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 reports states that Britain’s armed forces are considered to be below strength for the tasks they have been ordered to perform. Nothing very surprising about that, given that although Blair has been almost indecently keen to deploy troops, sailors and airmen to various theatres of operations, he has not backed this up with a corresponding deployment of resources.
As a minimal statist rather than an anarcho-capitalist libertarian, I accept that providing for the defence of this country is a basic task of the state, but that of course leaves wide open how exactly that task is carried out, by whom, and at what cost. Does it mean things like standing armies, or navies, or large airforces, or anti-missile batteries dotting the coasts? Does it mean an armed citizenry called upon to defend the nation at short notice? Does it mean getting into alliances with other powers to share this role, or focusing entirely on one’s own resources?
It is Friday and we like a good debate ahead of the weekend. Let the comments fly! Try not to get hurt.
In today’s news, media channels bring Samizdata readers this stunning, shocking announcement:
The UK is becoming a “surveillance society” where technology is used to track people’s lives, a report has warned.
CCTV, analysis of buying habits and recording travel movements are among the techniques already used, and the Report on the Surveillance Society predicts surveillance will further increase over the next decade.
Information Commissioner Richard Thomas – who commissioned the report – warned that excessive surveillance could create a “climate of suspicion”.
One of the many justifications for creating this all-seeing, all-knowing state is that it will help reduce crime. Well, it does not appear to be having much impact on Britain’s lovely teenagers, at least according to a new report. Of course, one wonders how much of the worries about crime are partly a moral panic and partly based on hard, ugly reality (a bit of both, probably). Even so, Britain’s approach to crime, which involves massive use of surveillance technology to catch offenders, appears not to be all that much of a deterrent to certain forms of crime, although arguably it does mean that there is a slightly greater chance of catching people once a crime has been carried out (not much consolation for the victims of said, obviously).
I recently got this book on the whole issue of crime, state powers, surveillance and terrorism, by Bruce Schneier, who confronts the whole idea that we face an inescapable trade-off, a zero sum game, between liberty and security. Recommended.
I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.
This is a quotation attributed to the Duke of Wellington, referring to the red-coated soldiers he led in the Peninsular campaign in the early 19th Century and later, in the Battle of Waterloo, in what is now Belgium. He would often remark in scathing terms about his own men while also praising their steadiness under fire and general courage.
I kind of feel the same way about a bunch of men – it seems to be male thing – called the New Atheists in this interesting article over at Wired magazine. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others are no doubt fearless in fighting against what they see is wilful superstition. You want to admire and like what they are doing and in general, I do. I recall reading Dawkins’ book, the Selfish Gene many years ago and was greatly impressed. I felt the same way about Dennett’s books. And yet and yet… Dawkins is so dismissive of there being any value to religion whatsoever that you almost end up feeling rather sorry for religious people – at least the ones that are not fundamentalists. For all that I have problems with religion and un-reason, I cannot overlook the benign side of religion or the contributions that the Judeo-Christian tradition has played in the West, for instance. It is arguable, for example, that notions of individualism, free will and dignity of the person have been greatly driven by that tradition, as well as other schools of thought. But Dawkins will have none of it. He is just as harsh on moderates as he is on the fundamentalists. He thinks the state should ban parents from trying to pass their views to their children (quite how this would be enforced is not made clear in the Wired article). I am not sure if he is going to persuade any existing religious people out of their views although he might, by his sheer boldness, encourage a lot of secret atheists to “come out of the closet”.
Anyway, it is an interesting article and the associated comments, or at least most of them, are pretty good as these things go.
One of the problems with Political Correctness, if one can define it as a desire to change the words we use to change how we think, is that it will invite a backlash. That backlash will not necessarily be for the good, but could encourage a new sort of ugliness: a desire to say things that are by any yardstick offensive, rude and coarsening of public life.
Consider how we talk about people suffering from physical and mental handicaps these days. Even the word, ‘handicap’ might get you into trouble. This Wikipedia take on PC terms shows to what lengths the speech-code enforces will go to change language. Yet there seems to be something of a fightback, and I am not sure if I like the results any more than the PC stuff. Last night, TV presenter Jonathan Ross, a man famed for his massive BBC salary, loud suits and inability to pronounce the letter R, launched an attack on the now-estranged wife of ex-Beatle Paul McCartney in terms so vile that Ross’s career might have been destroyed a few years ago. On the Have I Got News for You satirical current affairs ‘quiz’ show last night, the same sort of mockery was sent the way of Heather Mills, again playing on the fact that she is an amputee. Now, of course some people who suffer such calamities learn to put on a brave face about it and even laugh at their own misfortune. Humour can be a great source of strength. But I thought it pretty striking nonetheless that it is considered okay by mainstream, left-leaning members of the chattering entertainment classes to have a crack at someone by reference to their disability. Personally I have no desire to discuss the rather nasty divorce case. Life is too short.
