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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A leaked memo revealed that David Blunkett is pushing the Cabinet to back national identity cards for everyone aged 16 and over, carrying biometric information, such as fingerprints, to allow police to confirm the holder’s identity. Under Mr Blunkett’s scheme, the card will cost £39 for most people between the ages of 17 and 75.
An opinion piece about the identity cards news in Telegraph is yet again explaining what is wrong with Blunkett’s argument. Basically, each of the claims made by the Home Secretary in support of his pet scheme is wrong.
- First, Mr Blunkett says that there is strong public support for the idea. In fact, the Home Office’s recent consultation exercise focused on the concept of an entitlement card, a very different prospect. (Also, according to this Out-law article, the goverment has admited that the public opposes the ID card scheme.)
- The Home Secretary goes on to argue ID cards will help fight crime. This is one of those assertions that is forever being made, but hardly ever substantiated… The public mood is said to have changed since September 11, 2001, but no one has explained – or even seriously tried to explain – how ID cards would have thwarted those bombers, many of whom died in possession of forged papers.
- Nor, by the way, are ID cards a solution to illegal immigration. The root of the asylum problem is not that we cannot find clandestine entrants, but that we never enforce their deportation.
- More faulty still is Mr Blunkett’s central proposition, as set out in a letter to his Cabinet colleagues: “The argument that identity cards will inhibit our freedom is wrong. We are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists.” In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes how a concept can be traduced if the words used to express it lose their meaning. The example he gives, uncannily, is the word “free”. Now here is Mr Blunkett using “freedom” to mean more state control.
- Any doubts as to the wisdom of the scheme must surely be removed by the Home Secretary’s final argument in its favour: that we are “out of kilter with Europe”. Indeed we are, thank heaven. Policemen in Britain are seen as citizens in uniform, not agents of the government.
The most worrying is Blunkett’s spin on the concept of freedom. In his view we are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists. This is vaguely based on the distinction between negative and positive liberty, which are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting – or the fact of acting – in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.
Blunkett and his New Labour chums are classic and rather unexceptional anti-liberals. (I use the term liberal in its original meaning, based on negative definition of liberty and claiming that in order to protect individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state.) In Blunkett’s mind, the pursuit of liberty (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) requires state intervention, which, by definition, is not contradictory with limitations on personal freedom. As a result, the protests of civil liberties groups do not make sense to him.
The concept of freedom as being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do is alien to him. According to Isaiah Berlin the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole – “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers.
I will not grant Blunkett’s social and political philosophy such level of ‘sophistication’. I will say that his are the simple and toxic insticts of a collectivist and a statist and that those protesting policies based on them will have their words muffled by the Big Blunkett.
Cross-posted from White Rose
The Chancellor Gordon Brown has long been hailed as an economic wonder, a giant, a prince among men; a proto-tyrant possibly, but nevertheless an economic God. What a load of old spoons. Those feckless Tory MPs in the House of Commons may be scared of his bombastic rhetoric, his curling lip, and his comprehensive knowledge of the canon of John Kenneth Galbraith; well, at least the idiot’s guide to John Kenneth Galbraith. But let me tell you of a tale, to put a sword to the lie of this risible greatness.
It began yesterday morning, at 10am. The phone rang. A certain Englishman, of Scottish, Irish, and Jewish extraction, picked up the phone.
“Yes?”
“Hello, is that Mrs Duncan?”
“No, who’s this?”
“It’s the Inland Revenue, in Liverpool. Can I ask you some questions?” The man panicked. Did he ‘owe’ £10,000 more in Corporation Tax? Had his company secretary, or accountant, failed to send in Form IR-XYP/9100/97/a.30, his thirtieth of the year? He decided to go for the polite response, in case this was being taped.
“Yes…”
“But first, you will need to answer some security questions…” → Continue reading: Tales from the kingdom of the mad
Having been published last month, this article, in blogosphere terms, is verging on the archaeological but it is well worth a delve into the archives for a sobering illustration of just how despotic and deranged our ruling classes have become.
Not content with having turned our justice system into a playground for victimologists, parasites and professional race-baiters, the Home Office is now preparing the ground for an arbitrary police-state:
The government’s war against men is now plumbing ever more astonishing depths. On Radio Four’s Today programme yesterday, the Home Secretary David Blunkett could scarcely wait to boast of new proposals to deal with domestic violence.
Anyone truly concerned with civil liberties could not fail to have been appalled by Mr Blunkett’s comments. The problem was, he enthusiastically explained, that at present ‘you have to get someone through court’ before a domestic violence suspect can be restrained.
