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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Why are governments so deeply concerned to protect us all from pornography? Simple. To protect us from it properly, they have to watch it. Protecting us from savage debt collectors is not nearly so entertaining, so they don’t bother with that, even though the kind of savagery that can involve is much closer to being their real business.
Canadian civil servants have been condemned for inspecting sex shops and adult cinemas while apparently ignoring a flood of consumer complaints.
Ontario’s provincial auditor says the Ministry of Consumer and Business Services officials have carried out almost 1,600 inspections of adult video retail stores after claiming to have received eight complaints – none in writing.
Those inspections involved checking whether the stores had valid licences “and were selling adult videos only with proper stickers indicating their ratings,” the report states.
In the same time there were about 4,000 complaints and inquiries related to debt collectors last year, including 800 written, formal complaints.
Despite the avalanche, it’s claimed the ministry carried out only 10 inspections. Similarly, almost 2,000 complaints about motor vehicle repairs prompted just six inspections.
Assistant provincial auditor Jim McCarter has described the situation as “pretty weird”, saying he wasn’t sure whether inspectors were in fact screening porn. “My understanding is that is not a primary part of their job,” said McCarter
As usual, Dave Barry gets to the stories that matter, and I pick out some of the ones that are serious as well as funny for Samizdata. And he has quite a few of those, let me tell you.
Last night I attended the Adam Smith Institute Christmas Party, and I was once again struck by what seems to me to be a major fact of modern social life, and a major difference between the times we now live in and the times in which people lived in earlier times, say two or three hundred years ago.
Present at the party were some hundred or more people, ranging from posh and clever schoolgirls enticed only a few hours earlier with the promise of free food and a rest from schoolwork, to opposition front benchers, and assorted policy wonks, friends of the ASI of extremely variable wealth, and of course a decent sprinkling of bloggers, ditto. And what I noticed, again, was that when you are in a gathering like this, it is impossible to tell at a glance how grand the person you are talking to is, unless you happen already to know.
Take the nice chap I found myself talking to. Fifty-ish, matching jacket and trousers (that’s pants if you’re American), educated somewhere, you know, good. Pleasant, a job being Something in the City which I didn’t quite hear properly because the din was a bit loud and nuances got lost. And as I said to the man himself in my bonharmonious liven-up-the-party way, I simply had no idea how important a chap he might be. Dressed like that, I said, you could by anything from a wage slave to a billionaire, from a failing journalist to a major media player, from a pathetic wannabe politician to a Bilderberg Commissioner. I wasn’t that eloquent, but that was my point, and he got it well enough and with no offence meant or taken. Indeed, he amplified the point, by saying that me being dressed as I was (vomit coloured corduroy jacket, red cardigan, no tie, black corduroy trousers with safety pins to keep the improvised turn-ups turned up), I too could be anyone or anything. He reminisced about the various ultra-grand personages he had met in his time who dressed in a similarly down-market way.
The big immediately visible social gulf, now, it seems to me, is the one at the lower end of society, between those who are just about clinging on, and those who have fallen off the social edge into the untermenchen class. Dressing as I do, in a socially concerned manner (i.e. badly), I get a lot of attention from the street begging variant of these people, and I can tell at once what sort of person I’m dealing with. I don’t know this person. Certainly not. But I do know exactly which side of the great divide he or she is on, and he or she is on the wrong side of it. Sorry. No. → Continue reading: Where the social gulf is now – thoughts after a Christmas Party – and on long-distance bus travel
Both us civil libertarians and our critics are in the habit of arguing that technology, especially in the hands of government, never works properly, so either (civil libertarians): it should never be relied upon – or (anti civil libertarians): why are civil libertarians making such a fuss about it if it’s so useless? My own opinion is that this stuff is getting inexorably cleverer, and that to assume permanent techno-incompetence, in these times of all times, is ridiculous. Bureaucratic and legal confusion can be relied upon to continue indefinitely. But technology can be depended upon to improve.
Here’s a BBC report today, about the inexorable development CCTV software:
Visitors to a South Yorkshire science centre are helping the FBI in a project to improve CCTV evidence.
Scientists from the University of Sheffield were asked to help the US law enforcement agency develop a way of identifying often blurry faces caught on video footage.
Now 3,000 volunteers at the Magna Centre in Rotherham are to have their heads scanned to form a three-dimensional image which can then be compared with enhanced CCTV footage.
Researchers at the university’s department of forensic pathology hope the resulting technique will revolutionise the way CCTV evidence is used in court cases on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Magna” eh? Anything to do with Magna Carta?
Over at the Adam Smith Institute Blog, Mark Griffin says they’re about to legalise spam, by defining it, incompetently. That means whatever dodges its way around the definition ain’t spam, right? So by trying to stop it they are going to allow it.