I suppose context does matter. The media, or at least parts of it, have taken the view that the soon-to-be ex-Mrs McC is a gold-digging trollop who has played on her disability to win support for her case, so she is fair game. But I also suspect this is just another example of the boorish strain in what passes for British public cultural life these days. A year or so back, Andrew Sullivan noted how (link requires subscription) British TV shows and magazines like Maxim or Big Brother were spreading the Brit gospel of crassness and vulgarity across the United States. He had a point then and it applies just as much now.
Excerpt:
The most powerful British influences on American culture today are ferociously crass, unvarnished, unseemly – and completely unapologetic about it.
Vulgarity, I suppose, has its uses. A strong tradition of satire and mockery of the rich, famous and powerful can and does act as a check on the over-mighty. A certain level of vulgarity is probably rather healthy. But my goodness, would it not be refreshing, just for once, if the supposed public merrymakers focused more of their aim on our corrupt and power-mad political elite, and rather less on people who, for all their supposed failings, are not really very important? But perhaps to state the question is to know the answer. Taking the piss out of religious fundamentalists, crooks or tyrants is quite dangerous to the would-be piss-taker (just ask Theo Van Gogh). Much easier to have a go at a pop star instead.
Andrew Sullivan has been gently poking fun at 80s music recently. Steady on Sully, I am a proud 80s-era teenager (although I never sported a mullet haircut, honest). In my ‘umble opinion, you can keep your droning Coldplays, Travises and thuggish Oasises, for me, nothing comes close to the brio of Madness, the wonderful, cleverness of the Stranglers or for that matter, these dudes from Norway.
And of course, one should always remember to buy Danish!
(I originally said that Aha is from Denmark. Several latitudes of error. Thanks for the eagle-eyed reader for pointing this out).
According to the Sunday Telegraph, a new way of calculating how council tax (local government taxes) are set will take account of aspects of a locality such as crime in setting the tax band. The nicer and less crime-ridden the area, the higher the tax you pay. Areas such as Chelsea and Westminster (I live in the latter area) will see their tax bills soar, while presumably if you live in a place such as Hackney, one of the most deprived and crime-ridden areas, your bill goes down. Marvellous. This is hardly an incentive for people to help curb crime and contribute to making their neighbourhoods more pleasant places in which to live.
One of the tropes of the MSM in recent years has been how the present New Labour government has turned away, in part, from the politics of punitive taxation as practised by Labour governments in the past. This is more about image than reality, however. Inheritance tax is biting into a broad swathe of the affluent middle class, the sort of folk that switched to Labour in 1997 or simply refused to vote for the Tories. Now Labour, in order to finance the swelling ranks of public workers, is proposing to hammer those same classes again. Even the Tories, who have been supine on the tax issue under the leadership of David Cameron, have started to kick up a stink on this issue.
The increasingly intrusive powers of officials in judging the values of our homes, coupled with this latest threatened increase, promises to be a gift to the Tories, if only they have the cojones to play the issue properly. The threatened increases are likely to hit precisely those marginal constituencies that the Tories must take from Labour to stand a chance of winning the next election. This does not look very intelligent from Labour’s point of view.
The best research for playing a drunk is being a British actor for 20 years.
– Michael Caine.
Corporate executives used to avoid talking about their war experiences. But today’s educated executives thrill and eventually bore you with their high-altitude conquests. A quarter of them seem either to be just back from one of those instant-glacier expeditions or to be deep in the midst of training for one…You get the impression that every spot on earth over 10,000 feet above sea level is packed with magneta-clad millionaires luxuriating in their thin-air hardships.
– David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, first published in 2000, page 209.
I normally have to get into my office in London’s docklands financial centre of Canary Wharf at some ungodly hour in the morning, so I rarely get the chance to browse the news headlines on television or radio before rushing off for the Tube. But laid low with a nasty headcold this morning, I watched the BBC Breakfast television show for about 30 minutes. This is what I saw:
Item: The local council in Richmond, west London, is proposing to slap heavy parking taxes on people who own cars that are deemed ecologically incorrect (SUVs, etc). The programme interviewed a few bedraggled locals moaning about this, a retired TV personality who said it was a jolly good idea, and left it at that.
Item: A group of MPs want to ban sale of fireworks to ordinary citizens because loud bangs emitted by such things frighten animals and the elderly. We had a brief “debate” in the studio between a puritanical MP and an elderly lady who said what a shame it would be if fireworks were banned. No clear defence was made of the right for law-abiding people to have their fun. The safety-trumps-liberty issue was taken as a given.
Item: The pop star Madonna, who is trying to adopt a baby boy from the African nation of Malawi, has spoken of her anguish about this bureaucracy involved on the Opra Winfrey TV show in the US. This was deemed to be a news item worthy of the BBC’s attention.
