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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The Guardian reports today on an announcement from Tom Ridge, to the effect that a quick fix has been put in place by the US government to allow low risk passengers to get on and off their airplane’s more quickly:
Acknowledging that travellers resented the stringent security checks at US airports, he announced that “low risk” flyers to John F Kennedy New York would be allowed to register their fingerprints and other biometric details so that they could avoid the long queues at Schiphol by stopping at a fast check kiosk.
The Guardian complains only about how it is Schiphol that is getting the benefit of the new arrangements, rather than Heathrow, making the story a hook for another cheap gibe about American geography knowledge.
This is a perfect example of the way the world now works. This register is voluntary, but the process is now well in hand to enable the authorities everywhere in due course to demand such information from everyone, as a condition of international travel. How long before it starts being claimed that an unwillingness to register is an admission that one is a high risk flyer?
If you doubt this, read the rest of the story:
He said the system was based on that used for frequent flyers on US domestic flights.
He told Associated Press in Amsterdam: “The main advantage to the United States will come if this program successfully and efficiently moves traffic through and other countries say: ‘We ought to apply this on a much broader basis.'”
Precisely. We are rapidly entering a world in which the world’s various Big Brothers know our every move. Our best hope will be that, on the whole, Big Brother does not care.
If we can have an ‘absurdity of lawmakers’, I suppose we can have a ‘stupidity of doctors’. In the face of attempts to deregulate drinking in Britain, a nation which is unusually restrictive when it comes alcohol compared to most western nations, we have Prof Ian Gilmore, a spokesman for the Royal College of Physicians (an extreme statist professional organisation and political lobby) saying:
“We are facing an epidemic of alcohol-related harm in this country, and to extend the licensing hours flies in the face of common sense as well as the evidence we have got.”
Prof Gilmore said plans to stagger the times people left pubs were an attempt to manage drunkenness rather than prevent it.
He added that the key to tackling the problem was reducing the availability of alcohol and increasing the price.
“I think it is fanciful to think we can turn ourselves into a French-style wine-tippling culture merely by licensing regulations,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
However he does not explain why digging the same hole deeper will make things better, given that Britain is already far more regulated than France and also has more serious alcohol related problems. Like most regulatory authoritarians, Gilmore and the RCP simply do not have either the imagination to think that perhaps the over-regulation caused the problem, nor do they have the socialisation to have the notion occur to them that imposing their views on others is immoral.
If people get drunk and commit crimes, punish the criminals, not those who drink and do not commit crimes. And in any case, the true criminals are those who added times limits to drinking hours which more or less institutionalised binge drinking.
The political class at work
Of all the criticisms of the War on Terror (and there are many legitimate ones), at least there appears to be no intention on the part of the prosecutors to deliberately target children.
Alas, the same cannot be said for the War on Drugs:
PUPILS at a secondary school will undergo random drug testing when they return from the Christmas holiday next week in what is believed to be the first state scheme of its kind.
Students as young as 11 at The Abbey School in Faversham, Kent, will have mouth swabs taken to detect the use of drugs including cannabis, cocaine and Ecstasy, Peter Walker, the headmaster, said.
Oh but why settle for all these namby-pamby, milquetoast, half-measures? There is only one sure way to stop children taking drugs: kill them.
Yes, that’s it! Kill the little bastards. Think of all the valuable police and court time it will save, not to mention precious and overstretched NHS resources.
Kill them all now. You know it makes sense. If it saves just one child from a life on drugs it’s worth it. It’s for their own good. It’s called ‘tough love’…etc…etc… (adding shopworn cliches infinitum).
Michael Howard’s Conservative Party is planning a U-turn over identity cards – but not until after the General Election. According to a senior Conservative Party MP, the plan is to support ID cards at present in order to look tough on law and order, but they will drop support on ‘practical grounds’ when public opinion edges away. Cynically, Michael Howard’s office has already drawn up plans to flip-flop in the summer.
I believe this is called ‘conviction politics’.
Although I knew this day was coming, it is profoundly depressing nevertheless. It is now the law that ID cards will be imposed by force in Britain, with the support of the Leaders of the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. They have won and as far as I am concerned, the guttering flame of the culture of liberty in Britain just blew out.
I do not expect a truly repressive state to be implemented for many years yet (hopefully), but the infrastructure of tyranny is now well and truly in place, all of which came to pass with a soundtrack of a faint bleating sound of an indifferent public in the background. You might as well flip a coin to figure out which party will usher it in but a authoritarian panoptic state is coming. If this is what the majority of British people want, then may they get exactly what they deserve, but I am out of here. For those of you who will be happy to see me go, trust me, the feeling is mutual.
