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 appeared in the comment section of the previous post, writen by Michael Taylor. It is just too interesting to leave as a comment:
One thing we in the online community can do is to work to ensure transparency and accountability is brought to this process. We need to find out who has been pressing this scheme from its infancy: that doesn’t just mean finding the Labour Party hacks who’ve embraced it; it does not even just mean finding the Whitehall Committees which pushed it.
It means finding the details of the people who sat on that committee: it means getting their names and track records out in public. I want names and reasons and track records. Where possible, I would want those personal details which they would collect from us out there on the web for all to see. It also means tracking every single hardware and software supplier who is bidding for the work – again, we need personal names not company names. And then these people need to be monitored closely, and lobbied intensively. There needs to be absolutely no place for these securocrats to hide: there must be no secrecy, no privacy for them.
Let us also make sure we use the Freedom of Information Act aggressively to get this information: swamp them with requests for every detail of every person’s career who has ever been on any committee which has recommended any part of this scheme. If nothing else, such an intensive and personal campaign of transparency gives opponents of the scheme the best possible chance of keeping these people on the back foot.
Look, for example, at how angry the govt has got with the LSE’s report. That should be only the merest footfall, the tiniest ripple of administrative inconvenience and distributed informational opposition they must face. Do this, and we will win.
Michael Taylor.
The ID card is at hand in the UK and we should now start thinking very hard about how to wreck the government’s plans at every level. Every options needs to be considered because if this can be made into a political fiasco of epic proportions and is remembered as ‘Labour’s Poll Tax’, then it will be a long time before any party tries this sort of abridgement of civil liberties again.
It is important to remember that the Poll Tax was not defeated in Parliament, it was defeated in the streets.
It is just plain wrong to think things were just peachy in the United States until last week when all the Supreme Court did was make de jure what had been de facto for quite some time regarding the state’s ability to sieze private property for no other reason than to get more tax. But perhaps this is for the best as there is no longer any doubt that things are badly broken and that this should not be a left vs. right issue. As Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent:
If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect discrete and insular minorities, surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms to victimize the weak.
Those incentives have made the legacy of this court’s public purpose test an unhappy one. In the 1950s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of public use this court adopted in Berman, cities rushed to draw plans for downtown development. Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were non-white, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them. Public works projects in the 1950s and 1960s destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely lower-income and elderly Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; in cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as Negro removal. Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the slum-clearance project upheld by this court in Berman were black. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects.
I trust that decent Democrats who are not in the pockets of public sector employee associations and who actually have at the core of their convictions the desire to help the ‘have nots’ against whom the system can at time be so slanted, will set aside partisan politics and join with Republicans who are not in the pockets of well funded business interests to rebel against this savage wound to the US Constitution which in effects rips out the Fifth Amendment. Let this case be the litmus test of decency against which political figures of both left and right will judged and judged harshly.
I came across a text of a speech by Democrat Senator Richard Durbin here which, at least from my reading, did not liken what is going on with suspected terrorists in U.S. captivity and the old Soviet gulag, on the other. The speech contains a lot that one might reasonably dispute but it is not rabid Michael Moore moonbattery, as far as I can tell. (Of course, his speech on his website may have been edited later on with the offending para taken out, but one should not assume that out of fairness to the senator).
So where did the reference to the “Dick Durbin slanders our boys” come from? Seriously, I’d like to know.
I posted similar thoughts over here.
It appears Durbin did make a reference to the gulag and the Nazis in the speech text I have now seen, so the guy clearly deserves some of the heat coming his way. But like I said, it doesn’t overall appear to be a rabidly silly speech.
Attention all petty, vindictive snitches everywhere, your country needs you:
New powers effectively criminalising smoking in public were announced by the Government yesterday, with the minister in charge promising an “intelligence-led approach to enforcing the law”.
Informers will be encouraged to report breaches of sweeping bans on the habit, in which company smoking rooms will be outlawed and places such as bus shelters and the outsides of office blocks made no-smoking areas.
