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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Aristocracy [Late Latin aristocratia, government by the best, from Greek aristokrati : aristos, best; see ar- in Indo-European Roots + kratos, power; see -cracy.]. An aristocracy is a form of government in which rulership is in the hands of an “upper class” known as aristocrats. (The Greek origins of the word aristocracy imply the meaning of “rule by the best”.)
People like David Attenborough or almost anyone connected with Population Connection (a group which used to be rather more directly called ‘Zero Population Growth’), are technocrats at heart. Problems are identified, analyzed by experts and their solutions to those problems are imposed via political interaction. It is simply ‘rule by expert’ and there is quite literally no limit to the areas of life which is beyond the overarching gaze of the men and woman with letters after their names. When such people are given access to political power, no limits to what they can make you do or not do. The experts are, after all, the best and thus know best, and if people will not be swayed by their words spoken from the position of superior knowledge, then they must be forced to comply via the political system. They are the new would-be aristocracy in the literal Greek sense of the word.
In today’s Times of London (we do not link directly to The Times), David Attenborough, speaking for the Optimum Population Trust, demanded that the British state work to halve Britain’s population by establishing a ‘population policy’.
He said: “The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us and it is the poor people of the world who will suffer most.”
[…]
[the Optimum Population Trust] believes that Britain should seek to reduce its population from its present 59m to about 30m by 2130 — about the same as the population in 1870. It wants economic incentives for women to stay childless, free contraception, a balanced approach to immigration and a government population reduction policy.
Indira Gandhi and Deng Xiaoping shared such views and enacted policies based on the realization that gentle prods will not stop people having children. Their views were based on crude pragmatism married with an honest understanding of the efficacy of coercive violence.
People like David Attenborough however take a rather more lyrical utopian view of nature and ‘sustainable economics’ (which in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with economics) and thus are rather more grandiose in their objectives. They seek to limit people’s right to have children or to travel the world or engage in ‘wasteful’ or ‘harmful’ economic activity generally that is not approved of by…well, them, of course. They wish to restore balance and harmony. This sort of idealized view of nature and man’s place in it (or lack thereof) was something that would have gained approving nods not just from idyllic ruralist 18th and 19th century poets but also Heinrich Himmler.
For these people there are no ‘market’ solutions caused by the social interaction of free people, because that would allow the possibility that free people may simply ignore the ‘wise words’ of The Best. In a political system, rather than a social system, there are only a few people who must be convinced and manipulated, and thus it through coercive collectivist politics that the new technocratic aristocracy seek to apply their ‘wisdom’.
At least the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement are not trying to use the violence of state to make people comply. The same cannot be said of Sir David Attenborough and his collectivist ilk.
Over wide areas of the urban first world, the Panopticon State is already very much a reality. Folks like us, the contributors to Samizdata.net, White Rose and the grizzled veterans over at Privacy International cry out warning pretty much daily alerting people not so much about the simple fact of surveillance per se but rather surveillance plus data-pooling.
Yet it is important to draw people attention to the basic facts and encourage them to notice the evidence right in front of their eyes, peering down at them like menacing mechanical crows perched on metal branches jutting from walls everywhere, that we are increasing under surveillance by the state directly…
…and by companies whose surveillance footage states are increasingly reserving themselves the right to gain access to on demand…
But the people who would like our every move recorded and subject to analysis are not fools. They would rather you did not actually notice what is before your very eyes and so we are seeing the second age of CCTV: more aesthetically pleasing and less intrusive cameras, rather than the stark utilitarian carrion crows which currently predominate…
…rounder, blending in with the background…
…looking more like the lighting fixtures than the all-seeing-eye.
The second age of security cameras is at hand…still quite literally staring you in the face, but increasingly hiding in plain sight, counting on a mixture of clever design and the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. But Big Brother is still watching, only with a little more style and taste now. That just makes it more dangerous.
(Cross-posted from White Rose)
Over wide areas of the urban first world, the Panopticon State is already very much a reality. Folks like us, the contributors to White Rose, Samizdata.net and the grizzled veterans over at Privacy International cry out warning pretty much daily alerting people not so much about the simple fact of surveillance per se but rather surveillance plus data-pooling.
Yet it is important to draw people attention to the basic facts and encourage them to notice the evidence right in front of their eyes, peering down at them like menacing mechanical crows perched on metal branches jutting from walls everywhere, that we are increasing under surveillance by the state directly…
…and by companies whose surveillance footage states are increasingly reserving themselves the right to gain access to on demand…
But the people who would like our every move recorded and subject to analysis are not fools. They would rather you did not actually notice what is before your very eyes and so we are seeing the second age of CCTV: more aesthetically pleasing and less intrusive cameras, rather than the stark utilitarian carrion crows which currently predominate…
…rounder, blending in with the background…
…looking more like the lighting fixtures than the all-seeing-eye.
