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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Londoners are to be asked what they think about using force to prevent people smoking in ‘public’ places (meaning privately owned places to which members of the general public may choose to enter… or not enter).
I do not smoke, though I did puff on a Havana recently, and I generally do not like smoke filled rooms. However, I do not have anyone holding a gun to my head forcing me to go into a smoke filled room against my will or compelling me to take employment with someone who allows people to smoke on their private property (such as a restaurant or bar owner). And yet millions of people see nothing wrong with legitimising threats of violence against others to force them to not smoke for nothing more than their personal convenience.
To take the view that replacing social interaction (such as deciding to walk out of a bar because it is too smoky or quitting your job because you dislike smoky environments) with political interaction, namely agreeing that people can be dragged off to jail by armed men because they smoke in places you would like to enter as a matter of your discretionary ease, is nothing less than taking the view that imposing your convenience by force (and we are not talking prohibiting robbery or murder here) is okay, because anything done via political process is okay. This is what is really meant when people like George Monbiot talk about ‘a more democratic society’… what they really mean is a society in which all interaction is political rather than social.
The genius of the US Constitution was not that it brought forth democracy, albeit one which countenanced slavery (for Britain was also a democracy of sorts in 1776), it was that at its core the revolutionaries tried to place whole swathes of civil society simply off-limits to political interaction… such as free speech, the means of self defence, being secure in your property etc. It recognised that liberty can only exist within the context of a functioning extended civil society, which means the messy melee of free association and disassociation, private ownership, trade and freely entered into contract, actions constrained and encouraged by social imperatives and opprobrium, rather than the stern violence backed impositions of politically derived law.
For a minarchist such as myself, I see a role for democratic politics as a means of constraining the minimal state that even I concede is required to keep the barbarians from the gates of civilization. Yet until democratic politics is once more seen as underpinning a free republic and not an end in and of itself, most politics must seen as a baleful thing and the people who practice it professionally as legislators little different from Mafia Dons dispensing patronage amongst the people under their ‘protection’
In many places across the Anglosphere, civil society is dying under the cumulative pressure of decades of regulatory statism. “There ought to be a law against it” comes to the lips of anyone who dislikes anything…and yet at the same time the moral authority of states is decaying with trends pointing to ever less people choosing to participate in political processes in an ever more affluent and information rich civilization. This is one of the central contradictions of our modern information age and sooner or later those contradictions will cause something to give in ways that cannot be reliably predicted.
Nick Timms recounts a new yet sadly familiar tale of how the state just sees us as things to be managed for its convenience. The state is not your friend.
My friend Ron, a semi-retired gentlemen, who after a working life fairly high on the corporate greasy pole, now pursues several different activities including taking his pedigree dogs to shows and sitting as a magistrate, told me today about a visit he had recently from an employee of his local planning office.
I should explain that first he had a visit from the local environmental health department because a lady neighbour of his had complained about the smell of his kennels.
Ron has kept fairly rare pedigree dogs for showing for the last fifteen years and he is meticulous about hygiene and cleanliness. His home is in a semi-rural area backing onto some woods and running behind his house is a pathway used by some of the locals as a shortcut. This area is also frequented by foxes and the dog foxes mark their territory with a particularly pungent urine. Apparently when Ron’s bitches are in season the dog foxes make a special effort and spray the whole area thus causing the offending stink.
Ron showed the environmental health officer around his kennels and the officer was apparently satisfied that he kept his dogs in a good and healthy manner.
However, very shortly after this he was visited by the local planning department. His visitor told him that as he kept more than six dogs at his home he had to apply for change of usage. Ron asked for what usage he should apply and was told he should apply as a breeder. Ron explained that he was not a breeder as he only occasionally had litters and he kept the pick and sold the rest only to what he considered would be good homes. He did not do this as a commercial venture so he was not a breeder.
He was told he would still have to apply for change of usage because case law indicated that local town planners could decide for what purpose he used his home and they had decided that having more than six dogs was one of their criteria. (Apparently all homes are granted rights of usage when they are registered and the local planning office can withdraw or alter these rights.)
Ron asked how much this application cost and was informed that it was around £250 [note: about $400]. Ron then asked would his application be approved and was told “No” because the local planning office wanted him to appeal so that they could have a test case. The appeal application would cost Ron another £200-£300. And he could still lose the case.
Ron resorted in the end to telling his officious visitor that he was a local magistrate and that under the Human Rights Act – and he made up some paragraph – the local planning office was unlikely to win the argument.
This seems to have silenced the secret police for the moment, although they may just have decided to pick a softer target. Ron is anxiously awaiting further developments but as he commiserated to me, his council tax went up by nearly 20% this year which is probably paying for more little führers who cannot get a real job.