Very little encouragement will be required as there will be no shortage of willing and zealous ‘informers’.
What a horrible place this country is becoming.
I rarely fly these days, but will be buzzing off to New Mexico in a few days for our annual fishing expedition to Vermejo Park Ranch. (Note: Ted Turner may be a loony tranzi goofball, but he runs a fine ranch, and for that alone gets an indulgence in my book.)
Last time I flew, I had a perfectly good and utterly useless-for-highjacking cigar lighter confiscated, which still rankles. Given my impending trip, Christopher Hitchens’ rant about the idiocy of our airport security was both timely, and dead on target.
We learn that there is no real capacity to detect explosives, for example. And we learn that, “If, say, a handgun were discovered, the terrorist would have ample ability to retain control of it. TSA screeners are neither expecting to encounter a real weapon nor are they trained to gain control of it.” Who hasn’t worked that out?
What we are looking at, then, is a hugely costly and oppressive system that is designed to maintain the illusion of safety and the delusion that the state is protecting its citizens. The main beneficiaries seem to be the pilferers employed by this vast bureaucracy—we have had several recent reports about the steep increase in items stolen from luggage. And that is petty theft that takes place off-stage. What amazes me is the willingness of Americans to submit to confiscation at the point of search.
Hence, my “disappeared” lighter. Imagine my irritation at learning that said lighter was only added to the confiscation list last month, so that when it was lifted over a year ago, there was no basis for confiscation at all.
A prediction: when we get hit again, and we will, there will be one almighty and well-deserved backlash against the Republicans who were in charge of this farce, and wasted everyone’s time on the irritations and idiocies of “homeland security” rather than doing something real to meet the most basic obligation of the nation-state – the safety and security of its citizens.
It is strange how English seems so often to be the ‘language of graffiti’
It is astonishing that a potential law could even reach the stage of being voted on in the USA that says if you witness or ‘become aware’ that neighbours or friends have broken the law with narcotics (which presumes you are a competent judge of that), you will be compelled by law to denounce them to the police. Failure to do so means prosecution and the threat of a two year sentence yourself if convicted of simply minding your own business. Even if you disagree with the drug laws, you will be threatened with prison if you do not actively help enforce them against other people.
I have met Congressman Sensenbrenner and I am shocked that he could have come up with such a profoundly authoritarian and illiberal law like this. He explained his support for the ghastly Patriot Act was purely a temporary emergency measure, pointing to the sunset clause as proof of that. Well if this* is his idea of reasonable legislation then I fear that I see all his motivations in a dramatically different light.
Turning neighbour against neighbour like this was how communist states maintained power in the Eastern bloc and anyone putting their name to such a law should be seen for the enemy of civil society that they are, turning people who just wish to be left alone into coerced informers for the state. Truly disgraceful.
*= to see details, enter HR1528 in the search box, then check the enter bill number button, then press search
The US Supreme Court today overturned the obstruction of justice conviction of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. This comes too late, of course, to save Andersen, which was largely destroyed by the conviction, but it nonetheless injects some common sense back into the rules around withholding information from the government (it can be legal, you know, a fact which the SCOTUS felt the feds needed to be reminded of) and document disposal (a topic on which I spend far too much of my time).
In a unanimous opinion, justices said the former Big Five accounting firm’s June 2002 obstruction-of-justice conviction – which virtually destroyed Andersen – was improper. The decision said jury instructions at trial were too vague and broad for jurors to determine correctly whether Andersen obstructed justice.
. . .
[I]n his opinion, Rehnquist noted that it is not necessarily wrong for companies to instruct employees to destroy documents, even if the intent is in part to keep information from the government.
Like a mother who advises a son to invoke his right against compelled self-incrimination out of fear he might be convicted, “persuading” an employee to withhold information is not “inherently malign,” Rehnquist wrote.
“The instructions also diluted the meaning of ‘corruptly’ so that it covered innocent conduct,” Rehnquist said.