So his solution is to restrain them before they even get to court. In other words, he wants action taken against a man on the basis of an unproven allegation by a woman– made under the protection of anonymity, to boot. So much for this Home Secretary’s understanding of the presumption of innocence, the meaning of justice and the necessity for a trial of the facts.
The article deserves to be read in it entirety in order to understand the extent to which the Home Office has deliberately ignored or manipulated statistical data in order to justify their insistence that male violence in the home is far worse and far more common than it actually is. Another case of tailoring the data to fit the political agenda.
These wicked and spiteful proposals are not on the books yet but they are clearly on the drawing board and, as per usual, it is only a matter of time before they are enacted thus ending the protection of the law for every man in this country.
The scope for abuse of powers like this is simply enormous and any case of abuse will lead to a man losing his home, access to his children and possibly even his livelihood all on the basis of an unproven and unanswerable allegation.
The damage this will cause to families and the fabric of society remains to be seen but, tragically, it will be seen thanks to a regime which is deeply in thrall to dangerously extremist femininst ideologues and which has now run out of easy targets.
[My thanks to Dr.Chris Tame who posted this link to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
The UK government’s chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has claimed that outlawing smoking in bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants and at work would dramatically reduce levels of lung cancer, and other lung diseases, caused by passive smoking. It seems the push is on, by the UK do-gooding society, to follow the example recently set by Michael Bloomberg, in New York.
Significantly, Sir Liam cited a recent government report, which claimed that 88% of people were in favour of smoking restrictions in restaurants. He obviously knows where to hit a government hard, especially one with no other principles than those dictated to it by opinion poll.
No doubt the UK government’s response will be to say, at first, that it has no plans to impose a public area smoking ban. Then it will say if private businesses fail to co-operate with a ‘voluntary’ ban, it will be ‘forced’ to take the necessary action to impose one, and then eventually, it will ‘regretfully’ impose the ban, if the appropriate opinion polls tell it to.
I am non-smoker myself, having taken seven New Year Eves to finally give the filthy weed up, but I am with South Oxfordshire’s very own TV celebrity chef on this one; Antony Worrall Thompson said on Channel 4 News last night:
I believe in smoking and non-smoking areas. If you don’t like a place because people are smoking don’t go in.
No doubt one day smoking will be banned completely in the UK, if these do-gooders keep up their do-gooding work, even in the privacy of your own home. The fact that people have to die of something, eventually, seems to have fully escaped them.
On the day they do successfully get smoking fully banned, thereby creating an enormous black market and making it even more sexually attractive to teenagers causing them to start up in the first place, is the day I will light up again. I am not looking forward to smoking Golden Virginia roll-ups again, but if it is in the cause of freedom, and helps the US economy to boot, so be it!
When Hong Kong was handed over to Communist China by the British state, to much joy and acclamation by credulous Chinese and Gweilos alike, the totalitarian gerontocracy in Peking pronounced soothingly that Hong Hong would retain its relatively liberal order under a doctrine ‘One nation, two systems’.
Tens of thousands of people have marched in protest at a planned anti-subversion law aimed at an EU style ‘harmonizing’ of Hong Kong law with that of the rest of Communist China. One nation, one system it would seem.
…the government is pushing through the national-security legislation, known as the “Article 23” measures, too quickly, and without enough public debate. The proposal is in many ways an attempt to bring Hong Kong’s laws regarding subversion, treason, sedition and the theft of “state secrets” in line with China’s.
Well it comes as no surprise to me that these patent lies only took six years to be revealed. I look forward to hearing the people who rejoiced at the surrender of Hong Kong’s people to China recanting their folly. I am not holding my breath however.
The Chinese way of dealing with effective protests
(WSJ link via Combustable Boy)
While opinions may vary on the correctness of the opinions of people who believe the income tax was illegally instituted – and there is some historical evidence that on the issue of employer withholding they are correct – few libertarians would disagree they have a right to say it.
That right is exactly what is being abridged:
“On Monday, June 16, Federal District Court Judge Lloyd D. George issued a preliminary injunction banning the sale and distribution of Irwin Schiff’s book about the income tax titled, “The Federal Mafia: How The Government Illegally Imposes And Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes And How Americans Can Fight Back.”
Say what you will, this is a rather vile and blatant breach of the First Amendment. Judge George should be severely reprimanded.
If you are interested in very large court documents, I’ve made the Court Order available for reading.
And speaking of Judges who should be reprimanded… A Texas judge who was in trouble once before has reverted to his previous bad behavior and placed a tax withholding protestor in jail without bond and after improper procedures.