The second age of security cameras is at hand…still quite literally staring you in the face, but increasingly hiding in plain sight, counting on a mixture of clever design and the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. But Big Brother is still watching, only with a little more style and taste now. That just makes it more dangerous.
Adriana sez: “Statism is enough to drive a girl to drink”.
Granny sez: “Don’t you have some flavour other that ‘samizdata.net flavour’?”
But what do you think the captions be?
…the state does, in the person of Mr. Justice Sumner, that is who owns your body.
Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign
– J.S. Mill, On Liberty, 1859
Given that so many in the ‘free world’ are subject to compulsory educational conscription, how many people are in fact ‘sovereign’ over their own minds? And in an era in which the state can force you to put certain chemicals in your body regardless of your wishes, are you sovereign over your own body? If you are a child, clearly not… and even if you are an adult, clearly not.
The mothers, the sole carers of their daughters, argued that immunisation should be voluntary and it was not right to impose it against the wishes of a caring parent and it would cause them great distress.
The elder girl had asked not to be given the MMR jab but had asked for meningitis protection. Some parents fear the MMR vaccine could be linked to autism, even though doctors and most experts say there is no evidence of a link.
Mr Justice Sumner decided both children should receive the jab because the benefits outweighed the risks.
But her views obviously count for nothing. If you do not truly own the insides of your body, then what are you? “The elder girl had asked not to be given the MMR jab”. Is she a slave? A serf? A chattel? I have fulminated before on that particular issue when confronted with people arguing for mandated mass medication… the issue is not one of health but rather ‘who owns your body’. What the judges and doctors who would use the violence of state to force other people to change the chemistry of their own bodies show us is not that they care, but rather their totalitarian mindset.
Can it really surprise us that the state does not respect individual property rights or the right of self-defense if it does not even respect the right of individuals to judge what chemicals should or should not be put in your own body? This is not a minor issue because it goes to the very heart of whether your perception of freedom is an illusion or not.
Bill Thompson wrote a rather histrionic article over on the BBC1 site about the recent incident in which a former US Marine went off on a, ehem, ill advised magical mystery tour with a 12 year old English girl. The bit I just loved in Thompson’s article was:
Shevaun’s disappearance was the net’s fault and we have to accept this. She would not have had any contact with her 31-year old ex-Marine if it had not been for the easy access to e-mail and chat that today’s children seem to demand as a right, and we should not pretend otherwise or blame inadequate supervision.
…that is like saying if the child had being dragged into a car and kidnapped:
Shevaun’s disappearance was the M25’s 2 fault and we have to accept this
Make our communities safe for children…ban roads and sidewalks I say! Ban them all!
So if ‘The Internet’ kidnapped this girl, then why is Toby Studabaker the one on trial for it and not this wicked fellah called The Internet?
Ok, Thompson says that this girl got into trouble (or at least everyone else feels she got into trouble, she never did seem to show much sign of thinking so herself from what I read), and she did this because she had access to a computer, which her parent have provided and thoughtfully equipped with a modem, over a phone line which they pay for, but somehow we must not blame inadequate supervision by the parents.
Goodness no! I mean, if we did that, next thing you know people might be saying it was a bad idea for parents to leave their loaded shotguns around their teenager’s room. Instead we must impose sweeping bans on who can use chatrooms! And why is that, pray tell, Bill? Ah… I understand… you write for the BBC of course! Never suggest a sensible private solution at the family level if an excuse can be found for some wonderful collective state intervention! Silly me. For one blinding and foolish moment I actually thought parents might be responsible for their children’s welfare!
1 = Link via our favourite statist technogeeks at iSociety
2 = The M25 is London’s orbital motorway (freeway)
Reports are coming in that both of Saddam Hussein’s mass murderous sons may have been killed during an attack by US Forces on a house in Mosul in Northern Iraq. Early reports said ‘seized’ but SkyNews is currently (17:40 GMT) reporting live from Mosul saying US reinforcements are “pouring into the area” and bodies at the house “have a strong resemblence to Uday and Qusay”.
Let’s hope the reports are confirmed soon!
 Yes! it is being confirmed that Uday and Qusay are dead. Good riddance to two of the most evil psychopaths to walk the earth in recent times…
…and to the US forces who did it: way to go, guys! 
When one objects to something, it is important to have a clear idea exactly what you are objecting to and why. Fleet Online is a company offering an inexpensive way to track the location of someone else’s mobile phone to within 50 yards in an urban area. The system has built in safeguards that prevent someone tracking someone else without their permission (a text message is sent to the target phone notifying them of the ping and asking if they are content to be located. Also certain times in which being located is acceptable can be set up as a preference).