Item: recycling of baby’s diapers.
Item: Litigation continues between ITN, the British television network, and the US authorities, over the death of ITN veteran broadcaster Terry Lloyd in Iraq about three years ago.
Item: BBC business journalist discusses how to avoid back injuries in the workplace. It is taken as given that companies must be forced to spend more money to ensure their staff are comfortable.
Now I think a trend is at work here. Many of the “news” items are pretty minor stuff, compared to the ongoing crackup in the Middle East, etc. They are relatively minor stories, what I would call “consumer journalism” stuff that typically used to be confined to daytime television and the dumber ends of the tabloid press. Maybe the producers figure that viewers are unable to digest anything more substantial at 7 in the morning and maybe they are right (but radio news and current affairs seems to have more gravitas, or at least it used to). However, the choice of subjects also reflect the current liberal/left intelligentsia’s obsession with bossing us around in order to protect the environment; they reflect a distinct strain of neo-puritanism (such as Richmond’s persecution of owners of big cars and bashing of fireworks), and an assumption that the child custody arrangements of a person, even a famous one like Madonna, are any of the State’s business.
Bring on Guy Fawke’s Night, is all I can say.
See if you tell the difference.
This via Reuters:
A 70-year-old British pensioner, trained in martial arts during his military service, dispatched a gang of four would-be muggers in a late-night attack in Germany.
“Looks like he had everything under control,” a police spokesman from the German town of Bielefeld said of the incident last Friday.
The man, a native of Birmingham who now lives in Germany, was challenged by three men, demanding money, while a fourth crept up behind him. Recalling his training, the Briton grabbed the first assailant and threw him over his shoulder.
When a second man tried to kick him, the pensioner grabbed his foot and tipped him to the ground. At this point, the three men, thought to be aged between 18 and 25, fled, carrying their injured accomplice with them.
The pensioner, whose name was not immediately available, suffered light abrasions.
Well, some of our older citizens are not pussies, it seems. I trust and hope that this guy gets a commendation for dealing with these scum in such an exemplary manner.
I have taken some lessons with these guys, and I can strongly recommend them for those in decent physical shape (and that does not mean you have to be a big tough bruiser, either. There is something positively encouraging about watching a petite woman throw off an attack by a 6 foot-tall rugby player type).
Henry Porter, the British journalist, gave a lecture recently, which is reproduced in the Independent newspaper here, which lays out in trenchant terms the sheer magnitude of the Blair government’s assault on civil liberties. None of the broad points will exactly come as a surprise to regular readers of this blog but I link to it because it is a pretty good primer on the issue for those who have not thought much about this issue.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
There will be many reasonable people among you who will argue that the fight against terrorism or some other compelling problem makes the removal of a fragment of liberty the best option available to us. A little bit here, a little bit there doesn’t really matter, particularly when it involves somebody else’s rights. Without thinking very deeply, we say to ourselves “if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear from these new laws”. Not true. There is something to fear – because someone else’s liberty is also your liberty. When it’s removed from them, it’s taken from you even though you may not be able to conceive of the circumstances when you might need it. A system of rights must apply to bank managers, illegal immigrant cockle pickers and every type of defendant otherwise it doesn’t count.
I worry that we are not alert to the possibilities of social control. No matter how discreet this surveillance, it increases the spectral presence of the state in the everyday consciousness of each individual. I grant that it is a slow process and that it is nothing like the leaden omnipresence of the Stasi in the GDR. But I think we’re heading for a place from which we will not be able to return: the surveillance society where the state will crowd in on the individual human experience and threaten the unguarded freedoms of privacy, solitude, seclusion and anonymity. We may continue to attest to the feeling of freedom but in reality we will suffer more and more restrictions. Inexorably we are becoming subjects not citizens, units on a database that may be observed and classified by a Government which is taking control in areas where it has never dared in democratic times to trespass before.
I like the way that Porter directly confronts the nonsense ‘argument’ that “only the guilty have anything to fear” line that one hears being trotted out in favour of things like abolition of Habeas Corpus or eroding the presumption of innocence in the Common Law. This is a fine article that deserves to be widely read. At the end, Porter recommends, among other things, a wholesale effort to teach children about how the laws protecting liberty were acquired, and why they were acquired, in the first place. For it is in its attempts to obliterate history, or make us feel deeply ashamed of it, that the real menace of New Labour’s modernisation obsession first revealed itself. It may strike some critics of libertarianism as paradoxical, given that libertarians are usually seen as fans of modern life, that any defence of freedom must be steeped in an understanding and appreciation of history, including the Classics. Perhaps our modern legislators would be far less of a menace if they had bothered to study the speeches of Pericles or Cicero.
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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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