The Andersen case was of a piece, really, with Martha Stewart’s conviction. Both were convicted, essentially, of failing to cooperate in their own prosecution. Give Martha cred for serving her time, but I wonder if she wouldn’t have won out on appeal. Eventually.
It seems like we are getting there. The serious press is starting to understand the threat posed by the nationalisation of personal identity dressed up as a populist system of “ID Cards”
This devastating quote appeared in an article in the New Statesman, house magazine of the British political left:
“Public opinion likes the idea of ID cards because it seems like the ultimate solution to all known problems,” says Brian Gladman, retired director of strategic electronic communications at the Ministry of Defence. “But actually, the way this bill is designed enables a police state. You’re not going to be allowed to opt out of having an ID card, the linked databases make detailed tracking feasible, and a system with this combination of complexity and scale is way beyond the state of the art. It won’t be reliable or safe. Anybody with access to the database will be able to target anybody. It’s horrendous what you’ll be able to do.”
One hopes the message is now starting to get through to Labour MPs, and they may find important other things to do rather than vote for the second reading (the first non-formal stage) in parliament.
A very small silver lining to the very large dark cloud that overshadows these violent times is that the war on drugs – that is to say the “war” on a particular form of unhealthy behaviour – no longer gets the prestige it once did. I think someone is feeling left out.
Police have claimed new successes in the war on drugs in central Scotland.
Officers have swooped on nearly 20 homes in the Falkirk, Stirling and Clackmannanshire areas in the past week as part of Operation Overlord.
They called it Operation Overlord?
As you can see from the photo, below, that I snapped at London’s Fenwick department store yesterday, the hype of supposed miracle wrinkle potion Creme de la Mer is not letting up. And why would it, when there are women like the one who told the Sunday Telegraph’s Elizabeth Day that she spends £850 per week – that’s $1700 US – on the cream so that she can rub it over her whole body?
 This is, clearly, madness. But what is even more mad is that people are so gullible. People tell themselves that if it did not work, the government would not let it be sold. Yet another instance of people relying on the state to do the critical thinking they should be doing for themselves. Sure, all that is lost in this case is a lot of cash, but it never stops frightening me that people are so eager to give up responsibility for their own choices. Of course, cosmetics are not the only area of peoples’ lives where they actually want to be freed from engaging their brains, but it is the one that concerns us here.
Day’s article tells us that the British Advertising Standards Authority – the main body that is supposed to “protect” consumers from cosmetic products (in the US, that’s the Food and Drug Administration) – last week “heavily criticised” cosmetics firm Estée Lauder for:
suggesting that it could “melt away the fatty look of cellulite” when, in fact, the ASA said that the company had not proved the product’s efficacy at removing cellulite.
But reducing the appearance of something and actually removing it are two different things. The fact is that – as beauty editor Kathleen Baird-Murray writes in How to Be Beautiful:
Many ordinary moisturisers will puff up the skin temporarily enough to ‘diminish the appearance of fine lines,’ so to prove that they are more effective than ordinary moisturisers, many anti-ageing creams will have undergone comparative testing. In other words, they will improve skin texture more than most, but they don’t actually claim to remove wrinkles for ever – it’s we who assume this because we’re paying a lot of money…
Further, the Advertising Standards Authority holds that if a cream causes actual physiological changes to the skin – such as real, permanent removal of wrinkles – then it is medicine and needs to be regulated as such.
One sad claim in Day’s article comes from a London PR person, Barbara Dodds, who says:
When one cream doesn’t work, I move on to another one in case that does. I probably spend about £100 a month on various products. I live in hope that the next one is actually going to get rid of my cellulite or my wrinkles and increase my self-esteem – but it never does.
In which case, Barbara Dodds is a fool, and it is up to her to curb her reckless and ridiculous buying habits. I am all for shouting it from the rooftops if a product does not work, but a lowering of expectations is clearly in order for far too many women. Fine, spend £850 per week on Creme de la Mer, but don’t come crying to the nanny state when it doesn’t turn you into Heidi Klum.
Cross-posted from beauty blog Jack & Hill
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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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