This was after a previous hearing in which the judge nearly laughed the State out of court over their claim the dissenting corporate CEO was a flight risk. While their victim is in jail, the IRS is spreading rumours the company has been dissolved. Creditors are calling the victimized company demanding cash payments.
Just one more example of “Your Government Servicing You”… like a bull with a cow…
Due to the high risk of an embarrassing misunderstanding here, I think it behoves me to start off by advising our American readers that, in Britain, the word ‘fags’ is a slang term for ‘cigarettes’. It is not generally perceived as having anything to do with homosexual men.
And this is important because cigarettes are no longer just ‘fags’ or even ‘smokes’. Now, they are symbols of defiance as well.
For the past two decades or so, tobacco manufacturers have been forced to print hectoring health warnings on cigarette packets. But now, due to a directive from Brussels (where else?) manufacturers are required cover at least half the space on both the front and rear of the packet with even more lurid warnings. It is the kind of useless, paternalistic gesture that enables the European political classes to posture self-righteously at someone else’s expense.
At last, though, someone is fighting back in the form of a website called ‘Fake Fags’ through which you can purchase waggishly irreverent stickers to cover up the politically-mandated health warnings on your cigarette pack.
It is a delicious act of subversion and, predictably, it has sent the reactionary health fascists into a blue funk:
Deborah Arnott of anti-smoking group ASH criticised the labels.
“These labels do not strike me as being funny,” she told BBC News Online.
Well they strike me as hilarious and I am very heartened that at least some of my compatriots are not prepared to throw in the towel just yet.
Never mind San Francisco or Hampstead, Brussels is the true home of the radical student left. Still as committed as ever to the anti-ismism crusades of the 1980’s, they continue to dig away at the foundations of our ‘bourgeois values’.
Seems they have just struck another seam:
The Commission is in the final stages of drawing up a directive to ban sex discrimination, with implications for the media, advertising and insurance industries.
The draft directive, revealed in Tuesday’s Financial Times, would leave it to the courts to decide whether programmes or advertisements were sexist or “did not respect human dignity”. An explanatory note says: “The purpose of this provision is to avoid throughout all forms of mass media all stereotypical portrayals of women and men, as well as any projection of unacceptable images of men and women affecting human dignity and decency in advertisements.”
The law could have profound implications for institutions such as Britain’s topless Page Three girls in The Sun newspaper and vast swathes of Italian television. Advertisers using sex to sell could also be affected.
If it wasn’t so offensive and inappropriate, I’d say that they’ve just discovered a motherlode.
The real devil in this detail lies with the apparently reasonable proposition to ‘leave it to the Courts’ thereby providing a fig-leaf of objective justice. Actually, though, this is a charter and blessing for looney-left activists to drag any number of advertising agencies and media companies through any number of Courts on pretty much any pretext they damn well please (as these things are usually drafted in the widest and vaguest possible terms).
However, in practice, this will only need to be done once or twice for the wicked capitalists to get the message and, in order to avoid the risk of a ruinous lawsuit, start censoring themselves. That is the ideal solution because why bother with all that messy and troublesome enforcement business when life is so much easier for the ruling elite if everyone just internalises their own repression.
The European Union: if it didn’t exist, we would not have to invent it.
With the assistance of several notable bloggers, namely Perry de Havilland and Dissident Frogman, I have set up a protest blog collective called White Rose. The original impetus came from an article about imminent introduction of identity cards in Britain which scared the hell out of me, and so I decided it is time to rally the Anglosphere behind resistance to the accelerating destruction of personal liberty in the UK.
White Rose will point a finger at the British government’s measures eroding personal freedom. All the time. With as many people helping as possible. It is not an exclusively libertarian project and we welcome regular contributions, from bloggers and non-bloggers alike, across the political spectrum. The only requirement is a refusal to tolerate the draconian nature of the state’s reach over the individual.
The format is that of a one-stop-shop for news, analysis, ideas, concepts and arguments, information and contacts related to privacy and civil liberties. The focus will be on the situation in the UK but any contributors who can point at similar cases and experiences in their countries will form an essential input in the debate. The objective is to discuss alternative solutions and halt the drive for security undermining personal freedom and privacy.
To read the White Rose argument about why the debate should not be framed around the trade-off between freedom and security, please go here.
If you want to find out how to become a White Rose contributor, please go here.
The proposed EU regulation of blogs and other forms of Internet speech being suggested by the Council of Europe (a quasi-governmental think-tank whose views have inordinate sway with the EU’s policy making elite) is very revealing about what lies at the heart of The Great European Project.
