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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User Friendly has been my daily “must read” cartoon every day since it’s inception. It’s the “Bloom County” of the computer world. If you see a tech guy laughing hysterically and falling off his seat, it means he’s either just wiped the corporate server terrabyte disk and backups by accident or is reading UF.
Like Bloom County, the strips have long standing characters and follow ongoing story lines. The stories often have a connection to the humorous side of current events.
Now to the point and the current events. UF’s Sunday ‘toon takes a pithy look at the true meaning of the RIAA “amnesty” program.
Don’t blame me if you spend the rest of the day and well into the night reading the UF cartoon archives… you have free will. Really.
What do you call a country which is run by the police for the benefit of the police? Is that a ‘police state’? Yes, I think that qualifies. Surely it does?
SENIOR police officers will call this week for the DNA of everyone in Britain to be put on a national database from the moment they are born.
They believe that this would be a vital weapon in the drive to curb crime and help to solve hundreds of murders.
[From the UK Times]
Some nerve those plods have got! Assuming that nothing has been lost in the media translation, I detect not even a hint of humility. After all, they are supposed to be public servants. And what next, I wonder? ‘Police demand increase in income tax to help fight crime’? ‘Police demand greater integration with the European Union to help fight crime? ‘Police demand greater regulation of world trade in order to fight crime’?
What disturbs me here is not so much the idea of a national DNA database. Okay, that does disturb me but HMG hasn’t got the money to fund such a grand scheme so it isn’t going to happen (yet). No, the ugliness is more immediate than that; it lies in the casual assumption by police chiefs that they can simply demand such a thing and expect their will to be done without even paying lip service to the principle of democracy that most people in this country set great store by. Who died and left them boss?
The crime-solving canard has worn so thin that it is almost beyond mockery. Solving crimes is something that the UK police are not much interested in doing anymore. Population control is now their job (‘Social Management’ in NuSpeak). And as they now regard themselves to be a uniformed wing of the ruling elite, I suppose we’re going to get much more of this kind of thing from them in future.
So now we are the servants and they are the masters. How did that happen?
At last, the people of the world unite to take a stand against tyranny:
Casting aside petty differences and forging new allegiances, UN ambassadors said they would ignore New York’s smoking ban, imposed five months ago and extended to the UN this week.
Now that’s what I call multilateralism!
White Rose notes that London’s police commissioner is calling for introduction of ID cards for all citizens as a means of combating terrorism and organised crime. The said commissioner is apparently opposed to any such “Big Brother” schemes but he needs “to have the ability to identify those people who are around doing their business lawfully and those other people who want to create mayhem and effectively destroy our way of life.”
And how exactly is that not Big Brother…?
White Rose has a selection of posts on surveillance with some interesting developments in RFID (radio frequency identification) technology used by supermarkets and retailers. Engraged civil liberties activists plan to ‘watch’ them closely for an opportunity to mount a legal challenge.
A report about a not very useful security camera system in Florida that has been scrapped.
And finally my favourite about microchips buried inside your vehicle that could soon be tipping off the authorities about your driving misdeamenors. The author of the Telegraph article, Jason Barlow, warns:
It could be worse. And, in five years, it will be – you’ll be fined for doing an illegal U-turn in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning, while someone burgles your house and gets away with it. Cue calls for everyone on the planet to be fitted with a microchip. After all, the innocent will have nothing to fear.
In the true spirit of White Rose.
In more traditional police-states, citizens may be blissfully unaware that they have done wrong until they are woken in the wee small hours by an ominous rapping on their front doors. In modern police-state Britain, the knock on the door is to be replaced by the thud on the doormat.
If this report from the UK Times is accurate (and it is just about creepy enough to be true) then it may be time to think about buying a bicycle:
EVEN George Orwell would have choked. Government officials are drawing up plans to fit all cars in Britain with a personalised microchip so that rule-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.