Patrick Crozier’s Transport Blog is steadily becoming a blog to be reckoned with. And yesterday and today, Patrick posted two White Rose Relevant bits, on the new law against mobile phones in cars, and (this presumably being kit that will also help to enforce the new phone law) surveillance cameras for spying on speeding motorists.
On mobiles in cars, Patrick agrees with David Carr. Bad new law. On the cameras? Well, his piece is entitled: “It’s not the speed cameras that are to blame – it’s the law”.
More on vote (mis?)counting machines, from Paul Krugman in today’s New York Times. As always with the NYT, hurry.
Opening paragraphs:
Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” No surprise there. But Walden O’Dell – who says that he wasn’t talking about his business operations – happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.
For example, Georgia – where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections – relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail.
Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that systems lacking these safeguards haven’t caused problems. “How do you know?” he asks.
What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover up product defects.
I think if people are seriously about democracy, they should keep it all on paper. That way, onlookers and overseers can see fair play, and with luck they can spot at least some of the unfair play. Put your vote in a computer system, and who the hell knows where it ends up?
Denis Dutton is a new name to me, but I have the strong feeling that this says a whole lot more about me than it does about Denis Dutton. Unless I’m grievously mistaken, Dutton is a New Zealander. He is certainly based there, at the University of Canterbury, and writes a lot about New Zealand.
Arts & Letters Daily today linked to Dutton’s excellent review article about piano playing, classical music etc., which I enthusiastically recommend to anyone who is even slightly interested in such matters. I’ve just been saying all that on my Culture Blog, and then had another of those this-guy-should-also-be-on-Samizdata reactions. So I followed the links I’d just been setting up, and got to this 1998 review article, which starts thus:
That the old politics of right and left are obsolete is demonstrated in the very person of the Rt. Hon. Mike Moore. A Labour man with a unionist, shop-floor background, he was once a hero of the working man. He still ought to be. But when he became New Zealand’s Trade Minister, he saw it as his “patriotic duty” to pull down this country’s Berlin Wall of import controls both for the benefit of New Zealanders and incidentally to help our small Pacific neighbours to make a living for themselves.
This was viewed as a betrayal of working-class interests. “From hero to traitor in a decade!”, he writes. But this stubborn bloke knows vastly more than his embittered critics about trade and the creation of wealth in the brave new borderless world of international commerce and he’s not about to be shouted down. In A Brief of the Future he mounts a persuasive case for the increased internationalization of New Zealand and for greater individual liberty and responsibility: “democracy and the ingenuity of our species know no bounds when freedom unleashes the genius of the people.”
The word “reactionary” once applied exclusively to the political right. The reactionary conservatives who count most today include not only jingoistic provincials like the Australian Pauline Hanson, but leftists who, disappointed by the failures of socialism and embarrassed by the stupendous successes of capitalism, are keen for any excuse to reintroduce their programmes of government economic control. (I’ve been told by at least a half-dozen friends and correspondents from the left that the recent share-market setbacks are clear evidence that capitalism is on the ropes. Or so they seem to hope.)
Hardly, says Moore, pointing out that the living standards of at least half a billion people have doubled since the early 1980s, and it wasn’t state socialism that achieved it. The setbacks Southeast Asia don’t negate that. Even countries such as India that once seemed backward basket cases now have prosperous, growing middle classes of hard-working people. Singaporeans, to whom New Zealanders used to send food parcels, now earn more per capita than we do, have a lower infant mortality and higher life expectancy.
For Mike Moore, the key to New Zealand’s future is to take an open and competitive attitude toward world markets. We must eschew protectionism and commit ourselves, both intellectually and technologically, to the information revolution.
See what I mean about a guy who should be plugged by Samizdata? All that, and he knows his piano playing.
It’s also good to know that being called Mike (née Michael?) Moore doesn’t automatically make you an idiot.
Googling “privacy” took me to this piece about the problem of junk mail sent to dead people.
After this scribe found black humor last year at the ceaseless stream of direct mail advertising directed at my recently deceased partner, an admonition arrived from a reader who lost her husband in 1999.
“Write about this again in a year,” she said. “The junk will just keep arriving, and by then you may have stopped laughing.”
Yes it really isn’t that funny, especially as the failure to find good ways to stop junk mail (and junk email) will mean bad ways, i.e. ways that don’t stop the junk, but stop other things which are good, like, I don’t know, freedom of communication.
Melanie Phillips links to and comments extensively on this article about NHS nursing by Harriet Sergeant from last Saturday’s Telegraph, which flags up a publication also by Sergeant from the Centre for Policy Studies, entitled Managing Not To Manage (.pdf only). That’s about the management of the entire NHS, and not just the nurses, but the bit of the Telegraph article that particularly caught my attention concerns the way that the education of nurses is now heading:
The training of nurses has promoted them further and further away from the interests of their patients. In the late 1980s, nursing turned itself into an academic profession. Nurses desiring increased status and greater parity with doctors sought to transform their training into a graduate profession. The result is “a frigging mess”, according to a member of the King’s Fund, a charitable foundation concerned with health.
