Given the previous post on the subject of state surveillance, it is good to hear that The Register is reporting that PGP encryption is back in the hands of an independent company.
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Although I have never been a huge fan of Statewatch, a civil liberties advocacy group whose membership contains a high proportion of socialists (which I have always thought analogous to a temperance society whose membership contains a high proportion of brewers), the latest Statewatch press release is well worth reading. They clearly lay out how the European Union is about to take a giant leap towards the sort of total surveillance super-state that the Soviet Union could only dream of implementing. As Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments in the press release:
The Panopticon super-state ‘of the future’ is now very much upon us.  When the state watches you, dare to stare back
August 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 As Paul Staines mentioned below, the Irish Young Progressive Democrats explicitly state they are not libertarians and just a glance at their agenda reveals that they are not friends of liberty by any stretch of the imagination. This party is just another bunch of statists pushing the conventional theft based ‘welfare’ politics of old, claiming responsibility for: · Introduction of a minimum wage
· Huge increase in overseas aid
· Taxi cab liberalisation
· Increased social benefits especially pensions
· Increased funding for education
I look forward to being invited to Paul Staine’s next garden party with food cooked over a barbecue lit with both his Tory Party and Progressive Democrat Party membership cards. August 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Just a reminder that our e-mail is still knackered, and has been so since last Friday. Please use our emergency e-mail rather than the one in ther side bar to contact us. August 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
In case anyone who has been observing the Tory Party in Britain has not noticed, they have not been doing very well for rather a long time now. In spite of years of Tony Blair’s less that glorious ‘precedency’, the Conservatives are still trailing a very distant second place in England and are more of less nonexistent in Scotland, riven everywhere by factions fighting over control of the carcass of the Party and quite bereft of any distinctly identifiable ‘Tory’ ideology. In fact there is not even any sign of an intellectual or political ‘wave of the future’ starting to build up… not even a ‘ripple of the future’ really. Now we are being told by Norman Tebbit, the Dr. Harold Shipman of British politics, that what the Tory Party really needs is a purge of any ‘libertarians’ (i.e. anyone who likes non-white sportsmen or dislikes the state telling them what to do with their genitals or actually has anything resembling a new idea). Of course Tebbit has quite a lot of experience masterminding Tory party purges. He shut down the Federation of Conservative Students in 1987, thereby guaranteeing the Conservative Party would become an ideology-free zone from then onwards. Funny how the party has been in decline ever since it eradicated its most radical and highly motivated roots. They don’t call it ‘The Stupid Party’ for nothing. August 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Although Prague has been hit hard by the worst flooding of the Vltava in a century, at least there has been some good news for the despondent staff at Prague’s zoo. After having been forced to put down several highly prized large animals when it became clear they could not be moved to higher ground in time to avoid drowning, returning zoo employees were astonished to discover Slavek, an 18 year old hippo, waiting for them on the second floor of a zoo building in an exceedingly bad mood.  Don’t just stand there gawping, feed me, damn it! August 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It seems our e-mail system is not working properly, with some e-mail sent to us over the last three days not arriving at our end at all. Please use our emergency backup e-mail address and re-send if you did not receive a reply from us to any communications, until our system comes back on-line.  August 18th, 2002 | Comments are closed
August 17, on this day in 1795 the slave known only as Tula and his friend Bastian Karpata started a violent revolt against their oppressors. August 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
There is a lengthy article on USS Clueless about why the US military is the best practitioner of high initiative warfare, tracing it to the empowering influence of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. I disagree on many levels starting with the fact I do not think the US military is the best (or even particularly remarkable) at ‘high initiative warfare’. The US military does not achieve its results as Steven Den Beste suggests, by empowering individual soldiers and harnessing their brains and initiative more than any number of armies I could mention, but rather it achieves results by maximising its true advantages: firstly a huge economy and therefore sheer firepower (it can afford to shoot more bullets/drop more bombs) and secondly, its advanced technology (it can make its aeroplanes hard to shoot down and therefore safely drop smart bombs on people they don’t like from 20,000 feet). In simply wins by dumping large numbers of expensive smart bombs and cruise missiles on the enemy where it hurts most, followed by precise massed artillery if required. The job of America’s infantry and tank jockeys is to pick their way through the crater pocked remnants to what gets left over after the aerial (and maybe artillery) bombardment. Factor out the high tech long range bombardment capabilities, which is unique in the world at the moment, and whilst the US army is a fine one, it is not particularly exceptional in the way it fights compared to many other armies. There are many armies in the world who are better than the US at the sort of small unit tactics that rely on ’empowered’ soldiers at low level (such as Israel, Britain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand). Frankly France’s 2eme REP is probably more optimised for what Steven thinks is a “new approach” to fighting than the much higher firepower US 82nd Airborne, precisely because it has less firepower and thus is forced to rely on élan et cran as well as to fight smart… and with very little help from 20,000 feet. It is in the ‘big stuff’ that no one can match the US, i.e. when it comes to the Godzilla-like ‘grid square removal’ that characterized the Gulf War.  