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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Much is being made, rightly, of China’s growing economic importance in the world, following China’s recent and very newsworthy space mission.
But now here’s a really interesting and encouraging New York Times article about the rapid and highly visible economic progress now being made in India. The most encouraging thing about the piece for me is that not only is this progress described, it is also explained:
This is no longer the India of Gandhi, among history’s most famous ascetics.
The change in values, habits and options in India – not just from his day, but from a mere decade ago – is undeniable, and so is the sense of optimism about India’s economic prospects.
Much of India is still mired in poverty, but just over a decade after the Indian economy began shaking off its statist shackles and opening to the outside world, it is booming. The surge is based on strong industry and agriculture, rising Indian and foreign investment and American-style consumer spending by a growing middle class, including the people under age 25 who now make up half the country’s population.
The lesson – and being taught in the New York Times, please note, rather than merely in some free market Think Tank think piece – is that if you want rapid economic progress and a sense of optimism, you have to shake off your “statist shackles” and open up to the outside world.
The use of the word “statist” I find especially interesting. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that’s a very common usage over here, and for that matter how common is it in the USA’s mainstream media? It makes the point perfectly that the important divide now is not between different factions wanting to use state power to do this or alternatively that, but rather between all of those who want their country or state to be or to remain bound by statist shackles, and all those who want those statist shackles shaken off. (You may need to slow down a bit when you try to say things like this out loud.)
For the sake of the entire world, I hope that the Indians themselves draw this same lesson from their own emerging success, and then teach that lesson to the rest of the world. Combine them doing that with the Chinese having so visibly retreated from their own far more horrific statist mania unleashed by the lunatic Mao-Tse-Tung and as a result also emerging into economic superpower status, and the twenty first century could end up being a very good one. It already looks like being a very prosperous one.
From last Friday’s Guardian:
Charles Clarke, the education secretary, is fighting for a short bill in the Queen’s speech next month which would give every child an identity number and allow local authorities in England to share information about any suspicion of neglect or abuse in the family.
The bill would be the first instalment of the government’s plans to reform child protection after a public inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbié.
Which nicely illustrates the connection between state “protection” and state numbering of its human possessions.
What is objectionable, I think, is the idea that all children, the overwhelming majority of whom are not suspected of being abused, will nevertheless get numbered. Is that really necessary?
Plus, you can’t help wondering if, after a brief interval while we all get used to this process, children who have got their numbers will start not to shed them, even when they’ve stopped being children. After all, it isn’t only children who need protecting, is it?
Natalie Solent has some striking gun-control analysis from Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, Here’s a bit of the bit she quotes:
There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that. Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate.
Vimes wondered if he’d sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he’d dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense. It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers – say, three per citizen.
Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing’ and it was this: criminals don’t obey the law. It’s more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. …
Natalie concludes her comments thus:
I suppose Pratchett might say that Vimes’ opinons are not his own, but, even so, Vimes is not just a one-off hero but a much loved character who stars in several books: this shows at the very least that Britain’s best selling living novelist sees where we’re coming from.
I guess it’s a case of read the whole thing.
I think this is a fascinating site, specialising in before-and-after plastic surgery star photos, which I found via one of my regular favourites, b3ta.com. “Crap plastic surgery”, they call it, but I say that there’s a bit more to all this than just the chance to jeer at silly celebs with fat lips and boobs that go in an out from one year to the next. As always, where the celebs go now, millions more will follow.
One of my absolute favourites, Meg Ryan, as is pointed out at the site itself, has been made to look like Susan Dey (of LA Law fame). I adore both these ladies, but even so, what Ryan has done to herself is to me off-putting. She’s just not Meg Ryan any more, which I suppose it the whole idea. Presumably Meg Ryan was fed-up with making dark, serious, scary, explosive movies, packed with implausible action and profound human wickedness, and everyone saying “We preferred you in When Harry Met Sally“, so she decided to smash up her original face and change herself into something else.
When I first saw the MR “trout pout” on the cover of a trashy made-up-news-mag, I thought, ugh!! But maybe the magazines had photoshop-enhanced it. According to this it’s not too bad.