I realise most people will just shrug their ovine shoulders and find my worries inexplicable, crazy even, as it is not like Blair and Howard are setting up Gulags, right? No, of course not. Who needs those when there is a camera on every corner and your every purchase and phone call will eventually be logged on a central government database? As far as I concerned, the war is over and my side lost.
I have to try and speed up my business ventures and get out as soon as I can afford to do so. I shall try to be out of Britain and have my primary residence in the USA by 2007 at the latest to avoid being forced to submit to this intolerable imposition… and I shall be taking my wealth generating assets with me. I cannot say I am looking forward to winters in New Hampshire but I do not really see that I have much choice anymore. I do not see the United States as a paragon of civil liberties (to put it mildly), but at least it is a place in which the battle can be fought within the last bastion of the Anglosphere’s culture of liberty.
Damn it.
We interrupt your regular blogging schedule to bring you an important government announcement:
Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, starts his new job vowing business as usual and refusing to reconsider plans for the controversial and expensive ID cards.
Mr Clarke promised “continuity” of his predecessor’s policies.
Thank you for listening and have a nice day.
The Tory Party in Britain has been beyond a joke for a while now, but having now come out in support of ID cards, the Conservatives have well and truly screwed the pooch. Apart from the Democrats in the United States, never has a political party been so clueless and thoroughly unfit to govern. Let’s get this bursting at the seams.
Link via Patrick Crozier
The leader of the neo-fascist British National Party has been arrested by West Yorkshire Police on ‘suspicion of incitement to commit racial hatred’.
Now let us ponder that for a moment. Incitement to commit racial hatred. He has been arrested for trying to get someone else to hate non-white people. Now if he had incited someone to hate Manchester United supporters, the Old Bill in West Yorkshire would not have hauled him off for questioning, so clearly we are still permitted to suggest to others that they should hate some folks without being dragged into court, just not folks of a given race.
But please note he was not arrested for ‘incitement to violence’ against some racial group, he was arrested for inciting hate. He was arrested for trying to get people to think and feel, not act, a certain way. He was arrested for leading people into thought crimes. So they have outlawed certain emotions (i.e. hatred) and have moved to enforce that law against the racial collectivist Nick Griffin, because the hatred he incites is directed towards a certain classification of people.
Well I also happen to loathe, yes loathe, certain other classifications of people: communists, fascists, theocrats, some paleo-conservatives, members of Al-Qaeda and many flavours of socialists. I do not necessarily think all such people need to have violence done against them (well, members of Al-Qaeda excepted…) nor should they be arrested for thinking the things they do, but I do indeed think such people should be regarded with a fair degree of detestation. Moreover I have no hesitation inciting others to feel the same way towards such because those who would take away our liberties should indeed incur the hatred of those whose rights they would abridge.
I wonder how long I have left before I have to live somewhere else other than Britain if I wish to continue to have freedom of speech and stay out of jail.
A few days back, Perry de Havilland wrote about the sheer weight of regulations which empower officials to tell homeowners what sort of windows and fitting they can have in their own homes and mused as to whether such laws might, given their sheer impertinence, help provoke Britons to revolt. Maybe. I hope so but I want to mention another related thought – how the state makes it harder for us to carry out practical tasks in our daily lives, and what this does to our society.
Let’s face, it, home maintenance or ‘Do It Yourself’ (DIY) is not every man or woman’s idea of fun. In today’s hectic world, it makes a lot of rational economic sense to ‘outsource’ work to plumbers, electricians, plasterers and carpenters, and such folk can make a good living thereby (I read somewhere that a lot of ex stockbrokers have retrained as plumbers – it pays better). The usual Adam Smith arguments apply. But there will always be folk who, for either economic reasons or plain love of working with their hands, will want to look after their homes themselves. My dad is such a person and built the very house my parents now live in. It is a very good building.
Some of the satisfaction people get in buying a home – as I am about to do – is knowing that you can paint, decorate and shape your possessions as you like, subject to getting insurance cover, which tends to be rather more effective in promoting quality than government rules. In today’s world, of course, things like preservation orders and planning regulations impose tight limits on certain alterations, but even with such restrictions, owning a home gives us the chance to make a small physical mark on our world in a tangible way. This matters to people. Owning your own bit of bricks and mortar touches something in our psyche deeper than abstract political treatises on liberty ever can.
By telling us whether we should be able to wire a plug or put in double glazing, the State officials is continuing to infantilise the public, and also alienate us from our physical surroundings by telling us that we are not allowed to alter anything without a permit. By frustrating our desires to enjoy the simple pleasures of property ownership, our splendidly caring masters may be denying many of us the chance to to grab those small but priceless parts of daily life.
