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]
|
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.
Stephen Lewis of the Sterling Times message board sent this link.
Follow it, please. Now would be a good time.
Mr Lewis has found a report on the Radio Nederlands website stating that the BBC, the BBC, is to monitor message boards for hate speech on behalf of the authorities.
Once upon a time the only official way your home could be searched was by a policeman backed by a warrant issued by the courts. OK, as a libertarian I could raise certain objections even to that, but it was the evolved and generally agreed custom of my country and that counts for a lot. Then the privilege of search spread first to customs officers and then to tax-gatherers, until now practically any parasite of a an environmental health officer or social worker can walk in.
Count on it. The same process is happening with restrictions of freedom of speech. Fifty years ago the legal right to impose restrictions was the preserve of the courts. Many of the restrictions were ridiculous: the Lord Chamberlain censored naughty bits out of stage plays until as late as 1968. However, in terms of political speech, freedom fifty years ago was greater than freedom now. Speakers in Hyde Park Corner could and did call for the gutters of Mayfair to run red with the blood of the rich and the copper would just say, “steady on mate, steady on.” Part of the reason for this freedom was that the right to restrict was itself restricted to the justice system.
It’s a sign of a half-way healthy state (half-way being about as good as states get) that it is very clear who is doing the state’s dirty work.
Now, it seems, the job of spying on British citizens has been franchised out to that “much loved” institution, the BBC. As Mr Lewis says, that is not their role. Later on in the post some Radio Nederlands commentary is quoted saying that it might be better to have “trained journalists” doing the monitoring than others. Not surprising, I suppose, that the trained journalists at Radio Nederlands rate their fellow trained journalists at the BBC as the best people to employ for this task. I must disagree: if I had to choose I’d rather be spied on by professional spies. At least they live in the real world, and in particular have the peril of Islamofascism very much in the forefront of their minds. I’d trust them way above the BBC to be able to tell the difference between clear statements warning against Islamofascism and genuine hate speech.*
When it comes to judging others – judging us here, for instance – the BBC is very likely to imply that anyone who says out loud that a kind of death-cult has infected to some degree a disturbingly high proportion of the Muslim world is thereby an Islamophobe.
But when it comes to judging themselves, or judging the groups they have a soft spot for, the standard is very different. You can see the double standard in operation by the BBC’s choice of Jew-hating ranter Mahathir as official BBC “expert” on Islam for an upcoming forum. (See Biased BBC here and passim.) Tell you what, Beeb guys, if you want to monitor “hate speech” why don’t you start with him?
*I do not make this distinction between real and apparent hate speech in order to say we should forbid one and allow the other. I am a free speech absolutist. That means I must support the political right to make truly hateful hate speech, however vile, while also asserting my right to condemn it. This includes hate speech about Muslims and hate speech by Muslims. But the distinction between real and apparent hate speech is crucial in terms of moral assessment and national security.
Stephen Lewis of the Sterling Times message board sent this link.
Follow it, please. Now would be a good time.
Mr Lewis has found a report on the Radio Nederlands website stating that the BBC, the BBC, is to monitor message boards for hate speech on behalf of the authorities.
Once upon a time the only official way your home could be searched was by a policeman backed by a warrant issued by the courts. OK, as a libertarian I could raise certain objections even to that, but it was the evolved and generally agreed custom of my country and that counts for a lot. Then the privilege of search spread first to customs officers and then to tax-gatherers, until now practically any parasite of an environmental health officer or social worker can walk in.
Count on it. The same process is happening with restrictions of freedom of speech. Fifty years ago the legal right to impose restrictions was the preserve of the courts. Many of the restrictions were ridiculous: the Lord Chamberlain censored naughty bits out of stage plays until as late as 1968. However, in terms of political speech, freedom fifty years ago was greater than freedom now. Speakers in Hyde Park Corner could and did call for the gutters of Mayfair to run red with the blood of the rich and the copper would just say, “steady on mate, steady on.” Part of the reason for this freedom was that the right to restrict was itself restricted to the justice system.
It’s a sign of a half-way healthy state (half-way being about as good as states get) that it is very clear who is doing the state’s dirty work.
Now, it seems, the job of spying on British citizens has been franchised out to that “much loved” institution, the BBC. As Mr Lewis says, that is not their role. Later on in the post some Radio Nederlands commentary is quoted saying that it might be better to have “trained journalists” doing the monitoring than others. Not surprising, I suppose, that the trained journalists at Radio Nederlands rate their fellow trained journalists at the BBC as the best people to employ for this task. I must disagree: if I had to choose I’d rather be spied on by professional spies. At least they live in the real world, and in particular have the peril of Islamofascism very much in the forefront of their minds. I’d trust them way above the BBC to be able to tell the difference between clear statements warning against Islamofascism and genuine hate speech 1.
When it comes to judging others – judging us here, for instance – the BBC is very likely to imply that anyone who says out loud that a kind of death-cult has infected to some degree a disturbingly high proportion of the Muslim world is thereby an Islamophobe.
