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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Mark Steyn comments here on the absurdity of trying to legislate to make our charming youth appear less menacing by stopping them from wearing hooded tracksuit tops of the sort familiar in any major city. As he goes on to write, the attempt by the government to try and regulate this sort of thing suggests the government has a terrible naivety about the ability of the State to improve things like manners and standards of conduct by brute force of law:
But respect is a two-way street, and two-way streets are increasingly rare in British town centres. The idea that the national government can legislate respect is a large part of the reason why there isn’t any. Almost every act of the social democratic state says: don’t worry, you’re not responsible, leave it to us, we know best. The social democratic state is, in that sense, profoundly anti-social and ultimately anti-democratic.
As Steyn points out, the habit of wearing hoods, large baseball caps and the like is in part a rebellion against the gazillions of CCTV cameras which now festoon so many of our town centres, shopping malls, public buildings and even, so the government hopes, our countryside. The law of Unintended Consequences, as Steyn says, applies. If you treat the populace like kids being minded by nannies in a creche, some of them will try and hide from nanny the best way they can. Of course, there is no reason why owners of private premises cannot enforce dress codes, as happens in pubs which ban people from wearing soccer shirts etc. However fair or unfair, owners should be allowed to insist on the dress code and behaviour they deem fit.
Perhaps this government might try to treat us like reasonably intelligent adults. You never know, the habit might catch on.
The indefatigible Radley Balko has a nice roundup of latest regulatory nuttiness from across the world, including my personal favourite, a rule in Italy stating that dog-owners must walk their furry friends at least three times a day. Tremendous stuff, the sort of law that would make the land of Julius Ceasar and Enzo Ferrari proud.
Joking aside at this lunacy, we are surely far beyond the point at which it is possible to subject this sort of regulatory mania to Monty Python-style satire. How on earth can one excite the anger of people against this sort of thing when it appears that the humourless berks who want to pass these rules feel no shame, no sense that they are infantilising the public?
Two recommendations. First, a general recommendation for this news site. It is the work of a law firm, and there is a definite bias in the direction of news stories about internet law, intellectual property matters, and such like. You will not get relentless civil liberties based complaint about the way things are going, the way you do here, but you will, if you tune in regularly, learn quite a lot about the legal facts around which such arguments rage.
If there is a general message, it is: It’s complicated! Call us before you do anything! Fair enough. Here is yet another example of how to do Internet business. They ‘advertise’ themselves and their services, not by having silly adverts saying, e.g.: “It’s complicated! Call us before you do anything!”, but by giving away helpful and informative content where that is only one of the subtexts.
And second, a particular recommendation for this article from last week, which explains what the ID card argument is all about. → Continue reading: A national electronic database – what ID cards are really about
There is a name for a country where the police tell us what the law ought to be, and give us heavy hints which way to vote. It is called a police state.
In a constitutional monarchy such as ours, the police keep the Queen’s peace and uphold the laws as they are; they do not bluster and threaten the public for publicity, nor do they enter the political process and shill for attempts to change that constitution.
Your resignation would be appropriate. Before you go and do something even more repugnant.
There is an excellent article on the Social Affairs Unit blog called Civil liberties cannot be defended selectively, by Joyce Lee Malcolm.
As the culture and meta-contextual assumptions of liberty have decayed amongst the intellectual and activist elements of British society, the institutions supporting liberty for so long have been revealed to have no foundations and are thus unable survive the torrent of events such as Hungerford or even the 9/11 terrorist attacks in another country.
As the Joyce Lee Malcolm article points out, the so called ‘opposition’ and even the vast majority of the media have abdicated their role in seriously questioning the disassembly of ancient civil rights for decades, whilst the rights to self-defence, trial by jury and double jeopardy are steadily abridged. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the British system, which for so long survived and thrived by using the custom of liberty as its bedrock, has shown its fatal weakness. Defending civil liberties in the UK is becoming harder and harder because not only have the institutional means for doing so been effectively swept away, so few British people even understand upon what their now largely illusory liberties were based.
You may well have heard this point made before, and I surely have myself, but it nevertheless made me grin, again, today:
We can only ask supporters of the precautionary principle to follow it through to its logical conclusion, that is not to have it applied unless it can be proved that no risk is involved. It is up to them to prove that this principle is harmless.
Those are the concluding words of Precaution with the Precautionary Principle, published (pdf only but in both French and English) by the Institut Economique Molinari. My thanks to Cécile Philippe of the IEM for the email that pointed me to this publication, and to this conclusion.
The brilliant new blog, Nanny Knows Best, has an item on the latest piece of nannying insanity, namely, bans on adverts that mix images of sex and alcohol. God forbid that alcohol should be sold on the basis that it is to do with fun, ooooh noooo. We cannot have the poor deluded moppets otherwise known as the British population led down that dangerous path, can we?
It does of course mean that lots of one’s favourite films will have to be doctored lest the image of Sean Connery or Humphrey Bogart sipping a drink and chatting up a lady leads one to get the wrong idea about the sauce.
It is enough to drive one to the bottle.
Over the span of international and domestic flights covering some 11,000 miles in the past fortnight, I have spent a lot of time reading magazines. I tried to limit myself to fluff – gossip and pictures of celebrities wearing ugly clothes – because reading about wrong-headed business ideas and even more wrong-headed political ideas really is not my idea of a fun way to spend several hours in a confined space where screaming at the top of one’s lungs is frowned upon.