This is not to denigrate the US military, far from it actually: that is a highly rational way to fight if you can afford it. But please realise that the way the USA fights is just the confluence of technology and economy, added to a particularly American political horror of friendly casualties, rather than some emerging ‘First Amendment Powered’ super soldiers. The German Fallschimjägers landing on Crete in 1941 displayed all the characteristics of low level high initiative fight smart upward info-flow empowerment yet it would be safe to say they were not benefiting from the First Amendment of the US Constitution or democracy. August 15th, 2002 | Comments are closed
To more or less complete indifference by the so called human rights champions of the left, Robert Mugabe continues the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white farmers and brutal murders of black political opponents in Zimbabwe. Insignificant sanctions have not saved a single life from Mugabe’s thugs nor prevented the theft of land than is leading inexorably to mass starvation in that unhappy country. Yet it is no more a ‘political’ question that dealing with a marauding wolf attacking one’s sheep is. Commentators should not be calling for ‘harder sanctions’ or ‘robust diplomacy’ but rather for the violent overthrow of Mugabe. There is no material difference between the Mugabe’s and Saddam Hussain’s of this world and the more murderous Mafia families of Corleone in Sicily and you don’t see the Italian state negotiating with Mafia dons but rather sending para-military police with guns after them. There is only one reasonable way to deal with murderous tyrants and that is to kill them. As I have said before, until someone puts a bullet through Mugabe’s head and that of any who would emulate him, Zimbabwe will continue its spiral towards complete societal meltdown. The ‘heads’ of all such governments belong on pikes in a public square and any government who has civil dealing with such people are part of the problem. The world is awash with morally ambiguous issues but this is not one of them. Sic semper tyrannis. August 14th, 2002 | Comments are closed
If as libertarians we believe that we may live in something called ‘society’ but that ‘rights’ are something for individuals, not some corporatised community, then it pretty much follows we are going to be ambivalent at best about nation states, taking either the minarchist/classical liberal position that states should not exist to ‘do stuff’ (such as build roads, educate people, put men on the moon, restrict smoking, discourage single motherhood, prevent discordant architecture etc.) but rather should exist exclusively to guarantee individual rights and thereby reducing it to nothing more than a ‘night watchman state’… or, beyond that, a libertarian takes the anarchist position that states are completely superfluous. What both ends of the libertarian continuum agree on however is that ‘society’ is essentially a self ordering mechanism in which order rather than chaos, results from the absence of the state’s guiding claws. Spontaneous order does not require a blithe belief in the ‘goodness of man’ or some Rousseau-esque drivel about noble savage, just the observation that order in one form or other is in fact man’s ‘natural’ state and that chaos, not order, is the inherently unstable and unsupportable state of human affairs. Chaotic societies in fact are not produced by the absence of invasive governments but by them. The implosion of the Soviet Union is a splendid example of this in action. This is of course a complex subject that could fill a library by itself. Markets occur within the context of sets of rules that enable interaction, but throughout human history, the majority of ‘market rules’ were not imposed by the state but evolved naturally to facilitate wealth creating commerce. In much the same way, the customs of a society are not created by the state’s fiat (customs are not laws), they evolve for complex and often poorly understood reasons. Yet it is social customs, the shared meta-context of assumptions, which really enable the extended social and commercial order that is modern society. Of course societies with liberty enabling customs develop better economically and indeed socially than societies with more restrictive customs. So then what is the role of ‘laws’ if evolved social custom is really the glue that holds everything together? Well I would say ‘law’ is legitimately the choice-less aspect of custom, which is clarified for the avoidance of misunderstanding, and backed by force. For example you have no right to take my property without my consent. You may not legitimately ‘choose’ to do that because your right to acquire my property is rationally and objectively trumped by my right to maintain my pre-existing ownership. To a minarchist like me, backing up that fact is why some sort of ‘night watchman’ state is required, but to a libertarian anarchist, protection agencies and mutated insurance companies take on that sort of role. Coming in Part 3: So what are we to do about tyranny? August 12th, 2002 | Comments are closed
For reasons that will only be clear to certain people who are ‘in August 11th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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