But when it comes to judging themselves, or judging the groups they have a soft spot for, the standard is very different. You can see the double standard in operation by the BBC’s choice of Jew-hating ranter Mahathir as official BBC “expert” on Islam for an upcoming forum. (See Biased BBC here and passim.) Tell you what, Beeb guys, if you want to monitor “hate speech” why don’t you start with him?
- I do not make this distinction between real and apparent hate speech in order to say we should forbid one and allow the other. I am a free speech absolutist. That means I must support the political right to make truly hateful hate speech, however vile, while also asserting my right to condemn it. This includes hate speech about Muslims and hate speech by Muslims. But the distinction between real and apparent hate speech is crucial in terms of moral assessment and national security.
I don’t believe the popular line that attacks on Coalition troops in Iraq take place because the Iraqis are angry about lacking electricity, water and other services. That theory certainly doesn’t explain the dreadful bombing of a mosque a few hours ago.
But there’s no denying that when you are trying to win over a country, it doesn’t help if nothing bloody works.
This story from Stephen Pollard made me think that some loyal US bureaucrats might as well go out and slit a few of their own soldiers’ throats. In a hot country like Iraq with intermittent electricity supply and a dodgy phone system, mobile phones make a tremendous difference. They save time, inconvenience and sometimes lives. So here’s how the State Department has gone about getting this great aid to the restoration of normality up and running:
Compounding the impact of the US’ military overstretch on security has been the State Department’s crippling bureaucratic mindset. Rather than recognising the exceptional nature of the Iraqi situation, officials have insisted at every point in applying the full rigour of US health and safety requirements, licensing procedures and other sundry impediments to progress. Take the mobile phone network. The sensible solution would have been to pick the most able and cost-effective operator and let them get on with it. But instead, the decision was taken to go through a full competitive tendering process, which takes an inordinate amount of time. One day, however, people suddenly found their mobiles working; a network had decided, to immense acclaim, to ignore the process and, indeed, get on with it. They were swiftly shut down, encapsulating just why things have been moving so slowly in Iraq: beauraucracy ahead of common sense.
They had it! They had one of the prizes they should have been striving for actually in their hands – and they let it slip through their fingers.
In the first years of the last century Count Peter Stolypin raced against time to enrich the Russian people fast enough to stave off revolution. The race ended with his assassination in 1911. Tough luck, Russia. What an irony if Stolypin’s counterparts in modern Iraq survive the assassins who are undoubtedly after them – only to be defeated by regulation.
As a libertarian I shall boycott Ryanair on political grounds while that state- backed parasite Michael O’Leary is in charge.
Before I explain, my apologies to Andy Duncan, for I intend to exercise the privilege of a Samizdatista and make my comment on his posting below a posting in itself. I want lots of people to read it and think as I do.
Why am I so against O’Leary? No, it is not his cheap flights (in themselves cheap flights are a good thing), nor his not paying dividends (I neither know nor care about dividends), nor his safety record (take the risk or don’t: up to you), nor his comments about wishing to be a dictator (unimportant bombast), nor the environment (a side issue: to protect it, privatise it), nor his intention to move his business elsewhere if the bureacrats mess him about (I actively like that bit).
It’s because he intends to make his airline strong by massive compulsory purchase of people’s homes, homes they love and desperately want to keep, so that airports can be expanded. Stansted Airport is the one I know about personally, but I stress that state compulsory purchase for any airport anywhere is as clear a violation of liberty as you will ever see. Like force-advocates everywhere O’Leary has a pep-talk about how it’s all necessary for the greater good, adding a positively Stakhanovite spiel about how Britain must compete with France and Germany. I stress that he doesn’t merely go along with this because he can’t imagine any other way; he is an enthusiast.
Also my neighbour saw him speak and said he was an arrogant git.
There is no tradeoff between freedom and security. That is the contention put forward by Jonathan Wilde of Catallarchy.net in this essay about why a society that allowed the private ownership of nukes might be safer, yes safer, than ours. It was inspired by the comments to Perry’s Samizdata posting where he describes himself as a “social individualist.”
“My song is a hymn for individualism and against collectivism. I am also for balls and against circles, for corners and against edges, for trees and against the forest. In my performance it is not so much the song that counts but the moral attitude behind it. Whoever votes for me is against being standardized and cemented in by ‘European Banality’.”
Alf Poier, Austrian entrant to the European Song Contest.
(Via Michael Jennings.)
(In the end, Mr Poier got a respectable 94 points. It seems Britain got no points at all. Politically, this is all to the good.)
He has the gall to (metaphorically) dig up J S Mill’s dead body, sit it next to him, do a ventriloquist’s act with the dead skull, and then to say, “look – Mill agrees with me.”