However, according to this, she’s turned herself into Molly Ringwald.
What Britain’s TV equivalent of Meg Ryan, Leslie Ash, has had done to herself is, however, truly scary. Google google. See what I mean.
What makes the Ryan and Ash lipo-enhancements so unnerving is that we’ve got used to these ladies with their regular faces. So when you see them now, you can’t forget that that isn’t the real shape of their faces and they’ve got bits of their bums in there. That’s not good.
And would you believe: Al Pacino? He seems to have said: “Make me look more like Dustin Hoffman!”
On the face of it this is all down-market tittle-tattle of the trailer-trashiest sort, of interest to the kind of lunatics who (like me) enjoy all the mad rubbish that b3ta links to, but to nobody else. But as so often with b3ta there’s deadly serious stuff in among the photoshopped squirrels with eagle-heads and pictures of weird people with huge eyes for no reason. It’s clear that something very profound is going on with our culture here. We have entered the age of the artificial body.
What’s going on? It starts with the obvious, which is that people who now want to change their bodies now can change their bodies.
It reminds me a bit of what Alice Bachini was blogging about yesterday, which got a lot of admiring attention. That posting was about a person changing their entire voice and become a different person, without necessarily meaning to. With plastic surgery, you change your entire look, and become a different person while very much meaning to, in much the same way that Meg Ryan seems to want to be a different sort of actress.
The strangest transformation of all which I found at Awful Plastic Surgery is that the charming Marie Osmond has had herself re-engineered into the monstrous Ruby Wax. Why would anyone want to make that transition? The answer is probably: she didn’t. Plastic surgery is still only a bet that it will turn out better than before rather than worse. (Ask Leslie Ash!) But already it’s a bet that millions are placing.
Personally I think it is all most undignified, like changing your name because you don’t like the one you’ve got.
Courtesy of one of the great Middle Men of the Internet, Dave Barry, comes this gripping story:
Bordeaux, France – A French magistrate caught masturbating during a court session was locked up on Thursday and put under investigation, justice officials in the south-western city of Bordeaux said.
The head judge of the city’s appeals court said “a penal inquiry ordered by the prosecutor of the republic is currently being carried out by the police” while a request for a psychiatric evaluation of the magistrate, who was not named, had been made.
He said the justice ministry had also been asked to temporarily suspend the magistrate while the matter was looked into.
According to La Charente Libre, a local newspaper who had a reporter in court at the time of the alleged offence, the magistrate had discreetly lifted up his ceremonial robe while a lawyer was presenting final arguments, undid his pants and “engaged in gestures that left nothing to the imagination”. Sapa-AFP
Which, said a later commenter chez Barry, is how justice gets to be blind.
Last week I linked from White Rose to this piece by Jemima Lewis in the Telegraph, because it contained some stuff of White Rose relevance about using technology to enable parents to keep track of their kids.
But, as commenter Mark Ellott pointed out there, this Telegraph piece also contained some interesting reflections on the teaching of history, provoked by the increasing annoyance being expressed by Germans about Britain’s continuing obsession with the history of Nazism to the exclusion of any other sort of history.
Our Education Minister, the big-eared Mr Clarke, has been using his big ears to listen to his German opposite number Edelgard Buhlman, tell him that:
… our fixation with Hitler is leaving British teenagers with a distorted view of German history, and a violent prejudice against the Teutonic race.
A lot of the problem, says Lewis, is that children don’t learn history dates any more. I think she’s probably right. When I was about eight or nine I had a vast set of history dates dinned into me – with my enthusiastic cooperation I should add – and I’ve been fascinated by history, all history, any I could lay my hands on that was fun and made any sense, ever since. My only regret is that the list I imbibed wasn’t bigger and more global in its scope. I should guess that much the same applies to many of the regular readers of this blog. How can you understand history without getting a handle on the basic stuff that it happens in, namely time?
Yet this boringly chronological approach to history teaching was, Ms. Lewis tells us, abandoned in the 1970s for a more pick-and-mix, bring-it-alive and never-mind-when-exactly-it-happened approach to history, and the only bit that kids now want to pick is The Nazis.