Dubbed the “Spy in the Dashboard” and “the Informer” the chip will automatically report a wide range of offences including speeding, road tax evasion and illegal parking. The first you will know about it is when a summons or a fine lands on your doormat.
The plan, which is being devised by the government, police and other enforcement agencies, would see all private cars monitored by roadside sensors wherever they travelled.
Who the bloody hell are the ‘other enforcement agencies’? And the very notion of an informer in every vehicle! Saddam Hussein could only dream about that level of control.
Police working on the “car-tagging” scheme say it would also help to slash car theft and even drug smuggling.
The same old, same old. Every accursed and intrusive state abuse is sold to the public as a cure for crime and ‘drug-dealing’. The fact that it still works is proof that we live in the Age of Bovine Stupidity. A media advertising campaign showing seedy drug-dealers and leering child-molesters being rounded up as a result of this technology will have the public begging for a ‘spy in the dashboard’.
Having already expressed my doubts about the viability of new government schemes (see below) I should just add that the fact that this relies on technology rather than human agency means it just might work.
The next step is an electronic device in your car which will immediately detetct any infringement of any regulation, then lock the doors, drive you to a football stadium and shoot you. HMG is reported to be very interested and is launching a feasibility study.
[This article has been cross-posted to White Rose.]
I wonder how many of our readers went to see the film ‘Minority Report’ and came away thinking, ‘Hey, what a great film’?
Contrast this with one of HMG’s advisers who went to see the film and cam away thinking, ‘Hey, what a great idea!:
Tony Blair is to announce plans to put up to half a million children deemed at risk of becoming criminals or getting into other trouble on a new computer register.
Teachers, family doctors and other professionals working with youngsters will be asked to name potential troublemakers whose personal details will then be placed on the database.
The new “identification, tracking and referral” system will allow the authorities to share information on vulnerable children, including their potential for criminal activity.
Alright, let’s get the obvious question out of the way, such as, exactly what does ‘at risk’ mean? What constitutes a ‘potential troublemaker’? Who decides these things and on what basis? Who guards the guardians?
Oh I daresay that there are answers (or, rather, great globs of state-management gobbledekook that purport to be answers) but they will almost certainly remain occluded behind the volumes of policy documents that filter through the ziggurat of state agencies charged with enforcing it all.
For the record, I denounce this but I do so merely as a matter of form. My stores of furious indignation have all but dried up leaving a residue of doleful resignation. And, to be fair, we’ve always had mechanisms for controlling the poor; this is merely the latest manifestation, albeit dressed up in the fashionable terminology of ‘caring and concern’.
The chink of light (well, a fissure really) is that this grand plan may not get off the ground at all and, even if it does, it will probably be a shambles. HMG already has far more laws, regulations, rules, plans, initiatives, schemes and regimes that it can possible see through or enforce and nothing they announce nowadays is likely to work as intended or at all.
Still, it will keep a few state bureaucrats busy for a few more years and that is probably enough.
White Rose has a post about the launch of the Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) to raise awareness about the IP Enforcement proposal’s threat to consumer rights and market competition.
Forbiding tools that are required for the exercise of legally protected rights, like private use, preservation of works by libraries, and reverse engineering, means giving a complete monopoly to right-holders on the basic infrastructure needed to communicate in the digital world.
This article on White Rose is rather interesting and really rather heartening…
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says it will prosecute any priests found distributing or quoting the Pope’s anti-gay document for hate crimes.
I have long feared incremental statism more than revolutionary statism, because revolutions are easy to notice and thus easy to shoot at and, more importantly, get support from other people when you do. Incremental diminution of liberty however falls within the ‘boiling frog’ syndrome. By the time people notice, it is too late.
Now I really do not care what the Catholic Church has to say about gays or whatever… that is matter for practicing Catholics, not a well and truly lapsed one like me. But I am rather interested in anything which could well cause a major collision between civil society and the state.
