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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This is one of those stories that Richard Littlejohn would classify under “You Couldn’t Make It Up”. I’m sure White Rose will have more to say about it than this one posting. For now I hardly have time to do more than flag it up before going to bed.
The national DNA database containing more than two million samples could end up in the private sector under Government plans to sell off the Home Office Forensic Science Service (FSS).
This is toxic. You gather information about people without any consent (because being arrested isn’t that kind of deal) and then you turn the management of the resulting database into a business. Objections? Where do you start? How long do we have?
Call this whatever other names you want, but don’t you dare call it “pure” capitalism, or the “extreme” free market.
Last night, the proposed sale threatened to become the most controversial since the privatisation of the air traffic control system.
I’ll say.
White Rose seems to have missed this (from the BBC on Wednesday):
A group of peace protesters has launched legal proceedings against Gloucestershire police, claiming they used anti-terrorism laws to prevent demonstrations against the war in Iraq.
The complaints centre on RAF Fairford, where American B-52 bombers were based during the conflict.
None of the protesters who demonstrated at the airbase were charged with terrorism offences but they say their human rights were breached.
The pressure group Liberty is calling for an inquiry into the use of section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 at the base.
Officers were granted powers under the legislation to stop and search vehicles and pedestrians in the area near the base between 7 March and 27 April.
But they were obviously all really dangerous people, yes? Absolutely.
One of the people the group says was stopped under the Terrorism act was 11-year-old Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft, whose father David Cockcroft is taking legal action claiming a breach of human rights.
Isabelle told the BBC: “We were just walking along the road and they stopped us. I did not have a full body search because there was no woman officer there.
“They asked what was in our pockets, wrote down our descriptions and checked a backpack and a bike we had with us.
“They said they were stopping us under the Terrorism Act, but I’m not a terrorist.”
I guess you just can’t be too careful.
Don’t get me wrong. I personally don’t care at all for peaceniks, and I especially dislike them when they have hyphenated surnames. Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft should be swooning over plasticated pop musicians in preparation for doing It-Girl Studies at Roedean, not demo-ing outside an airbase.
But I will defend the right of hyphenated peaceniks to demonstrate without being arrested as terrorists to the point of putting up a posting about it on White Rose.
Thanks to Chris R. Tame and the Libertarian Alliance Forum for flagging up the story.
“I think we were bamboozled by the Prime Minister into doing the right thing.”
– Michael Portillo on This Week, BBC1, small hours of today
This New York Times story is worth a look. It deals with activities of something called the Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, who have been, so the New York Civil Liberties Union says, overdoing it in their investigation of those wanting to soften the state’s current drug laws.
In a letter sent today to the Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, the civil liberties group said the commission had been overly aggressive in its inquiry into the activists’ public rallies and broadcasts. It called them core First Amendment activities that were not subject to lobbying regulation.
In addition, civil liberties officials said the commission had been confrontational in its inquiry and needed to distinguish between the scrutiny of citizens who came forward to speak their minds and paid, professional lobbyists, or those who spent at least $2,000 to directly communicate with legislators.
Yes, well, they pass a law, and then distinctions of that sort – which were, you know, merely intended, but not actually spelt out in the law – have a way of getting lost.
I wonder what “Temporary” means in this connection.
Privacy conscious operators now use shredders. So welcome to the world of the unshredder.
As Instapundit often says, the New York Times may be a bit bonkers at the front, but the science and technology coverage can be excellent.
Last night the BBC showed, on Newsnight, a report about why Tony Blair is so well-liked in the USA. He is a persuasive debater and arguer. The USA’s right wingers like him because he stood shoulder to shoulder with Bush over the Iraq war, and the USA’s left wingers like him because when he stands shoulder to shoulder with Bush he makes Bush look like a fool by comparison. That kind of thing.
It was a deft move by the BBC. The government have been complaining that the BBC are anti-Government and anti-Blair. Now they can say: look, here was a piece about how well Blair has been doing.
But exposing Blair to the world as being liked by American politicians is to do him no favours with the massed ranks of the Labour Party, parliamentary and out in the constituencies. Those people, by and large, don’t like American politicians, and especially they don’t Like George W. Bush Jnr. When they could think of Bush as just a joke, he was just a joke. But now he’s bad, bad, bad. With friends like him, Blair needs no enemies.
Two Guardian stories have just been punching home the message. This one points out, for all the usual Poltical Editor type reasons, that Blair is now looking wobbly.