Hattersley claims that Mill would have joined him in wanting schools to be banned from teaching creationism. Here’s the offending article. Yes, I know that Mill sometimes departed from pure classical liberalism, but if there was one thing that he, writing in an age riven by religious controversy and when religious organisations provided the majority of British primary education, would have recognised as a test case for liberty it would be the right of religious people to propagate their beliefs to their children as they see fit. Yet Hattersley writes:
“We need to decide where individual freedom begins and ends. Fortunately, we have John Stuart Mill to guide us. He was a passionate opponent of what vulgarians call “the nanny state”. So he insisted that: “All the errors which [we are] likely to commit against advice and warning are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain (their neighbours) for their own good.” But, while we must be free to harm ourselves, there can be no freedom to “injure the interests of one another, or rather certain interest which, either by express legal provision or tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights.” It is surely self-evident that to teach in schools that Eve was created from Adam’s rib injures children’s interests. They either go into the world believing manifest nonsense, or spend their adolescence under the impression that their teachers are cranks.”
I may not have my copy of On Liberty to hand, but thanks to the internet, I can nail that one. Back before I lost the book I put an entry in my blog about Mill’s very explicit view that propagating mistaken beliefs did NOT constitute an injury to another’s rights. A quick Google search called it up. When the secretary of the Alliance, an organization agitating for the prohibition of alcohol, said, “I claim, as a citizen a right to legislate whenever my social rights are invaded by the social act of another,” Mill replied:
“So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify; it acknowledges no right to any freedom whatsoever, except perhaps to that of holding opinions in secret, without ever disclosing them: for the moment an opinion which I consider noxious passes any one’s lips, it invades all the ‘social rights’ attributed to me by the Alliance.”
From memory that passage comes very soon after the passage Hattersley quotes. How on earth did Hattersley come to miss it? Don’t answer that! And how, too, did he come to claim Mill as an ideological ally given Mill’s view, expressed in the same book, that Hattersley’s beloved state education was a thoroughly bad thing:
“A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government–whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the the existing generation–in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.”
(Quote found via Improved Clinch)
I haven’t touched here on Hattersley’s remarks on extending anti-discrimination legislation to cover sexuality even for religious schools who hold homosexuality to be a sin, nor on his views about halal slaughter. But I am pretty sure that on those topics, too, Hattersley vilely misrepresents the inferences it is possible to make from J S Mill’s writings when he (Hattersley) concludes his article thus:
No doubt the government will behave in that way as it examines “creationist” teaching, employment discrimination and ritual slaughter. Unfortunately, it will take as its text not On Liberty but the recent report of a focus group.
Blogger David Holford has been threatened with legal action by Tower Hamlets Council unless he removes some comments from his site. He has no plans to comply.
For more from me about why Tower Hamlets Council are not, as they claim, preventing hate speech but rather are attempting to suppress ridicule of Tower Hamlets Council, click here, or here if the Blogspot archives are bust again.
Turn on your TV now. If you are in Britain ITV is the right station to watch – never mind missing Bob The Builder on BBC2 – just do it, OK? You have just missed the sight of a Baghdad citizen in traditional Arab dress hitching up his robe to make a universally comprehensible pelvic gesture towards a picture of Saddam Hussein, said picture held up by another guy who has just finished whacking it with his shoe – oops, no, he hasn’t finished, more whacking left to do. They don’t think he’s coming back.
I gather the minders didn’t turn up at the press hotel today; like the rest of the Iraqi state apparatus they have melted away. Now the whole of Baghdad looks like the world’s worst organised car boot sale. Horns honking, people smiling, waving, jumping, shouting and looting every official building in the city. I just saw a lady carrying off a vase almost bigger than she is. Chairs seem to be popular, as do tyres. One practical-minded lad has gone for a large bottle of olive oil. Heavens, is nothing sacred? One reporter said that the mob had nicked all the UN vehicles and were driving them around.
I tell you, it’s anarchy out there!
Only – ahem- not our sort of anarchy. I am a minarchist most of the time, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays I am an anarchist, and I am a little bit worried about our good name. I can certainly cheer on the guys who have doused a mural of Saddam with petrol and set it alight; deconstructive art, I call it. Nor do I begrudge most of the looters their spontaneous redistribution of the ruling kleptocracy’s wealth back to the people. But it’s not all innocent fun: reports speak of shops being cleaned out as well as palaces, and that will be hard for those whose wealth and lives were tied up in those shops. Expect also to see the pent-up anger of the people bursting out into mob violence which will harm the innocent as well as the guilty.
When a drug addict undergoes the “cold turkey” cure, he will sometimes go into convulsions. This is the anarchy of cold turkey.
This is amazing, considering the source. Arab News war correspondent Essam Al-Ghalib reports that Iraqis who chanted pro-Saddam slogans told him privately that they only did so out of fear of the massacre that would follow if Saddam’s rule were to return to their area. He says he heard the same sentiments many times.
Kudos to Essam Al-Ghalib for reporting things that will make him very unpopular at home. His willingness to do so is a good sign for the future of the Arab press.
I found the link in Joanne Jacobs’ blog. If the permalink is bust, try the general link here.
|
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.
|