It does exactly what it says in the tin. You either have it or you do not… and judging by many of the letters to the Telegraph, many on Britain would rather you not have it. In response to an interesting article by Charles Moore, we see…
Sir – I have been a regular reader of your newspaper for more than 25 years. I am very concerned to read Moore’s article: it is offensive and flawed. It may cause racial disharmony among four million British Muslims at a critical time.
Dr. Basil Adam Shihabi, Consultant Physician, Secretary General of the British Iraqi Medical Association, Stevenage, Herts
For a start, ‘Muslims’ are not a race, they are a religion. But that aside, if I wish to poke fun at the muslim religion, or any equally daft belief in invisible imaginary friends, I will damn well do so. At least the good Doctor is not calling for Moore to be prevented by law from saying what he wishes and that is an important thing to note. The fact Dr. Shihabi is free to respond in the Telegraph is proof enough that the deck is not stacked against him.
However…
Sir – Moore entirely misses the point about the proposed law against inspiring religious hatred. It is not aimed at those who laugh at religion or scorn it. It is aimed at the “kill the infidel” brigade.
Michael Gorman, Guildford, Surrey
What we have here is a touching naivety about the nature of states and laws in general. The law may be aimed at the “kill the infidel” brigade (I have my doubts) but that means other remarks which disparage and insult the muslim faith will be illegal and to just assume ‘people like us’ (as opposed to ‘them’) will not have the law enforced against them is preposterous.
Making insulting remarks about any religion is like shooting fish in a barrel but the right to say what you will is vastly more important than some imaginary right to not to be offended. Without freedom of speech the whole damaged edifice of liberty really is in the gravest peril and if not enough British people realise that then we are in serious, serious trouble.
In April of this year, I did a White Rose posting, linking to this BBC report about people who are wrongly accused by the Criminal Records Bureau of being criminals. Because I wrote the piece, I today received email notification of this comment on it, that has just been added by David Wilson. This comment deserves wider circulation than just to sit in the White Rose archives. The message is, if you have a quite common name, like David Wilson, look out.
Just found your page and I have experienced this mistaken identity by the National Identification Service (NIS) and been wrongly identified with a convicted criminal with a similar name and date of birth – but absolutely no other similarities.
I am trying to emigrate and was shocked when the report from the NIS came about a man who was convicted of fraud, serious assault and most distressing sexual assault!
I found all doors for complaint closed to me. I called the NIS and was told by an ignorant person on the phone ‘that’s your problem and it’s up to you to prove otherwise’. The Police where equally difficult to deal with. No lawyer would touch it.
I then took it to my MP Mr James Wray, who wrote to Blunkett, who passed it to the Minister Bob Ainsworth, who then wrote to my MP, assuring him that it wouldn’t happen again. I then received a corrected document which stated I had no offences, and an apology for the error.
That wasn’t the end of it though. On July 25th of this year I was stopped in a US Airport (after trying to collect an eticket from BA check-in, who instead of giving me a ticket held on to my passport and alerted and armed security guard) and prevented from boarding my flight to Gatwick for over an hour. A manager finally came and told me it was an issue between myself and my government, and let me board the plane.
On arriving back in the UK I wrote to the NIS asking for justification of why my name is still being linked to this other person, and recorded proof of posting of my letter – Royal Mail tell me it was received on 30th July 2004. I never received any response. It was quite simply ignored. Today I believe there has been no change despite the intervention of Mr. Ainsworth.
Once again I find myself needing to get a copy of this sheet and just today had a letter sent to me asking me several questions which relate to the other man. I have been told by someone in the legal profession that it is a ‘violation of my rights to privacy by government’ and that I could in fact have a legal case.
Any advice would be appreciated. Right now I would just like to be at my liberty and enjoy my freedom to travel in the world without harassment or any violation of my civil liberties.
I am an honest person who has never been charged with any offence. The PNC and the actions of the NIS is an absolute disgrace – it would seem that a civil servant in London has more power than any Judge or Jury in the nation and has the ability to put one person’s criminal past on another. There is I have found no way to completely clear your name.
Roll up, roll up ladies and gentlemen! Book your tickets for a day or two in the verdant British countryside where you will find thrills, spills, adventures, games, rides, puzzles, jokes, wheezes, teases, conundrums and wonders to behold:
The new law banning hunting with dogs is “so poorly drafted” no-one can define the offence, pro-hunt MPs say.
The accusation came after it emerged a Devon man had been told he could use his four dogs to “chase away unwanted animals” from his farm.
Because he did not intend to kill deer or foxes it was not hunting…..
Tory MP Peter Luff, another co-chairman of Middle Way, said that the legislation was “so poorly drafted nobody appears able to properly define the offence”.
“It is no wonder the government desperately wants to move on from this disastrous law. However, I seriously doubt the countryside will be that accommodating.”
Guaranteed fun for all the family.
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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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