But it was another article by an until-now Blair supporter and true believer, from yesterday, that really caught my attention. This paragraph is especially revealing and bullseye-hitting:
The key issue for Blair seems to be his own sincerity. He is desperate to convince us that he believes in the rightness of his actions. This has been a faultline in his personality from the very beginning. It’s instructive, in this context, to consider the ways in which he differs from Thatcher. Thatcher never claimed to be Good, just Right. Blair’s political personality has always been predicated on the proposition “I am good.” His brilliantly articulate impersonation of earnest inarticulacy has all along been tied to this self-projection as a Good Man. He is careful about not touting his religion in public, but he doesn’t need to, since the conviction of his own goodness is imprinted in everything he says and does. It is one of the things he has in common with the party he leads, and one of the reasons people are wrong when they say that Blair is a natural Tory. Thatcher’s sense of being right fits into the Tory party’s self-image as the home of unpopular and uncomfortable truths. Blair’s sense of being good fits the Labour self-image as the party of virtue: the party we would all vote for if we were less selfish and greedy.
It is Blair’s reputation for goodness, among his own most devoted supporters, which has taken such a knock with this Weapons of Mass Destruction business. To people like me, who never believed in Saint Tony in general or in much of the pre-war hooplah about WMDs in particular, the only surprise was why such a canny operator as Blair should have hung himself on such a nasty hook But for the true Blair believers, this stuff is really hurting.
It reminds me of what I vaguely recall someone saying a thousand years ago about Nixon, just before he resigned. If people like this (i.e. some Nixon true believers the guy had just been talking to) think that something very bad has happened, he’s in serious trouble.
Cloning is an understandably controversial subject, and it would appear that all the excitement about cloning humans may have been somewhat premature. But this sounds like a potentially most entertaining application of the principle:
After a six-year search Japanese scientists are preparing to clone prehistoric woolly mammoths from frozen DNA samples found in Siberia.
Inspired by Dolly the sheep – cloned from the cell of an adult ewe in Scotland in 1996 – and the film Jurassic Park, researchers from Kagoshima and Kinki universities and the Gifu Science and Technology Centre began the search in 1997 for sperm or tissue from mammoths preserved in the tundra.
The plan was to find a frozen male, recover samples of its sperm, inseminate a modern elephant and create a mammoth-elephant hybrid. No sperm was ever found. Several mammoths, preserved in the permafrost, have been identified in Siberia but the DNA was degraded.
So how are they doing?
The Japanese scientists collected samples of bone marrow, muscle and skin from mammoth remains found in Siberia last August. Yesterday, after a year fighting Russian bureaucracy, the samples arrived.
The researchers face a series of new hurdles. First, they have to confirm the samples are from mammoths, then see if they can isolate a full set of chromosomes. Then they would have to fuse an egg from a living relative – an elephant – with DNA from an extinct creature. Then there would be the challenge of implanting the embryo into the womb of a host mother.
Doesn’t sound very much like “cloning” to me. And since this is the Guardian, no article about a creature that thrives in a cold climate would be complete without a gratuitous reference to global warming.
If they overcame all these challenges, they would then be faced with the biggest of all: what to do with a lonely ice age mammal in a rapidly warming world.
Oh for heavens sake. Go north. Use a fridge. Biggest challenge of all indeed.
And as to what to do with it, hasn’t the Guardian heard of show business? That’s what all this is about. This is not “pure” science, which pure science seldom is anyway. Think Jurassic Park. Think Elephant Man. Or in this case Elephant Mammoth.
Deepest thanks to David Farrer for linking to this fascinating article by Dr Raj Persaud in the Scotsman.
Could your political beliefs determine how long you live? New research from sociologist Dr William Cockerham and colleagues from the University of Alabama in the United States has found that differences in attitudes to looking after your body and your health are predicted by your political allegiances.
It seems those who believe the state should take responsibility for most aspects of life also tend to eschew personal responsibility for taking care of themselves. As a result, they are more likely to engage in lifestyles hazardous to their health, including drinking to excess and not exercising.
The just-published research was conducted among Russians, comparing those who longed for a to return to the old-style Soviet system with those who preferred the free-market approach to the economy.
Personal interviews with almost 9,000 Russians found significant differences in how much they looked after their own health depending on where they placed themselves on the political spectrum.
David says that this reminds him of Glasgow, another great bastion of socialist intellectual self-abuse, and bodily self-abuse by other more enjoyable but equally destructive means. But Dr Raj Persaud doesn’t seem to have heard about Glasgow. → Continue reading: The moral hazards of healthcare
When you type “Surveillance” into google, some of the more interesting stuff is the adverts on the right. The top one in the list today was this. The one with the creepiest name was this.
A commenter (“Grace”) on a previous surveillance related post of mine here said that governments will always be more powerful users of this stuff than the general run of surveillance-inclined people:
We’re deluding ourselves if we think there’s ever going to be any degree of equality in information collection between the government and the (no-longer) private citizen. 1) The government has the money, the power, the inclination and – increasingly – the ability to carpet the nation with surveillance. 2) Forms of counter-surveillance proving to be effective will be declared illegal – in the interest of public security, of course – and forced underground. (That’ll be interesting.)
