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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‘Underground, overground,
Wombling free,
The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.
Making good use of the things that we find,
The things that the everyday folks leave behind.’
I was half watching one of those interminable nostalgia programmes on TV last night when my intention was caught by the voice of Bernard Cribbins, whose vocal intepretation of the flawed yet quietly heroic role of Orinoco (not to mention Tomsk, Wellington, Tobermory, Madam Cholet and Great Uncle Bulgaria) in The Wombles will forever have its place in the hearts of all who heard it.
Among the many interesting things he said (did you know that all those endearing dithery mutters were ad-libbed?) was that Womble-fixated kiddies used to go to Wimbledon Common and drop litter there in the hope that a Womble would come and take it away.
This proves something. I am not sure what, but something.
I am currently re-reading Are We At War?, a collection of letters to the Times 1939-1945. (Pub. Times Books 1989.) Here are some extracts from letters on the subject of identity cards:
From a letter from Antony Wells:
Sir, -While obtaining, recently, a National Registration identity card for my small daughter, I remarked that it was pleasant to think all this bothersome business would soon no longer be necessary. I was blandly informed by the clerk that my expectation was quite wrong, since registration was to continue after the war. On looking at the card in my hand, I discovered it was valid until 1960.
In happy fact, identity cards were seen off as a result of a court case soon after the war. But the fact that the government saw fit to plan for them to expire so many years after issue shows how purported “emergency measures” have a way of becoming permanent. The letter was written in December 1944 and the war was quite clearly nearing its end; the government could not have seriously believed it would go on until 1960.
This second extract comes from a letter from (Baron) Quickswood:
…Such cards may seem only a small inconvenience, but they are seriously dangerous to liberty in two ways: -First, they facilitate all sorts of further regimentation of citizens, and that is, of course, why it is desired to retain them; secondly, they have a most mischievous moral effect in treating the individual as a numbered item in the aggregate that makes up the State. There lie before us two alternative conceptions of the State: it may be thought an organization useful to individuals and essentially their servant, or it may be thought a pagan demigod for whom the individual exists, whose service is his greatest glory and whose supremacy is without limit.
…We have to fear an Anglicized totalitarianism, humane and benevolent but esentially destructive of personal liberty and initiative; and there will be a strong coalition of philanphropists and bureaucrats eager to regulate their fellow-citizens. We must be jealous for our liberties, and to begin with must resist being numbered by convicts in order to facilitate our servitude.
I have nothing to add to that.
In his latest post Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber gives the background to, and an unedited version of, his letter in today’s Guardian.
I agree with every word of his letter. Paticularly the bit about scavenging for soundbites that the Guardian edited out.
Judging from what I’ve read in blogs and the press about Cavanagh’s unreconstructed views, he did not put forward the standard libertarian argument that to forbid racial discrimination is to violate the human right of free association. (The standard libertarian view is the view I hold. It is quite compatible with thinking that in all but a few special situations racial discrimination is morally wrong, a view I also hold.) According to Edward Lucas in a letter further down the page, “We invited Mr Cavanagh [to the ICA debate that started all the fuss] as a leftwing critic of equality of opportunity. He argued, for example, that it leads to an overemphasis on competition between individuals.”
In other words the views I hold would be even more likely than Mr Cavanagh’s to be described as pyschotic by David Winnick MP, a member of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. As described by the Guardian this prominent Labour MP’s own views appear close to totalitarian. He does not merely think it is pyschotic to oppose the discrimination laws he thinks it is psychotic even to question them.
That’s us lot for the loony bin then.
Still, you never know with the Guardian. Tomorrow we might be treated to the amusing spectacle of Mr Winnick saying that he was quoted out of context, just like Mr Cavanagh before him.
Kids in Lee county, Florida are being thumb printed every time they get on or off a school bus. Yes, you read that right, thumb printed, in the name of safety. Could somebody please explain to me how thumb printing a kid when they get on or off a school bus increases their safety by one iota?