Alas, alas. I avoided idiocy but the idiocy sure did find me, and in Cosmopolitan magazine of all places. Okay, no surprise there: Cosmo articles telling women to wear animal prints if they want to make a guy attracted to them are hardly the height of intellect and good sense (or taste). But at least I could kick back with some mindless articles about makeup and men and not worry about being hit over the head with loopy politics.
Or so I thought.
An Israeli fashion photographer – coming from an industry that is surely the great unsung incubator of brilliant legislation – wants the Knesset to put a law on the books that would make it illegal to use women as fashion models if they are not deemed “healthy” enough by the government. The aim is to produce:
legislation insisting all models undergo an examination by a Government nutritionist. Those deemed healthy would get a licence while any who were too thin would be given nutritional advice and a two-month deadline to put on weight or be barred.
All this is based on BMI (body mass index), which is not a reliable way of determining health anyway. Even if it was, such a law would not magically make the population healthy. But junk science being accepted as gospel is hardly a shock. What did surprise me is that 53 per cent of polled Cosmo readers said that the US should introduce similar legislation of fashion photography.
In short: I would have been less enraged if I had watched a Michael Moore “documentary” festival on the plane. Thinking about it, though, I wonder how long it would be before such legislation would make any image of someone deemed unhealthy fall into the realm of the banned and illegal. The upside of that would be no more pictures of Michael Moore in our faces, but the price for such a benefit seems a bit steep.
There has been a great deal of discussion today about the McCann-Feingold attack on the First Amendment. These lowlives are behind the most dangerous attack on American civil liberties in my life time and probably even that of our oldest readers.
They are gutting the First Amendment.
I have gone to Senator McCain’s comment page and left the following polemic:
Dear Sirs:
Should you attempt to overthrow the First Amendment on the internet, I will disobey.
I will not answer the court.
I refuse to pay fines.
I will organize civil disobedience against your Communist style election rules.
I will never, ever, submit to this attempt to destroy American liberty.
With utter enmity and ill will,
Dale Amon.
Live Free or Die.
I hope y’all will come visit me when they send the Marines to Belfast to haul my ass off to a Federal prison for the crime of Lese Majeste and inciting Civil Disobedience.
Actually, I hope to see a lot of you there with me. Massive in your face disobedience is the only real answer to this all out attack on our Constitution and Bill of Rights.
It does not matter what your politics are: Left, Right, Center or Libertarian. We have to hang together and fight these bastards.
PS: It is never too early to begin the campaign to unseat them.
The threat to civil liberties in Britain posted by the Labour government, with laws that make the Patriot Act in the USA seem like a mere trifle, is finally regularly getting the sort of attention it deserves, at least in the Daily Telegraph.
The notion that a politician would dare to try and take powers to deprive people of their liberty without recourse to courts and without even presenting evidence because they ‘know’ that they pose a threat is astonishing. It should also should answer all those people who shrug their shoulders and say “why get worked up about ID cards? We can trust the state.” House arrest without trial and without the ability to confront your accusers… and of British subjects on British soil. And the people who want to do this expect to just be trusted without at any point being required to present proof of a crime or threat to national security. If this is allowed to stand then truly, Britain stands on the brink of something truly dark.
This is the question asked by Anthony Daniels over on the Social Affairs Units blog. His article conveys the sense of mounting unease that I certainly share. Read the whole thing.
The land of the free is imposing privacy-busting requirements on its visitors.
At America’s insistence, passports are about to get their biggest overhaul since they were introduced. They are to be fitted with computer chips that have been loaded with digital photographs of the bearer (so that the process of comparing the face on the passport with the face on the person can be automated), digitised fingerprints and even scans of the bearer’s irises, which are as unique to people as their fingerprints.
There are so many concerns that one does not know where to start:
For one thing, the data on these chips will be readable remotely, without the bearer knowing. And—again at America’s insistence—those data will not be encrypted, so anybody with a suitable reader, be they official, commercial, criminal or terrorist, will be able to check a passport holder’s details.
So we have unencrypted details about an individual, recorded in by an unreliable manner (biometrics). That’s what I call the worst of both worlds…
A second difficulty is the reliability of biometric technology. Facial-recognition systems work only if the photograph is taken with proper lighting and an especially bland expression on the face. Even then, the error rate for facial-recognition software has proved to be as high as 10% in tests. If that were translated into reality, one person in ten would need to be pulled aside for extra screening. Fingerprint and iris-recognition technology have significant error rates, too. So, despite the belief that biometrics will make crossing a border more efficient and secure, it could well have the opposite effect, as false alarms become the norm.
And far more unpleasant as you already will be ‘guilty’ of not having your non-papers in order.
The scariest problem of all is the remote-readability of the chip, which combined with unencrypted data on it, make it designed for clandestine remote reading. Deliberately.
The ICAO specification refers quite openly to the idea of a “walk-through” inspection with the person concerned “possibly being unaware of the operation”.
Privacy and liberty implications of this are enourmous… and it gets worse. Identity theft will become a matter of setting up such clandestine remote readings. Terrorists will be able to know the nationality of those they attack.
Even the authorities realised that this would be double-plus-ungood and are looking for ways to ‘protect’ the chip either by blocking radio waves with a Faraday cage or an electronic lock. As a result, some countries may need special equipment or software to read an EU passport, which undermines the ideal of a global, interoperable standard. And so we come the full joyous circle of government ‘compentence’…
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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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