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.
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Or should we deal with it at all?
Sean Duffy targeted the relatives of dead teenagers with defaced pictures of the teenagers and offensive messages. His victims were unknown to him. He has been jailed for 18 weeks.
What is the opinion of Samizdata readers on whether he should have been jailed, and if not, whether there are any legitimate means of stopping him? (I trust it is already the opinion of Samizdata readers that he is a foul excuse for a human being.) If he had sent personal emails to the relatives, then I think most of us could, with a sigh of relief, invoke concepts of private property and harassment. Actually, having just written that I have become unsure about it. Moot point, anyway; as far as I can see he either posted his offensive messages on Facebook pages open to all or made his own websites. Some of his messages were also libelous – so much so that I cannot understand why he has not been prosecuted for libel – but others were not, despite their malice. It is the latter category that present the difficulty for believers in free speech.
Or perhaps all I have done is demonstrate that I am not such a strong believer in free speech as I thought.
Another possible get-out clause is that the web hosts, or Facebook, or the Internet Service Providers should ‘do something’. I am almost fanatically opposed to making them do something, but I agree they should. But what if they won’t, or can’t, or can’t quickly enough?
Another line of thought: there has long been a catch all in English law of “conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace”. That could work, but I do not like the way it makes the test whether the victim of outrageous speech is likely to turn violent. It puts the most peaceable or timid victims at a disadvantage.
Similar questions arise regarding the calculated offensiveness of the extended family cult known as the Westboro Baptist Church. One solution was an emergency law:
In January 2011, Westboro announced that they would picket the funeral of Christina Green, a 9-year-old victim of the 2011 Tucson shooting. In response, the Arizona legislature passed an emergency bill to ban protests within 300 feet of a funeral service, and Tucson residents made plans to shield the funeral from protesters.
The law seems to have done the job it was intended for … but it and similar laws remain on the books setting a dangerous precedent.
The common factor that takes Duffy and the Phelps family beyond the level of politically offensive speech (such as the Muslim provocateurs who disrupted the commemorative silence in honour of the victims of 9-11 held in London on Sunday) is the targeting of individuals.
Propaganda ‘own goals’ are always interesting. A couple of self-described anti-fascists from United Against Fascism produced a happy, confident video in which they laughed at the beating administered to a female English Defence League supporter by members of the UAF. The left-wing site Harry’s Place described it as horrifying. In the Telegraph, Brendan O’Neill called it “A glimpse into the class hatred at the heart of the anti-EDL clique”.
The woman concerned is a racist. She gloated on Facebook over the death of a Muslim woman whose burka became caught in a go-kart. But that’s not the point, as the author of the second post from Harry’s Place makes clear.
In the Independent, Laurie Penny writes Class snobbery about the EDL won’t halt the far right. Lady, that ain’t the half of it. The upper middle class laughter – oh, yes, in England laughter has a class – of Ben and Anthony as they call the victim a “the most tattooed horrible scrote of a woman” and their Rag Week chuckles as they say, “Never hit a woman – but they are not women” and “Never hit a woman – but DO kick a dog” will be like salt on raw skin to many working class men.
Anthony and Ben put this video on YouTube themselves, before the EDL got hold of it. They did not forsee how it would look to others. Like ‘No Pressure’ with real violence.
There is a further twist. The boiling surface of the internet has thrown up what are claimed to be the full names and personal details of Ben and Anthony. However one of the men named strongly denies that he is the person who made the video. One act of mob violence may give rise to another.
Felicity Lawrence. Describing her as a health dominatrix doesn’t really work; some people find that fun. In this article, Why the new McDonald’s menu won’t make us thin, she writes:
The coalition government has chosen to cast public health as a matter of personal responsibility. It takes the classical liberal view that individuals should make their own choices, free from state intrusion. Nudging us to healthier choices is OK, but regulating is not.
On this liberal reading, the fact that your risk of being obese relates closely to your socio-economic status is not a question of social justice but a problem of the feckless poor being too ignorant or spineless to make good choices.
This is a dangerous misrepresentation. It conflates the right of the individual to freedom from interference with the right of business to the same freedom from government constraint. It ignores the fact that business intrudes on our choices constantly with its powerful marketing and sales strategies.
The part where she is projecting is the part I have put in bold type. It is Felicity Lawrence, not the supporters of a belief that individuals should make their own choices, who is conflating the right of the individual to freedom from interference with the right of business to the same freedom from government constraint. She is conflating the two rights so as to get her Guardian audience, generally hostile to business, to give up their residual hippy belief in freedom to do what one likes with one’s own body in return for the quick thrill of an anti-business sugar rush.