This is not a matter of opinion, but of fact. An Ofsted report earlier this year confirmed that British pupils spend more time learning about the Nazis than any other period of history. Meanwhile, one survey after another suggests that our broader historical knowledge is dying out. The statistics are hair-raising. More than half of Britons are unaware that America used to be a British colony; 55 per cent believe that Elizabeth I introduced curry to this country; 17 per cent of teenagers cannot even guess in which century the First World War took place.
Never mind the Tudors and the Stuarts and the Industrial Revolution and the Suffragettes, what we want is Hitler!
Now that they can – and do – choose to spend almost every lesson poring over the evil deeds of history’s most infamous homicidal maniac, the evidence suggests that they love it. As one teacher bemoaned last week: “If you try to avoid him, the pupils say: ‘I was only doing history to study the Nazis.’ ” But a diet of unleavened Hitler is no good for anyone. We need to see the broader sweep of things.
But for me there is a huge irony here. For ask yourself this: why is Mr Clarke so anxious to de-Nazify the teaching of history in Britain? And why are German politicians making such a fuss about this issue? I’m sure that part of the answer is that they just are, and that as time goes by, the thing just gets more and more embarrassing and uncouth.
But I think that the EU is involved here. If a generation of Brits has now grown up thinking that “Europe equals Hitler”, that could be the popular opinion half of a British pincer movement against British EU provincehood, the other half being British elite hesitations. For as long as the “bloody Huns” view of history was confined to the old geezers who had actually fought against the Huns, then that sentiment could simply be left to die out with the old warriors. But now, it turns out, this sentiment is not dying out. The kids hate the Huns too! Indeed, that’s the only thing about the past that they’re sure of.
We are told again and again that British public opinion is now unchangeably against British becoming a province of the new EUropean nation that they are busily forging on the continent, to the point where this public opinion might not merely vote against the EU constitution if granted the opportunity, but actually vote for such an opportunity in the meantime. Where did this opinion come from? Might the “Hitlerisation” of British history teaching not be one of the big the culprits?
Ms. Lewis says that “a diet of unleavened Hitler is no good for anyone”. But if you are the type, as I am, who believes that Britain should shake itself free from EUro-provincehood, might you not reckon that the collapse of that more nuanced and informed and less melodramatic presentation of History – of History with lots of history dates and with that “broad sweep”, as Ms. Lewis terms it – turn out to have been … rather a good thing?
How huge an irony would that be? The very people who have worked hardest to beat British national pride out of Britain, namely the teaching profession and the theorisers of teaching who have been guiding them, have ended up with a kind of History that says only one thing: Germany bollocks!! Don’t want nothing to do with them bastards!!! As a result these anti-historical history persons, mostly rabidly pro-EU on anti-British grounds, could be achieving what looked impossible as recently as only a decade ago, namely the saving of Britain from permanent EUro-subjugation.
Lefty bastard enemies of British History, we hail you, the savours of British national independence.
Or, as Instapundit would say: Heh.
This article about how to (temporarily) neutralise surveillance cameras with laser beams looks interesting, which I got to via this guy (October 10th – scroll down – not real blog software).
The key point here, it seems to me, is that this doesn’t harm the camera permanently. It doesn’t fry any of its inner workings for when the next victim comes along. It simply stops it working while you are in the vicinity.
PRIVACY INTERNATIONAL
MEDIA RELEASE
LEGAL BLOW TO UK GOVERNMENT’S “SNOOPERS CHARTER”
Retention of phone and Internet records breaches European human rights law
15th October 2003
EMBARGOED UNTIL 11 PM, WEDNESDAY 15th OCTOBER 2003
Details of a legal Opinion announced today has dealt a blow to Home Office plans to snoop on the phone and Internet activity of the UK population.
The Opinion, which relates to an EU framework directive on the retention of communications data, has profound ramifications for ten EU states that have implemented, or are planning to implement, measures to place communications users under blanket surveillance. The UK is in the early stages of implementing such measures.