We’re fighting a rear-guard action.
And then she recommends a book.
But she’s missing my point. I’m not saying that all these regular punters are going to try to spy only on the government and thereby to hold it at bay, although no doubt that will be part of the story, in the form of spying on lesser government officials and the like. My point is that people concerned about surveillance don’t just have the government to worry about. They’ll also have the amateurs spying and spooking all over them. These amateurs may not have mainframe computers and super-intelligent software, but they are awfully numerous, compared to the government.
And the kit that the amateurs need is now getting very cheap, and very easy to use, and to hide. As these adverts prove.
According to the Independent, Robert Mugabe is being bought out of office by President Bush.
Robert Mugabe will relinquish his leadership of Zimbabwe’s ruling party by December, paving the way for his exit as President and new elections by June 2004, the South African President Thabo Mbeki has told George Bush.
The Independent has established that Mr Bush has pledged a reconstruction package for Zimbabwe worth up to $10bn (£6.2bn) over an unspecified timeframe, if a new leader takes over.
Unwrapping the delicate wordage of the Independent story, Mbeki told Mugabe to go, and now he’s going (which obviously has something to do with this). But why? What’s in it for Mbeki?
Privately Mr Bush is said to have exerted pressure on the South African President by indicating that South African companies would benefit from the aid package for Zimbabwe, since many of them would be well placed to bid for contracts. South African firms are owed huge amounts of money by Zimbabwe, mainly for fuel and electricity supplies.
Ah.
Oh well. Better than nothing being done at all. I think. I hope.
White Rose readers will surely appreciate being told, if they don’t know it already, that a short posting by Gabriel Syme about compulsory ID cards, and about White Rose’s campaigning against them, was put up at Samizdata.net last Sunday.
The point is the comments, of which there have been 22 so far (Tuesday evening). The worst of the comments about anything on Samizdata are the usual abusive or incomprehensible nonsense (and the worst of them of all get deleted), but the average is good, and the best are often outstandingly interesting and informative, fully worthy to be postings in their own right on the average blog.
The ID card debate can get subtle, and lots of these subtleties are teased out in these particular comments.
For years I’ve been jabbering away on radio jabber-ins, in favour of the right of people to discriminate in the use of their property, and in particular of minorities to discriminate against majorities, and in particular of the right of gays to discriminate against straights. Are you in favour of such a right? Question mark, question mark. Because I am. And so on. Property rights. The right to fire people because you’ve taken a dislike to the colour of their eyes. It’s their property, it’s their money, etc. etc.
So this story gave me particular pleasure, even though it’s about something that shouldn’t be happening.
A manager of a gay bar was told to discriminate against heterosexuals and ordered to throw out a straight couple for kissing, an employment tribunal was told yesterday.
Nothing wrong with a gay bar discriminating, but they shouldn’t be hauled up in front of any tribunal.
Angelo Vigil, the assistant manager of G-A-Y bar in Soho, London, said the venue’s co-director and licensee, Jeremy Joseph, ordered him to deny entry to heterosexual couples as well as mixed groups of gay and straight revellers.
The nerve. Who does this Jeremy Joseph think he is? He’s behaving like he owns the place. Doesn’t he realise that he owns nothing? He is the delegate of the community, in the person of the employment tribunal. The G-A-Y bar in Soho is the property of All Of Us, and if All Of Us, as interpreted by the employment tribunal, say heteros can enter it, enter it they can.
Mr Vigil, of Barons Court, west London, started working at the club, which is owned by the Mean Fiddler Music Group, in September 2002. He resigned three months later and is claiming victimisation and harassment. He told the tribunal in Woburn Place that he understood the importance of preventing homophobia in the bar, but he believed the policy amounted to discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation.
Yes, that’s exactly what it amounted to. And if the law forbids this, the law is an ass. Chucking out all non-homos is a nice simple way of chucking out not just the reality of homophobia, but even the mistaken fear of it. Makes very good business sense.
He said when he raised concerns over the policy, he was told by Mr Joseph that he would “face the sack” if he “did not change his attitude”.
So. Angelo Vigil, “assistant manager”, didn’t want to assist the manager in enforcing the manager’s preferred policy of who comes in and who doesn’t, and how they behave when they’re there. So he got the boot. Sounds fair to me.
And even if it wasn’t fair, it is their property they wanted Angelo Vigil to help them administer, and it was their money they were paying him to do it.
Even if it wasn’t fair, it was still fair, and the employment tribunal should also get the boot.
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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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