Those who believe that individuals should be able to do what they like with their own bodies may also believe that businesses should be free from government constraint. I do. They are both freedoms. They are not the same freedom. I would say that the freedom to do what you like with your own body, and mind, and life, is the fundamental freedom – is, in fact, freedom. The specific freedom of businesses is merely an application of that to certain uses of your time and applied to specific types of groups.
I am a sarcastic cow, I am used to being a sarcastic cow and I am comfortable being a sarcastic cow. When the time comes to simply recommend an article in the Guardian my non-sarcastic mooing sounds all funny in my own ears. But, here goes: I recommend you read ‘Freedom of information is for businesses too’ by Heather Brooke.
A request by tobacco giant Philip Morris International has reignited concern about the use of freedom of information laws. The data it was interested in was collected as part of a survey of teenagers and smoking carried out by the university’s Centre for Tobacco Control Research.
The UK’s FoI law is meant to be applicant blind. This means anyone can ask a public body for official information and there should be no discrimination based on the identity of the person asking. In the case of scientific research conducted and funded in the public’s name, there is a strong argument that the underlying data and methodology should be disclosed. It is precisely this transparency that grants research reports their status as robust investigations.
It is right to ban the English Defence League’s march, argues Lutfur Rahman, the leader of Tower Hamlets council. How sensible and moderate he is. Observe how he calms the fears expressed by the left wing feminist writer Nina Power that the power to ban the EDL today is certain to be used against other causes tomorrow. Mr Rahman writes,
So while I applaud the Metropolitan police and the home secretary in listening to the many voices from our community in banning the EDL march, I will support the right of community organisations to hold some of the events that Power fears might be banned. However, I feel sure that good sense will prevail, and that the authorities will be capable of distinguishing between community events and demonstrations designed to whip up racial and religious intolerance.
Pernickety people might argue that once the “right” to demonstrate is dependent on your organisation falling within the authorities’ definition of a “community organisation”, then it is no longer a right. Really, though, who can be bothered with such far-fetched ideas? We have the assurance of a local politician that good sense will prevail.
Sit down. I am about to astonish you. Via the Drudge Report, I found this: Seattle’s ‘green jobs’ program a bust.
A green jobs scheme has failed. Over the shock yet? I’ve always meant to ask one of the enthusiasts for these schemes why they do not also support a job-creating proposal to forbid the generation of electricity by any means other than men on treadmills, but I have not done so for fear of giving them ideas.
I was lying earlier. I am not surprised at all and do not expect you to be. The best that any government “job creation” scheme can ever do is “create” a few jobs in some specific place or profession while the spotlight is on that place or profession – at the cost of destroying the wealth that actually creates long term jobs, but in a conveniently spread out way so no one much notices. Greens strive to convince us that there are external costs paid by the community as a whole when jets fly or factories produce geegaws. “Look at the whole picture,” they urge. “Don’t be bedazzled by the transitory benefit accruing to a few and fail to see the larger but subtler harm being borne by the many.” They have a point. I wish they could apply it to ‘job creation’.
Apparently, however, this Seattle scheme was even a bust in its own terms. It withered even before the spotlight moved on.
The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.
McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.
But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable.
I enjoyed the implication that there are others who do not wonder at all, no sir, no sliver of doubt that the original goals might not be met has ever crossed their minds.
That was not the only part of this article rich in irony. Look at this:
“Who’s benefitting from this program right now – it doesn’t square with what the aspiration was,” said Howard Greenwich, the policy director of Puget Sound Sage, an economic-justice group. He urged the city to revisit its social-equity goals.
….Greenwich said the energy retrofit market has turned out to be extremely complicated, with required hammering out of job standards, hiring practices, wages and how best to measure energy benefits.
Market? Where was the market there? The things that have “turned out” (talking as if it all happened by chance) to be “extremely complicated” (that I can believe) are the workings of the interlocking tangle of government rules and protections that people like him and his “economic justice” group advocate. Job standards. Hiring practices. How best to measure energy benefits on some government form. It is sad for all those whose hopes are dashed by these schemes, like the mugs here in the UK who trained as assessors to issue Energy Performance Certificates, or like the unfortunates who got burnt metaphorically and literally in the great Australian insulation debacle. (Not surprisingly, Tim Blair, chronicler of that saga, also has a post about this Seattle fandango. Mine was started first, though.) But what a joke when the very thing that reduces the progressive silver bullet to a twist of mangled brass is… all the stuff that progressives wanted all along.
On second thoughts, I need not worry about giving them dangerous ideas. The great ‘men on treadmills’ job creation scheme would never get moving. It would have to be persons on treadmills regardless of gender, age, religious belief or sexual orientation for a start. And what about disabled access?