You see, what I see here is that sooner or later, the Irish state is going to find itself confronted by a Catholic Priest who loudly proclaims in unambiguous language what the state defines as ‘hate speech’ by strongly depreciating homosexual relationships… and the state will be faced with in effect prosecuting someone for being a Catholic and following ex cathedra Catholic doctrines to the letter.
And then all of a sudden, when it becomes clear that the state has decided it will give itself a force-backed say in what gets said from the pulpits of Catholic Churches, millions of people who are voluntary members of a civil non-state social organization called The Roman Catholic Church are going to have to look long and hard at how they see the state. I could not ask for better grounds on which to draw up an army for that particular fight.
I think rather a lot of them will come to the conclusion that…The state is not your friend.
More and faster please.
Who’d have thought it? The UK Department of Health has said ID cards are the best way for removing health tourism from the UK government’s dreadful National Health Service (NHS). What a coincidence that the Home Office, which has been struggling for decades to find a problem necessitating an ID card solution, are trying to introduce just the very thing. And at this exact moment in time? Fancy that.
And here’s the best part. State-subsidised UK family doctors already refuse people access rights to their medical lists, if they don’t have the correct UK citizenship qualifications or residency permissions. Yes, the very people whom the ID card is supposed to prevent abusing the glorious wonders of the NHS, are already prevented from abusing it, at least up to the point the government is prepared to stop them. And whatever happens, the Department of Health have said, nobody will ever be refused emergency treatment, whatever their circumstances.
So currently, without ID cards in place, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. And in the envisaged ID card NHS future, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. Err…Doh?
The only solution to stop ‘health tourism’, where hapless British taxpayers are forced to subsidise the health needs of various global parasites, is to abolish the NHS. Immediately.
That way, everyone pays for what they need, or insures themselves against what they might need. And Britain can start becoming a welcoming place again, which people only come to for its wet Welsh weather and its fine Breakspear ales, rather than trying to sponge off our coerced goodwill after fighting their way through malevolent Blunkettesque security, at the ports of entry, before finding the nearest organised crime ID card forger.
Is this solution too simple, or should I be strung from the nearest lamp-post for daring to suggest that the great white elephant of our wondrous National Health Service should be slaughtered right here, and right now? String me up, baby. It can’t come a moment too soon.
A great many articles have been written on Samizdata.net about the monstrous Tony Martin case (just do a search for “Tony Martin” and you will see what I mean). I have always thought that he was convicted more for challenging the state’s monopoly on force by defending his property rather than for actually killing a man.
Well even the faint fiction of the Tony Martin case being a simple matter of criminal justice (which has come to mean justice for criminals) has been abandoned. The fact he was not going to be released early is old news… the demented fact this was because he was deemed a danger to burglars is also old news.
What is new was revealed in a Telegraph article yesterday (emphasis added):
Ms Stewart [a probation officer] has previously written a report on Martin which was submitted to the Parole Board before its ruling in January. In it she said that Martin’s support base in the country had made him more likely to reoffend.
“This is a case which has attracted immense and ongoing media attention and public interest,” she wrote. “I believe this has had an impact on Mr Martin’s own perceptions of his behaviour and his right to inflict punishment on those whom he perceives to be a threat to his own security.
In short, because he has widespread support from other people who believe he has been shafted by the system, lots of support, in fact political support, he is not going to be released. Ergo, he is a political prisoner. How else can one interpret it given the reason for his continued detention is due to the support of other people?
And let us not forget the other reason: he refuses to repent his ‘crime’ of perceiving two men breaking into his isolated country home as a threat to his security. Martin does not just have the temerity to demand he has the right to defend his own property, he refuses to apologise for doing so.
At the end of many articles I have written on Samizdata.net I have used the words “The state is not your friend”. Probation Officer Ms. Annette Stewart is the perfect embodiment of why I make that sort of remark. She is just acting in accordance with the institutional imperatives within which she works. The system is not just broken, it is insane.
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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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