City Council is to vote on a proposal by Mr. Burke to ban the use of camera phones in public bathrooms, locker rooms and showers.
Trouble is, how are such infringements to be detected?
Most will assume this to be a surveillance debate. But might it instead not be a ‘too many laws’ debate? I have in mind a world in which everyone will break the surveillance laws routinely, but only Enemies of the People will be prosecuted for it. Just wondering.
Robert Mugabe, that noted expert on the alleviation of Third World poverty, has been holding forth at a UN meeting in Geneva about the Internet. He may have left the Commonwealth, but he hasn’t lost any of his certainty of his own rightness and wonderfulness.
Here is my favourite bit of this BBC report:
He said there was no point in providing poor people with computers unless they were also given electricity and a phone network to run them.
Good point. And come to that, what’s the point in people having computers if they are starving to death or being beaten up or killed by government thugs?
I also liked Mark Doyle’s nicely ironic final paragraph, inviting comparisons between the monster Mugabe and all the other tyrants down the years who have also been rather bad people …
Opposition leaders in Zimbabwe may condemn Mr Mugabe for acting oppressively at home; but here in Geneva, many delegates – whether they agreed with him or not – were impressed by a lively speech.
… but who have likewise softened their various blows by making lively speeches which impressed everyone, whether they agreed with them or not.
Another evening meal with a fellow Samizdatista, and out of it another question. The Samizdatista was Michael Jennings, and the question now is this:
If the cost of getting stuff into earth orbit is seriously reduced, what kinds of things will be done in space that are not done now?
I am not asking how this big price reduction will be contrived. (As I understand it, it’s either better rockets or a giant stepladder, but commenters: don’t bother with that please. As I recall, we’ve had that argument.) I am asking what the consequences will be if, as and when this reduction in cost is contrived.
The two big things done in earth orbit at the moment are, it seems, looking down on earth and seeing things (such as crops and crop diseases, military installations, urban growth, the weather), and: helping to send messages from earth persons to each other, via communications satellites. If that all gets cheaper, there will clearly be a lot more of it.
A reduction in the cost of getting stuff into near space will surely result in a surge of space tourism. Money must even now piling up in earth bank accounts, waiting for the day when day trips to space are available at, say, a million quid a throw.
If only because the increases in what is already going on will alone result in a far greater general human presence in earth orbit, it is to be presumed that many other activities will become possible and will follow.
So, what other things will soon be done in space that are hard or impossible to do on earth?
Switching off gravity on earth is hard, but contriving a vacuum is fairly easy by comparison, so vacuum based manufacture will accordingly still be easier to do on earth than in space. But just because switching off gravity where it is is so hard, going to where it isn’t may bring huge manufacturing benefits. In particular, Michael tells me, it may be far easier to make three rather than merely two dimensional computer chips (very desirable apparently) in zero gravity.
In general, nanotechnology, whatever that is exactly, is relatively easy to do in space, compared with other sorts of technology, on account of it being so small, and hence relatively cheap to get up there. What, in English, might nanotechnologists be able to do that they can’t do on earth, if earth orbit became as easy to get to as a desert is to get to now?
And another ‘in general’ is that, in general, anything involving space travel beyond earth orbit, whether manned or unmanned, will get massively easier to organise if the getting of stuff, human or mechanical, into orbit can be organised separately from the business of going beyond earth orbit. Or so it would seem to me. Two obvious applications? Space tourism beyond earth orbit (see above). And, filling the solar system with unmanned gadgets for looking at our neighbour planets in more detail than has hitherto been possible, in the manner of that gadget that plunged into Jupiter not so long ago, but more so.
Because of all this orbital activity, it is a sure bet that many space service industries will thrive, such as rubbish collection, which I assume to be quite an art in space. (Mishandle a piece of junk and it could vaporise you.) Will there be specialist construction companies? Specialist firms of spaceship cleaners? Where will the advertising industry fit in? Sponsors will surely be heavily involved in space? They’ll want their logos flashed about. Won’t they?
Back here on earth, much new activity will ensue in support of and in response to what is going on out there. There’ll be zero-gravity training courses for tourists, for media people, and for ceremonial visits by senior management and bigshot politicians. There will be vast new bureaucracies to process all the new information that will come flooding back to us, vast new industries made possible by those few magic components that can only be made in space. There’ll be …
Well, those thoughts were the result of about an hour of very casual cogitation. There must be cleverer answers to my question out there, and I’m looking forward to hearing a few of them.
Taxation is in the news just now in Britain, because the word is that Middle England is finally getting fed up with Gordon Brown and his relentless drizzle of sneaky tax increases and failure or refusal – it doesn’t really matter which, does it? – to keep a lid on public spending. Which is perhaps why, when I supped last night with Alex Singleton, we fell to talking about Tax Freedom Day. And I heard myself saying, the way you do, that there is another way to dramatise the scope and nature of the British tax burden, which is to ask: How many taxes does Britain now have?
Frankly I have almost no idea at all of what the answer to this question is, for Britain. But to ask it might achieve many benefits, I surmise. → Continue reading: How many taxes does Britain have?
There’s a Reason online article here, and comments about it all on the Reason blog here, about this:
One night a few weeks ago, I was half-watching a black-and-white, early ’60s episode of The Andy Griffith Show on TV LAND (Episode 60, “The Bookie Barber”), when, all of a sudden, the homespun wisdom of Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor touched on today’s heated debate over how to balance individual privacy with security. Andy responded to a suggestion by his deputy Barney Fife by saying: “You can’t ask a private citizen to become a police spy. It’s too dangerous. Something could go wrong.” The statement jolted me, and I thought, if only Sheriff Taylor had been there to offer this profound piece of advice to the Republicans and Democrats writing the USA PATRIOT Act.
Title III of the act, which contains provisions to counter money-laundering, requires a host of private businesses to become “police spies” on their customers. These little-known provisions of the much-talked about law draft a substantial number of private-sector employees as citizen soldiers in the war on terrorism as well as on the broadly-defined crime of “money laundering.”
Says commenter James Merrit:
A free people, empowering a government that acts consistent with the ideals of freedom, will have the minimum to fear from terrorists. It won’t be a perfect world, or a world without danger, but it will be the best we can hope for. We need to reject the fear-based policies and concentrate on freedom-based ones, starting as soon as possible. Do not empower the fascists; do not empower the socialists. We’ve seen where their roads lead. Empower those who uphold the principles of freedom in word and deed. Making a good start really is as simple as that.
We have similar money laundering stuff here in Britain as well, as David Carr explains.
And turning traders into government stooges has also been here a long time. If you buy a TV, the shop you buy it from has long wanted to know who you are so that it can tell the government and the government can check that you’ve got a TV license. If you refuse to say who you are, you are liable to end up not buying the TV, as Michael Yardley explains in the latest Spectator:
They changed tack. ‘You’ve got to give us your name and address or you can’t have the television.’ ‘But I’ve paid for it.’ ‘You can’t have it.’ At this point, perhaps I should have walked out of the shop with the television and risked prosecution for some unspecified offence in Kafkaesque Britain. I went for the less dramatic option. ‘Well, I’ll have my money back.’ The first response from the shop staff was that this was impossible. They backed down when I pressed the point. I was directed to ‘customer services’. A credit was made to my card. I left without a television. What a palaver.
Driving home, I thought back to the last time I had bought a television, ten years or more ago. I had a dim memory of being asked for my name and address ‘for the guarantee’. It wasn’t for that purpose, I now knew. It was a ploy to get the information for the faceless ones. …
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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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