A series of regulations (Statutory Instruments) recently laid before the UK Parliament intends to create a legal basis for comprehensive surveillance of communications. The regulations will allow an extensive list of public authorities access to records of individuals’ telephone and Internet usage. This “communications data” — phone numbers and e-mail addresses contacted, web sites visited, locations of mobile phones, etc. – will be available to government without any judicial oversight. Not only does government want access to this information, but it also intends to oblige companies to keep personal data just in case it may be useful.
The twenty-page legal Opinion was commissioned by Privacy International and was provided by the international law firm Covington & Burling. It has unequivocally concluded that such plans would be unlawful.
The Opinion states: “The data retention regime envisaged by the (EU) Framework Decision, and now appearing in various forms at the Member State level, is unlawful.
“Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) guarantees every individual the right to respect for his or her private life, subject only to narrow exceptions where government action is imperative. The Framework Decision and national laws similar to it would interfere with this right, by requiring the accumulation of large amounts of information bearing on individuals’ private activities. This interference with the privacy rights of every user of European-based communications services cannot be justified under the limited exceptions envisaged by Article 8 because it is neither consistent with the rule of law nor necessary in a democratic society.
The Opinion continues: “The indiscriminate collection of traffic data offends a core principle of the rule of law: that citizens should have notice of the circumstances in which the State may conduct surveillance, so that they can regulate their behaviour to avoid unwanted intrusions. Moreover, the data retention requirement would be so extensive as to be out of all proportion to the law enforcement objectives served. Under the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, such a disproportionate interference in the private lives of individuals cannot be said to be necessary in a democratic society.”
The Opinion details a lengthy history of case law that clearly rules against the use of indiscriminate surveillance of communications.
Privacy International today warned that it intends to pursue test cases in at least two EU countries where mandatory retention has been implemented. It is currently seeking litigants from within the communications industry.
The Opinion – along with the substance of the government’s proposals – will be debated at a public meeting hosted by the London School of Economics on Wednesday October 22nd (see http://www.privacyinternational.org/conference/sfs7/ for details and registration information). The meeting will involve speakers from the Home Office, the Department of Constitutional Affairs, the Department of Works & Pensions, Local authorities and ACPO, together with industry representatives and parliamentarians.
In two parallel actions, Privacy International today lodged a complaint with the Information Commissioner alleging that the government’s regulations and voluntary code on retention breaches at least three of the core Data Protection principles enshrined in the Data Protection Act. The complaint requests the Commissioner to take urgent action to alert the appropriate Parliamentary committees, and to support a referral to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights Committee.
The complaint argues that the blanket retention of communications data breaches the principle of proportionality, that the practice flouts the specificity principle, and that the existence of a voluntary code for communications providers takes no account of the consent principle.
Privacy International has today also lodged an Open Government request for disclosure of the government’s legal advice relating to the regulations before the Parliament.
Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said: “This is an important legal analysis. It clearly exposes the government’s intention not only to snoop unnecessarily on innocent people, but also to force unwilling companies to be complicit in an unprecedented and disproportionate surveillance regime”.
“The government’s plans are illegal. We are calling on all communications providers to support their customers’ rights by ignoring the government’s proposals”.
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Simon Davies of Privacy International can be reached for comment on 07958 466 552 (from the UK) or on (+44) 7958 466 552 (from outside the UK). Email simon@privacy.org
Copies of all documents mentioned in this release can be obtained by contacting Simon Davies.
Privacy International (PI) (www.privacyinternational.org) is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations. PI is based in London, and has an office in Washington, D.C. Together with members in 40 countries, PI has conducted campaigns throughout the world on issues ranging from wiretapping and national security activities, to ID cards, video surveillance, data matching, police information systems, and medical privacy, and works with a wide range of parliamentary and inter-governmental organisations such as the European Parliament, the House of Lords and UNESCO.
When a politician backs something “in principle”, that means he doesn’t back it, right?
Let’s hope so, because the headline at the top of this BBC report is:
Blair backs ID cards ‘in principle’
Let’s hope the rule still applies.
Here’s a strange article, by the Telegraph’s education man, John Clare, in today’s Telegraph.