A letter to yesterday’s Times (link behind a paywall):
Sir, Statistics indicate that 100,000 children sleep rough in the UK every night. Evicting rioters from their homes would only add to this shameful number and it would fall on already overstretched charities to protect them. It will also create a disaffected underclass as can be found in countries like Brazil and Mexico.
Trudy Davies
Co-Founder of the Consortium for Street Children charities (CSC)
Wimbledon SW19
There are about 11.8 million children under sixteen in Britain, so according to the statistics cited – or at least mentioned as existing somewhere – by Trudy Davies, about one in 118 of them sleeps rough every night.
Strangely, a six year old document produced by Charlie Bretherton, a Trustee of the very same Consortium for Street Children Charities, gives a less alarming picture, although it does also include a figure of one hundred thousand. It says:
How many young people are involved and where are they?
‘Runaways’: The Children’s Society estimates that about 100,000 children under 16 run away from home every year. Most stay away for between one and three nights, but some stay away for longer. The Social Exclusion Unit estimates that at least one in eight runs three times or more. Most do not travel long distances; only one-fifth travel further afield than the nearest city. The majority will stay with friends or sleep in garden sheds, fields or bus stations.
Homeless: There are few statistics on youth homelessness. Centrepoint in London provides a place to stay for over 500 young people every night; in 2000 one in five were 16 and 17 year olds.
Street Homeless: The last rough sleeper count found only two under-18 year olds sleeping rough on the streets. However young people who run away often choose to sleep in dangerous places.
Emphasis added. From two to a hundred thousand in six years. I blame the Tories.
Writing in today’s Times behind a paywall, Natascha Engel, Labour MP for North East Derbyshire, relates how she stood in the rain outside a miner’s welfare hall smoking with a angry but partially mollified constituent.
…he told me about his father in law who used to come to the welfare every night and spent all evening drinking one pint of Guinness. He was a chain smoker. Since the smoking ban he’s never been back.
“He’s can’t stand outside in the rain like this. He’s an old man.” He told me about how his father-in-law never goes out any more. “He’s lonely and miserable. And he still chain smokes.”
Natascha Engel now says that, given the chance again, she would not vote for the ban. It is good that she has the empathy to see and the courage to state that the reason the smoking ban is wrong is that it makes people more miserable than they would otherwise have been. Just that. That is reason enough. Arguments about health are very interesting, and I have no doubt that the dangers of passive smoking have been exaggerated, but the fact that an old man has had the solace of smoking in company with his friends denied him trumps all that. I do wish Ms Engel had been able to perceive this at the time when her vote might have done some good, but better late than never.
“In the absence of a gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good and thereafter decline to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as claims on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to be able to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
– Alan Greenspan, Gold and Economic Freedom, 1966.
“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default”
– Alan Greenspan, on NBC’s Meet the Press, 7 August 2011
(Hat tip for the earlier quote to commenter “El Tut” in the comments to the later one.)
Anger at failure of £2bn fund to help bands, writes Mark Sweney in the Guardian. He is concerned that:
A £2bn government-backed scheme partly aimed at helping musicians and promoters launch new bands and other music ventures has approved just two music-sector loans in more than two years. One of the successful applicants received money only after making nine attempts.
Brian Message, co-manager of Radiohead and Kate Nash, tried repeatedly to obtain money under the enterprise finance guarantee (EFG) scheme to finance an album and tour for rock band the Rifles. After trying for two-and-a-half years, he was loaned a quarter of the cash he had originally sought.
The poor performance of the scheme – which was broadened in March 2009 to include “music composers and own-account artists” (those not already signed to a record label) – has led to deep frustration in the industry at a perceived lack of government support in an area where British acts lead the world.
In the comments, a character called “stewpot” performs an extended comic riff on the lines of
It was only because of generous government loans that “The Beatles” were able to get started. If not for such loans they would have ended up having to play gigs in German strip clubs and so-called “Cavern clubs” for pitiful amounts, an obvious non-starter.
An excellent joke, made even better by the fact that half the other commenters appear to have taken it seriously.
Good as stewpot’s joke was, Mark Sweney’s is even better. So far I am the only person who has seen that it is an obvious wind-up. In these days of austerity, two billion pounds of taxpayers’ money to be lent to wannabe rock stars? Come on.
“Johann Hari, you are a plagiarist!” I shoot those words at him and let them hang in the air between us.
He shifts uneasily, but when he replies his voice is surprisingly unapologetic.”When dealing with an inarticulate interviewee, or one whose English was poor,” he confides, “I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me, so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible.”