Nick Timms
It would seem Tony Blair has finally been sold on David Blunkett’s plans to chain us into perpetual serfdom. Along with the clap-trap flummery, the knocking of the opposition, and the other accoutrements of a Big Government leader under fire, I’m still struggling to believe I heard the following:
It made sense to ask whether identity cards were no longer an affront to civil liberties but a way of protecting them
A ripple of comfortable applause accompanied this slogan, from the Blessed Leader, at today’s UK Labour Party conference. Welcome to Oceania.
This strikes me as rather draconian:
The software giant Microsoft declared war on internet paedophiles last night by announcing the closure of its thousands of UK-based chatrooms used by millions of people.
It will also restrict access to chatroom systems around the world, allowing only identifiable, adults living in the same country to use them.
The decision is a significant precedent, the first time one of the biggest internet service providers has cut off an element of the World Wide Web in reaction to concerns over misuse.
Calls to place all internet chat rooms under strict state regulation and control cannot be far off.
Guardian columnist David Aaronovitch, who occasionally writes quite sensible things about Iraq and All That, has decided to resume normal service as Bullying Blairite Columnist, on the subject of compulsory ID cards.
The usual reasons in favour are trotted out. He says they are convenient. No doubt they are in many cases. So, for that matter, would be carrying a tattoo on one’s forehead with an ID number and message, saying, ‘State Licensed Guardianista’ or whatever.
I can quite see how, in a minimal or even anarcho-capitalist private ‘state’, how citizens could freely choose to have ID cards carrying all kinds of info. Then again, they might not choose to do so. I find it a great bore to point out to collectivists of various hues that if X is such a grand idea then it should not be necessary to compel citizens to have X. Take banks, for instance. I see no reason why, in a truly liberal order, banks could not give clients incentives to carry photo-ID credit cards to cut fraud and hence cut charges to their customers. Indeed such transactions would be quite normal and no-one would have grounds to complain given sufficient consumer freedom.
Then, perhaps realising that the usual reasons for compulsory ID cards amount to little more than making life easy for the police and the security authorities, Aaronovitch comes to his guiding motive: “What is convenient or aesthetic for the individual is not, unfailingly, what is good for society.”
That is true. It’s one reason I always rather liked Mrs Thatcher’s misquoted remark about there being no such thing as society. ‘Society’ may indeed in some sense be better off if Pc Plod and his colleagues knew of my wherabouts 24 hours a day. ‘Society’ can take a hike, thankyou very much.
So when Liberty (one of those annoying civil liberties groups, ed) talks of ID cards turning people into “suspects not citizens”, I am bound to ask whether Liberty has any concept of the duties – as opposed to the rights – of citizenship.
Well, those folk over at Liberty can no doubt answer Aaronovitch’s question for themselves. But I think we ought to feel grateful to him for framing the question so bluntly. He is right. Social democrat statists like him think that the entity he calls ‘society’ is somehow possessed of some claim on the citizens who compose it. For him, carrying an ID card is a badge of collective solidarity and hence non-ownership of such a thing demonstrates one’s anti-social (heaven forbid) character.
One thing is for sure. No one is ever likely to be in danger of thinking Aaronovitch believes in personal liberty. The next time I read one of his more sensible pieces about the Middle East, I will bear that in mind.
It’s like a cancer that we can battle against but never truly defeat. As it creeps purposefully through our national lymph system some of us can summon up the courage to fight it back and, for a while, it can appear as if we are in remission. But then comes the hoping and the praying for the final ‘all clear’ that signals a rebirth and a new lease of disease-free life.
It never comes. The cells are corrupted again and the cancer returns to devour us:
Sweeping powers for Government agencies to carry out covert surveillance, run agents and gather the telephone data of private citizens were contained in legislation published yesterday.
State bodies ranging from the police, intelligence services and Whitehall departments to local councils, the Postal Services Commission and the chief inspector of schools will be able to authorise undercover operations.
The measures were activated by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which became law three years ago. They need to be approved again by both Houses of Parliament before they can be used.
These horrors first made their appearance about a year ago and set off a call-to-arms that, in turn, caused the Home Office to drop the proposals. Or, at least, they made an appearance of dropping them because, like that lurking cancer, they never really went away. They were merely stacked neatly in the pending trays until an another opportune moment presented itself. Seems that the moment is now.
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the British people were “the most spied upon in the Western world”.
I reckon that’s a pretty fair prognosis. But why? Why are our political elites so determined to construct this panopticon? Why are they so single-minded about this project that they appear immune to sweet reason, protest or appeals to decency? What exactly is driving them? Are they so riddled with paranoia and insecurity that they see monsters and assassins lurking behind every curtain? Is that how they see us? I cannot think of any other reason why a democratically elected government would come to think of themselves as colonial occupiers of their own country.
What has led to this calamitous collapse of trust? Is it repairable? I rather fear that it is not.
Questions, questions. Answers may come in due course but I suspect none will be satisfactory or stop the cancer from spreading. Time for palliative surgery?
[This has been cross-posted to White Rose.]
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.]
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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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