It starts with lots of standard issue bad political news, about cuts and the resulting educational damage. Deranged plans for improvement, smashing down all that we’ve worked for over the last twenty years, blah, blah. The headline – “‘Government incompetence’ led to schools shedding 21,000 staff” – is all about that bad news. The usual political wreckage in other words.
But this, about one of those reports that journalists so love, is the interesting bit, I think:
The report laid much of the blame for the funding “debacle” on the “patently unfair grant culture” that the Government has imposed on schools.
It led to chronic disparities in funding, much of it allocated on an ad hoc basis to poorly conceived projects. “Schools emerge as winners or losers almost in spite of themselves,” the report said. “On the basis of some decision taken in the remoteness of Whitehall, a school can suddenly find itself receiving or being deprived of an extra £100,000 or more.”
Or, as one Inner London head put it: “Pots of money suddenly appear and disappear.” This year’s winners were failing schools, specialist schools, and schools with high proportions of pupils who are entitled to free meals and achieve poor exam results.
Okay, I don’t know what’s really going on here, but here’s my guess. What we see here is government activity done by people who have been pummelled with free market ideology and have accepted that free markets, although politically impossible to actually have, are nevertheless worth learning from. So the responses of consumers are faked by issuing that deluge of directives from London that I spent about a third to a half of my education blog complaining about. These directives give you extra money if you do what London says are good “outcomes”, and less if you don’t. Like in the free market, right?
Well, not really. These directives don’t actually have even the crude rationality of the free market. They aren’t actually the same as actual consumer demands, so instead of satisfied or unsatisfied customers giving you more or less money, you just get a kind of permanent government organised lottery. This month, the winning number is: Schools who are crap but considered by London to be getting better! If that’s you, you win! But, if your school is good but not considered by London to be getting any better, you lose! Next month, it’ll be something different. Next month it’ll be: Maths! Or: Languages! Or: The Obesity Directive! Or: Social Inclusion! Or: (Socially?) Excluding bullies, in response to the government’s Bullying Directive! And through it all, win or lose, you have to fill in form after form after form, because if you don’t even do that much in response to each bullying directive, you definitely lose.
When Tony Blair uses the word “reform” in connection with education, it is this process that he is referring to, and he wants more of it, but done better.
That’s what I think may be going, but it’s only me guessing really. Anyone with any better ideas?
Says Alice:
(I considered putting this on Samizdata, then thought maybe it wasn’t quite The Thing).
This is from Blackadder Goes Forth, a quite brilliant vintage British TV series set in WWI. Lord Flashheart is instructing a class of soldiers training to fly in the Royal Air Corps. Flashheart is the ludicrously loud and oversexed character played by Rik Mayall. George is the idealistic upper-class soldier played by Hugh Laurie.
And here it is:
Lord Flashheart: Treat your machine like you treat your woman!!
George: What, you mean, invite her home at weekends to meet your parents?
Flashheart: No! I mean, get inside her five times a day and take her to heaven and back!!
What a series that was.
Thanks to Dale Amon for the tip about something called the Crypto-Gram Newsletter, which contains much of White Rose relevance. Dale particularly singled out a piece called The Future of Surveillance. Excerpt:
Some uses of surveillance are benign. Fine restaurants sometimes have cameras in their dining rooms so the chef can watch diners as they eat their creations. Telephone help desks sometimes record customer conversations in order to help train their employees.
Other uses are less benign. Some employers monitor the computer use of their employees, including use of company machines on personal time. A company is selling an e-mail greeting card that surreptitiously installs spyware on the recipient’s computer. Some libraries keep records of what books people check out, and Amazon keeps records of what books people browse on their website.
And, as we’ve seen, some uses are criminal.
This trend will continue in the years ahead, because technology will continue to improve. Cameras will become even smaller and more inconspicuous. Imaging technology will be able to pick up even smaller details, and will be increasingly able to “see” through walls and other barriers. And computers will be able to process this information better. Today, cameras are just mindlessly watching and recording, but eventually sensors will be able to identify people. Photo IDs are just temporary; eventually no one will have to ask you for an ID because they’ll already know who you are. …
And as soon as I saw the title The Patriot Act and Mission Creep I knew that White Rosers would want to look at that one also.
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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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