I have no problem with companies keeping track of their employees whilst they are on-the-job… for example the advantages to a courier company and their clients are too obvious to need elaboration. I don’t even have much of a problem with parents keeping track of their children. Like so much in the world, this ability to track one of the increasingly ubiquitous tools of modern life is not intrinsically good or bad in and of itself. The problems I foresee spring from the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act in Britain and the various equivalent powers of state found in many other nations. Almost certainly there will be a requirement for services like Fleet Online to allow the state to locate people without their permission and under the various provisions of the aptly names RIP Act, notifying the target they are subject to state scrutiny will itself be a crime.
When the RIP Act was first imposed, it was with assurances that access to private information like e-mail, ISP activity records and even decryption keys1 would be tightly controlled and limited to only a few essential key government agencies. Of course it did not take long for the state to try and expand the list of people who can get access to your private internet traffic details to essential key government agencies like local town councils, the Department of Health, the Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency, the Postal Services Commission, and Fire Authorities. Previous assurances as to who would have access proved to be worthless and the people who uttered them straightforward liars. No real surprises there to any but the credulous. So does anyone seriously want to trust the same people with the ability to track not just your online life but your physical movements in the real world at the click of a mouse?
Technology is not the problem… the problem is a state with takes such power to itself with little more than an imperious demand to its subjects to ‘just trust us’ and ‘if you are not guilty, you have nothing to fear’.
1 = or more accurately the decryption keys of those ‘criminals’ who did not have a completely corrupted floppy disc to surrender on demand ‘on which their key codes are stored’. Corrupted you say? No! Really? Well I never. I guess I’ll never be able to access those files again… and nor will you.
When one objects to something, it is important to have a clear idea exactly what you are objecting to and why. Fleet Online is a company offering an inexpensive way to track the location of someone else’s mobile phone to within 50 yards in an urban area. The system has built in safeguards that prevent someone tracking someone else without their permission (a text message is sent to the target phone notifying them of the ping and asking if they are content to be located. Also certain times in which being located is acceptable can be set up as a preference).
I have no problem with companies keeping track of their employees whilst they are on-the-job… for example the advantages to a courier company and their clients are too obvious to need elaboration. I don’t even have much of a problem with parents keeping track of their children. Like so much in the world, this ability to track one of the increasingly ubiquitous tools of modern life is not intrinsically good or bad in and of itself. The problems I foresee spring from the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act in Britain and the various equivalent powers of state found in many other nations. Almost certainly there will be a requirement for services like Fleet Online to allow the state to locate people without their permission and under the various provisions of the aptly names RIP Act, notifying the target they are subject to state scrutiny will itself be a crime.
When the RIP Act was first imposed, it was with assurances that access to private information like e-mail, ISP activity records and even decryption keys1 would be tightly controlled and limited to only a few essential key government agencies. Of course it did not take long for the state to try and expand the list of people who can get access to your private internet traffic details to essential key government agencies like local town councils, the Department of Health, the Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency, the Postal Services Commission, and Fire Authorities. Previous assurances as to who would have access proved to be worthless and the people who uttered them straightforward liars. No real surprises there to any but the credulous. So does anyone seriously want to trust the same people with the ability to track not just your online life but your physical movements in the real world at the click of a mouse?
Technology is not the problem… the problem is a state with takes such power to itself with little more than an imperious demand to its subjects to ‘just trust us’ and ‘if you are not guilty, you have nothing to fear’.
1 = or more accurately the decryption keys of those ‘criminals’ who did not have a completely corrupted floppy disc to surrender on demand ‘on which their key codes are stored’. Corrupted you say? No! Really? Well I never. I guess I’ll never be able to access those files again… and nor will you.
A great many articles have been written on Samizdata.net about the monstrous Tony Martin case (just do a search for “Tony Martin” and you will see what I mean). I have always thought that he was convicted more for challenging the state’s monopoly on force by defending his property rather than for actually killing a man.
Well even the faint fiction of the Tony Martin case being a simple matter of criminal justice (which has come to mean justice for criminals) has been abandoned. The fact he was not going to be released early is old news… the demented fact this was because he was deemed a danger to burglars is also old news.
What is new was revealed in a Telegraph article yesterday (emphasis added):
Ms Stewart [a probation officer] has previously written a report on Martin which was submitted to the Parole Board before its ruling in January. In it she said that Martin’s support base in the country had made him more likely to reoffend.
“This is a case which has attracted immense and ongoing media attention and public interest,” she wrote. “I believe this has had an impact on Mr Martin’s own perceptions of his behaviour and his right to inflict punishment on those whom he perceives to be a threat to his own security.
In short, because he has widespread support from other people who believe he has been shafted by the system, lots of support, in fact political support, he is not going to be released. Ergo, he is a political prisoner. How else can one interpret it given the reason for his continued detention is due to the support of other people?