One senior staff nurse at a hospital in the West Country, who teaches at the local university, pointed out – logically enough – that the academic status of the qualification means “there has to be a lot of theory”. But there is too much theory, too much emphasis on social policy and communication skills – and not enough practical work.
At a London A&E department, a staff nurse who had recently qualified complained to me that her training had not prepared her at all. In 18 months of study, she had spent only one and a half hours learning how to take blood pressure and a patient’s temperature. On the other hand, a whole afternoon had been devoted to poverty in Russia. …
The usual assumption is that if there is a problem, it will take money to put it right, but that enough money will do it. But training nurses who knew how to nurse didn’t take any more money than teaching them about poverty in Russia costs now, surely. The problem will be forcing through the decision to teach nurses well instead of badly. My answer would be to phase out the NHS – gradually, no rush, say over a period of, I don’t know, three months – and thus allow a world to re-emerge in which good nurses get paid far more money than bad ones.
Melanie Phillips blames feminism. But why does feminism only seem to do damage to public sector institutions?
I linked to this story earlier today on my Culture Blog. And then I had supper at Perry’s earlier this evening, consisting of the leftovers from the Blogger Bash on Saturday, and I told him about it. He laughed, so here it is here. It’s from the Guardian, which has a Strange Things section:
In Romania, local media report that the country’s “first” institution of higher learning, the University of Arts, in Iasi, was the scene of an official investigation this month after police removed the corpse of a man believed to have hanged himself on the campus. Builders and students at the university had initially mistaken it for a modern work of art.
According to Reuters, the body hung for a whole day in a sculpture-laden garden building that had been re-opened for repairs before onlookers twigged to what it was and called the cops.
Cue commenters with stories about how granny went to sleep in Tate Modern and got confused with an exhibit. These are old gags now, in fact they go back to Duchamp’s Urinal, but as long as Art goes on being ridiculous, they will go on being funny.
When a government starts to slide seriously into the dustbin of history, the very things which it tries to do to halt the slide become part of the slide. All occasions are now starting to inform against this government:
Labour’s new initiative to listen to voters, The Big Conversation, appears to be a big con: a Telegraph investigation has revealed that party officials have handpicked contributors – and have then edited out their negative comments.
The disclosure will be an embarrassment for Tony Blair, who launched the exercise on Friday, saying it was proof that the Government was listening to the people of Britain.
The Prime Minister called for “an honest and serious debate about the future”, and urged voters to text or e-mail their views to a special website, www.bigconversation.org.uk.
The Telegraph discovered yesterday, however, that many of the stories on the website were crafted by Labour officials who interviewed carefully selected individuals known to be broadly sympathetic to Labour – and then cut out any negative comments.
This government started quite impressively, with temporarily persuasive talk of not increasing taxes, and of reforming public services in ways that might have worked, e.g. by sort-of privatising them. But it is all now dribbling away into incompetence. As a devoted opponent of collectivist delusions of all kinds, I supported and still support the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. No doubt some still have high hopes for the future, but frankly it doesn’t look as if there’ll be many achievements to come.
Let’s someone who is not me rephrase that. The government started impressively. I support the toppling of Saddam Hussein. High hopes. Many achievements to come.
“Have your say” says this fatuous website. I especially loathe that expression. You have your say, and then they do whatever they were going to do anyway.
We at Samizdata are anxious to hear from all our suckreaders. Any critical comment on this post will be severely edited in a way which will completely change its overall meaning until we approve of it, and will then be ignored.
I heartily endorse this, from Telemachus:
Recently, Ruth Lea, Policy Director at the Institute of Directors, was fired as Blair pressured her boss to rid her of this troublesome priestess, with the possible promise of honours. Anyone who can be such an effective thorn in the Government’s side should be on the Tory frontbench, and the Tories would be wise to offer her a peerage. While Theresa May holds her job solely due to the politically correct faction in the party demanding that a woman have a place in the Shadow Cabinet, Ms Lea would not need such backstops, as she has an agile mind and a good grasp of key issues. Besides, what could be better than the IoD director entering the Lords only to find Ruth Lea already there, attacking anti-business and anti-choice policies (like current higher education policies)?
And this guy not known to me until now, comments in agreement. (The link to Samizdata Illuminatus’s Samizdata piece about Lea was in the original Telemachus piece, by the way.) And here’s another guy who concurred, at the time when Ms. Lea was in the process of being ousted from the IoD.
I recall once, a long time ago now, doing a radio show with Ms. Lea and I can confirm that she is just the kind of woman who needs no womanist policies to get ahead in the world. Smart as a whip. With luck, this posting may stir up some more support for the advancement of this most admirable lady.
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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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