Is there any stupid idea that someone, somewhere won’t try and implement in the name of almighty safety? Good lord, this just boggles my mind! And what’s really sad is that these kids are going to grow up with this, never knowing a time when you didn’t just present your thumb print or any other identifying feature whenever asked. They’ll be used to constantly being surveilled and tracked, their lives fed into a computer and analyzed — all for their own good, of course. They’ll also never know a time when they didn’t have to watch anything they did or said because ears are everywhere and there is always some dipstick with a moronic zero-tolerance (zero-thought, more like) policy ready to toss you out on your ear should you say or do the slightest thing they might not like.
I read these stories, I wonder what kind of generation is being raised under these ludicrous “safety” rules, and I despair.
– Myria of It Can’t Rain All The Time
“God made the 20th Century to teach us that the notion that things work better when experts plan them is a fallacy. It’s a pity that a hundred-million or so had to die to illustrate the lesson. But now we got it. Right?”
– John Weidner
According to this Guardian article and the this one in the Independent the Labour MP turned talk show host, Robert Kilroy-Silk, is under fire for having written an anti-Arab article. I have read the Sunday Express article concerned on a forum but have not been able to find it in linkable form.
Predictably the Commission for Racial Equality is making noises about lawyers and prosecutions and public order. I will be amazed if they actually do anything. The point of the CRE’s threats is not to carry them out, but to have a chilling effect on the next person who wants to write in a similar vein.
(The issue of whether Mr Kilroy-Silk should write as a freelance while working for the BBC is a separate one which I shall ignore here.)
Here is something the CRE and other race relations bodies ought to remember but will not: freedom of speech and relatively good race relations go together. In fact it is broader than that. Freedom and relatively good race relations go together. Pogroms happen under tyrannies. I call it the “pressure-cooker effect.” → Continue reading: Robert Kilroy-Silk, freedom of speech and the pressure-cooker effect
Right then. Desperate times, desperate measures. It’ll just have to be the kittens.
Empathy is the thing in schools history these days. You get the kids to think their way in to what it was really, truly like to be a fourteenth century Bohemian swineherd and feel their pain. Empathising with groups neglected and derided by the “Kings ‘N’ Battles” school of history is particularly favoured.
As part of my personal commitment to this school of thought, I’d like to bring up for public view the sufferings of a marginalised and stigmatised group. Slaveowners. Ever thought about their problems, huh? You probably think a person who can legally demand the unlimited services of another human has everything he wants. But you’d be wrong.
The ancient and modern chroniclers agree. Slaves were frequently lazy, dishonest and obstructive. Lacking initiative and zeal. Endlessly prone to saying, “yes massa, coming massa,” and yet still somehow unwilling to put their hearts, souls and scrubbing arms into bringing out that deep-clean sparkle when scrubbing out the vomitorium.
Here is Seneca, writing in the Rome of the first century AD: “A household of slaves requires dressing and feeding; a crowd of ravenous creatures have to have their bellies filled, clothing has to be bought, thieving hands have to be watched, and the service we get is rendered with resentment and curses.” (From On Tranquillity.)
Seneca knew no other system than slavery. In contrast English observers of the US writing after 1833 could observe the system from outside. I found several quotations in the Penguin Portable Victorian Reader illustrating how shoddy slave-work was. A passionate enemy of slavery, Charles Dickens, wrote “Richmond is a prettily situated town; but like other towns in slave districts (as the planters themselves admit) has an aspect of decay and gloom which to an unaccustomed eye is most distressing.”
Even an opponent of slavery as lukewarm as William Makepeace Thackeray had to admit, writing to a friend in England: “Every person I have talked to here about it deplores it and owns that it is the most costly domestic machinery ever devised. In a house where four servants would do with us …. there must be a dozen blacks here, and the work is not well done.”
→ Continue reading: Life is still tough for the owners of lazy slaves.
Here’s our first week’s archives. As da boss said back then, “Post away and remember… let’s NOT be safe out there!”
Maria of Crooked Timber has posted this, warning that there are proposals afoot to oblige those who register domain names to give lots of personal information.