And let us not forget the other reason: he refuses to repent his ‘crime’ of perceiving two men breaking into his isolated country home as a threat to his security. Martin does not just have the temerity to demand he has the right to defend his own property, he refuses to apologise for doing so.
At the end of many articles I have written on Samizdata.net I have used the words “The state is not your friend”. Probation Officer Ms. Annette Stewart is the perfect embodiment of why I make that sort of remark. She is just acting in accordance with the institutional imperatives within which she works. The system is not just broken, it is insane.
One reader complains that he could never see why we use the word ‘service’ for public monopolies such as health, education, the post office (and even the ‘civil service’) when they deliver such rotten products.
Then a local farmer mentioned he was getting a bull in to service his cows. After that, our reader recognised that it was actually a pretty good way to describe the relationship between public producers and the taxpayers who have to fund them.
– Eamonn Butler, Adam Smith Institute
An earlier article by Gabriel Syme which was about the observations of a British Army Officer known to us, in which he relates his experiences in and around Basra, in Iraq, attracted a comment from one of our most thoughtful regular commenters. This gentleman argued that it was unreasonable for this officer to be able to enter and search houses of Iraqis without a search warrant. Now as this particular commenter is clearly a thoughtful fellow traveller with whom all the writers of Samizdata.net would find little room for ideological disagreement on most issues which vex us and whose past remarks were so interesting we used them as a ‘guest writer’ article on Samizdata.net, I thought his views deserved addressing with an article rather than just a comment. I think the core of my problem with the notion being suggested here is one of the most lethal aspects of libertarian thought and why it is so markedly unsuccessful in breaking into the mainstream, at least overtly… this error of which I speak is in fact the flip side of what makes socialism so monstrous… the complete inability to see the difference between normal civil society and society in an emergency situation.
For the socialists, they see how collective action in war works (in effect tribalising society) and try to apply the same logic to peacetime… a Labour Party slogan in post-war 1945 was “If we can achieve so much together in war, think what we can do in peacetime!”… which of course presumes there is no qualitative and material difference between a society at war and one at peace. For them, all economic decisions are subordinated to the collective, which makes some sense if you have to produce more aircraft than Nazi Germany in order to avoid mass annihilation or enslavement but none whatsoever if you just want more people to have more and better washing machines, a wider selection of flavoured coffee beans and responsive dynamic economy… not to mention such bagatelles as personal liberty. Statist conservatives are little better, declaring ‘war on drugs/poverty/illiteracy/whatever’ and trying to deal with the distortions of civil society they themselves are largely responsible for as issues justifying not just the language but the very underlying collectivising logic of war.
Alas so many libertarians make the same error in reverse. They cannot see the difference between when the network of social interactions we call markets and private free associations that characterise normal civil society are functioning… and situations in which large collections of people are trying to kill other groups of people that characterize wars and major civil disorder or serious crisis. Sorry guys, but at times like those, normal rules of civil interaction simply do not apply. Thermobaric explosions, plagues, rioting mobs and forest fires are not known for their propensity to respect even the most pukka of property boundaries.
For a more ‘local’ example… if a house is burning down and the only way for some fire-fighters to put it out is to run their hoses across the lawns of someone who does not wish them to do so, the extremist propertarian strand of libertarian thought would argue that as the lawn is private property, tough luck on the guy whose house is burning down. Well that is lunacy (and why I call myself a social individualist rather than a libertarian most of the time). Without a common law right to go where you must when faced with a clear and present danger, a “libertarian” social order will simply fall apart the first time it faces a collective threat (be it a war, forest fire or plague). People will not sit and watch their families burn because someone else has interpreted what Murray Rothbard or Hans Herman Hoppe wrote about the right to defend private property. I am all for private property and the right not to have people kicking down your doors in the middle of the night, but the reality is that much of the world does not look like the relatively tranquil civil societies of the First World. To see the peaceful and mundane logic that does and indeed should pertain in Islington, Peoria and Calgary as applying to Basra, Baghdad and Mosul in the violent aftermath of a war is not just wrong, it is perverse.
In the real world, a few weeks after a war in which a dictatorship that has been in power for over 25 years was overthrown, normal rules of civil interaction do NOT apply. It does not mean all notions of civilised behaviour goes out the window, but search warrants? Oh please. The mafia-like homicidal Ba’athist are deeply entrenched in Iraq and will only be completely destroyed if the occupying powers are willing to do whatever it takes, which means kicking down peoples doors in the middle of the night on little more than hunches and searching for weapons at bayonet point. The only legitimate use of force is when force can be used effectively… and tying up soldiers in such notions as search warrants during a counterinsurgency action means you would be better off just abandoning any pretence that you are using force to suppress Ba’athist remnants in Iraq and just replace the squadies with an equal number of unarmed American lawyers.
Hmmm… considering the likely outcome of doing that and the vastly excessive number of lawyers in the USA, maybe it is not such a bad idea after all.
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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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