“Yeah, right,” I say, my outrage rising, “but when you talk about what they said more clearly elsewhere what you really mean is what they said more clearly when interviewed by someone else, huh?”
He furrows his big, broad brow, pats my knee, and tells me about the night he knew he was going to die unless he got his copy in on time. “It depends, ” he says, looking away, “on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon.”
“Intellectual accuracy,” I cry, grabbing his patting-hand in a jiu-jitsu lock and hurling him over my shoulder, “cannot exist independently of reportorial accuracy.”
Floored equally by my logic and a martial arts technique taught to me by a secret order of fighting monks living in the high passes of Chingford, he apologises to a lampshade for having once supported the Iraq war and hobbles away.
This interview was true in spirit.
It was also almost entirely an excuse to say something that I had been meaning to say for ages, but was too short to be a post on its own: never mind all this twitter and email and communication-y stuff, the underreported way the internet changes everything is the way that everything anyone writes is still there years later. I cannot even safely assume that you have forgotten that I said this before, on Tuesday March 1st 2005.
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UPDATE: Today’s Guardian carries an interview (which I am fairly sure really happened) in which Stuart Jeffries talks to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age. Much there to disagree with, in particular the way Mayer-Schönberger chucks around the word “should” in “He argues that digital storage devices (cameras, mobiles, computers) should automatically delete information that has reached its expiration date”. Does “should” mean “it would be nice if manufactures put this in” or “let’s have a law to force them to”? When a professor of internet governance and regulation fails to make this distinction it strikes me as sinister. Nevertheless the interview is fascinating, particularly when Mayer-Schönberger talks about how “the Panopticon now extends across time and cyberspace”.
Stretch yourselves. Answer these questions, if you think you’re hard enough:
* There were no _________ remarks at the parents’ evening. Is the correct word: dissaproving disaproveing dissapproving disapproving?
* A lesson begins at 11:40. The teacher prepares a 10-minute introduction followed by a 15-minute video clip and then a 25-minute activity. At what time does the activity end? Give your answer using the 24-hour clock.
* The children enjoyed the _________ nature of the task. Is the correct word: mathmatical, mathematical, mathemmatical or mathematicall?
* Teachers organised activities for three classes of 24 pupils and four classes of 28 pupils. What was the total number of pupils involved?
* For a science experiment a teacher needed 95 cubic centimetres of vinegar for each pupil. There were 20 pupils in the class. Vinegar comes in 1,000 cubic centimetre bottles. How many bottles of vinegar were needed?
Michael Gove to set out tougher teacher training rules, reports the Telegraph.
Mr Gove is to publish new requirements for the “basic skills tests” to be completed before embarking on teacher training. Candidates will also be allowed a maximum of two re-sits for each exam.
The questions quoted above were from the current versions of these literacy and numeracy basic skills tests. One in five trainee teachers fails either the literacy or numeracy part of this fiendish Educational Tripos on the first sitting.
Oh dear. Is the correct word perthetic, pafetic, or pathetic?
Answer: all three, with knobs on. You might think from this that I am going to urge the Secretary of State for Education to an even more drastic reform than allowing only two re-sits. One re-sit! One re-sit and then euthanasia!
I make no such urgings. It none of it matters. The trouble is, to put in terms that an old D&D-er like the Minister would understand, is that it is a very bad idea to magic missile the orcs while the lich remains undefeated. The least of the problems with state education is that orcs who made a bad INT roll are let into the profession. Orcs can do quite nicely as teachers. A teacher needs to roll for three characteristics:
– knowledge of the subject he or she is to teach,
– the knack of teaching,
– ability to maintain classroom discipline.
Of course it is good to have rolled high in all three, and, to be fair to Mr Gove’s latest initiative, he is probably right that a 1 in any of them probably should disqualify the applicant. But a good score in two qualities can usually compensate for one bad roll.
But by Garl Glittergold’s holy nugget, I did not mean to get distracted by recommending this tweak or that tweak of Mr Gove’s new “tougher” criteria! It’s all pointless, I tell you. (Particularly as by Mr Gove’s express wish, a person who really had passed the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge would be refused a bursary to train as a maths teacher, if he or she had only a third class degree. Yes, really, even if they could work out how many bottles of vinegar were needed.)
The point was this. You don’t fight the orcs, Gove the Mighty But Deluded. You fight the liches. Give the man his due, allowing for the fact that “Secretary of State for Education” is a useless character class that ought to be deleted from any future editions, he is doing better than any we have had for years. If he survives the liches, he may even take the fight to the Blob itself.
Just leave the orcs alone. Head teachers can fight their own orcs, or hire ’em, you don’t have to worry which. It is unbecoming for anyone above fifth level to bash an orc.
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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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