Here is a clip from Maria’s post:
Next week the body that oversees the technical co-ordination of the internet, ICANN, meets at Carthage in Tunisia. The top item on the agenda, for anyone who cares about privacy and freedom of expression, is the WHOIS database. This is the set of data of domain name owners which was originally collected so that network administrators could find and fix technical problems and keep the internet running smoothly.
Of course no collection of personal data can remain long without various interests campaigning to open it up to a variety of unintended uses. In this case, those interests include IP rights holders, law enforcement, oppressive regimes, stalkers, and of course spammers.
While the first two groups have some legitimate interests in this data [Some of us here might disagree re law enforcement – NS], the others clearly do not. (I have blogged before about the unholy alliance of law enforcement and IP holders on this issue.) But instead of pushing for proportionate lawful access requirements, the latter are demanding that the entire database be policed for accuracy and published on the internet for all to see. Which means that if A.N. Other wants to publish a website, he/she must be content for his email and postal address to be made completely public. There are plenty of good and legitimate reasons to want to publish a website anonymously (and you don’t have to be a Chinese dissident to think of them)…”
The rest of the post includes some sample letters to the bods at ICANN. I am not sure I would sign up to every word in them, but it does look to me as if now might be a good time to register our protest.
Over at the Adam Smith Institute’s Weblog, Madsen Pirie says:
There is another view which says that politics matters less these days. When the UK government provided houses and jobs for many of us, and ran the electricity, gas, oil and phone companies, together with steel, coal, ships and cars, it mattered who was in charge. With less coming from government and more from ourselves and the private sector, it is not as important. People tend to vote heavily in high tax countries such as Denmark, and less so in low tax countries such as the USA.
In other words, if politics (i.e. the scramble for the favour of the majority) becomes less important, voting goes down.
Many libertarians, notably Perry de Havilland of this blog, believe that the same idea in reverse is true – that by not voting we can reduce the politicisation of our lives. ‘Let them wither away to irrelevance,’ he says. I’m not so sure. It might be one of those nasty paradoxes such as the one whereby safety breeds lack of vigilance, which makes us less safe.
Perhaps the first to stop voting are those who have achieved relative independence, leaving disproportionate influence to those still at the trough. Have any studies been done on this? And does anyone know what percentage of those eligible to vote in, say, 1900 when the State was very weak, actually did so?
I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that “a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras”. These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:
- A person who has unpopular political beliefs of left or right that might lose them their job or promotion.
- A person who is homosexual but their family does not know.
- A teenage girl secretly visiting her boyfriend. He is of a different race to her family, and they have forbidden her to see him.
- A man who is seeking to change his job needs to attend interviews with other companies. He doesn’t want his present employer to know for fear that if the interviews don’t work out he might end up worse off than before, having lost the confidence of his boss.
- A woman scouting out places to go to get away from her violent partner.
- Someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous or drugs rehabilitation sessions.
- Someone going to church, synagogue or mosque who fears the scorn of their secular friends, colleagues or family.
- Someone attending classes of religious instruction prior to converting to another religion who fears the vengeance of their family if their apostasy becomes known.
- A son or daughter visiting an estranged parent without the knowledge of the parent they live with.
- An ex-criminal seeking to go straight who must meet his probation officer or register with the police.
- An adulterer. (I think adultery is very wrong, but I don’t want the government involved in exposing it – besides the intrinsic nastiness of state intervention in such matters, you can bet they would expose the adulteries of their opponents and pass over the adulteries of their friends.)
That example takes us to a more general point: there are so many laws that nearly all of us are breaking some of them all the time. This fact gives local and national authorities enormous scope for quiet blackmail. You think it’s unlikely that they would be so wicked? Well, the blackmailers themselves might scarcely see it as blackmail. Imagine this scenario: they get to know that X, an irritating serial complainer, writer of letters to the editor, and general thorn in the side of several local councillors, is attending an adult education class for more than the number of hours permitted to an unemployed person who is meant to be actively seeking work. How satisfactory to take action against this pest! Meanwhile Y, who sat next to X in the class and is equally unemployed and equally breaking the rules (or equally unaware of them), is ignored because he is not a troublemaker.
Cross-posted from Samizdata.net
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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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