Steven Den Beste has written a rather good article on why the press is treated differently than broadcast media which use the finite resource of the electromagnetic spectrum. One can argue that as the EM spectrum is finite, it is reasonable to share out its use and as clearly not everyone can set up a radio or TV station, some rules to prevent the use of the media from becoming over mighty are justified. This is not quite how I see that issue myself but the contention is far from absurd.
One can even make the far less supportable assertion that because in reality setting up a newspaper is far beyond the means of most people simply because it is so expensive, the state should regulate the press, at least to some extent. Not surprisingly I flatly reject this notion and think the only defence individuals need against the established press are laws against libel. However the thinking behind this sort of regulation is at least easy to understand and can, if you accept the state as an essentially benevolent neutral institution (which I certainly do not), be seen as a way to prevent abuses of power by an over-mighty media corporation given the vast asymmetry of access to public opinion between a newspaper and an individual.
But when the Council of Europe start urging the EU to regulate blogs like this one, it should be clear that none of the arguments which can be applied to broadcast media and or the press apply here. As I mentioned in my previous article on this issue, if you have a cheap computer and a crummy modem, it still only takes about five minutes and no money whatsoever beyond your dial-up or broadband connection charges to set up a blog. There is no asymmetry of access to the public involved here. Granted, setting up an effective blog is another issue entirely, but simply getting viewable grievances in front of blogosphere eyeballs is simplicity itself.
So if anyone can set up a blog, and there is no finite resource in need of being allocated ‘fairly’ and there are no de facto capital related barriers to ‘market’ entry, what are we to make of this Council of Europe proposal to regulate us? → Continue reading: What is really going on in Europe?
People in the US, who take notions of Freedom of Expression and Private Property for granted, will be astonished by the latest steaming pile of wisdom to emerge from the clenched cheeks of our European would-be masters. Declan McCullagh reports:
The all-but-final proposal draft says that Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs (or “blogs”), must offer a “right of reply” to those who have been criticized by a person or organization.
With clinical precision, the council’s bureaucracy had decided exactly what would be required. Some excerpts from its proposal:
- “The reply should be made publicly available in a prominent place for a period of time (that) is at least equal to the period of time during which the contested information was publicly available, but, in any case, no less than for 24 hours.”
- Hyperlinking to a reply is acceptable. “It may be considered sufficient to publish (the reply) or make available a link to it” from the spot of the original mention.
- “So long as the contested information is available online, the reply should be attached to it, for example through a clearly visible link.”
- Long replies are fine. “There should be flexibility regarding the length of the reply, since there are (fewer) capacity limits for content than (there are) in off-line media.”
It’s pretty zany to imagine that just about every form of online publishing, from full-time news organizations to occasional bloggers to moderated chat rooms, would be covered. But it’s no accident. A January 2003 draft envisioned regulating only “professional on-line media.” Two months later, a March 2003 draft dropped the word “professional” and intentionally covered all “online media” of any type.
Read the whole article.
So what is the message to the EU I mentioned in the title? Simple:
We will not comply
We have a comments section on samizdata.net in which people can and do comment about what we write, but access to that comment section is at our capricious discretion. If we decide we want to IP ban someone or want to delete their remarks from our comments section because we think they are offensive, or even if they are not offensive but we just bloody well feel like doing it because we have a headache, then we bloody well will. This is our private property.
We are already hosted on a server in the USA and I am quite confident our hosters would tell the EU where they can stick any demands to yank us off the net because we decline to submit to political moderation of the form our free speech takes on our private property (i.e. the server space we rent from them). If we have to go entirely pseudonymous and log onto Samizdata.net in order to post via ‘dead drop’ servers rather than submit to EU regulation of how we manage the information on our blog, then that is exactly what those of us who post from within the rapidly emerging EU tyranny will do. We utterly reject political moderation of free speech in civil society. This is not about giving people a voice but rather about replacing social interaction (which is what true free speech is), with political interaction mediated and mandated by the state.
If these regulations become the law of the EU (as seems likely), we will not obey, we will not cooperate, we will not accept that anyone has a ‘right’ to reply on our blog. Do you think we have said nasty things about you and want to reply regardless of our unwillingness to let you use our comment section? Fine…go to blogger.com, sign up (for free), click on ‘create a new blog’ and voila… you have your own blog on which you can scream about how those mean old Samizdatistas ‘done you wrong’ to your heart’s content.
And if the EU says we have to let you comment… tough shit, it ain’t gonna happen. The people who write for Samizdata.net all now live next door to Samizdata Illuminatus, in Arkham, Massachusetts.
 
The mainstream news outlets in Britain are abuzz tonight following today’s statement from Chancellor Gordon Brown that now is not the right time for Britain to abandon sterling and adopt the Euro. Dressed up in the mawkish tinsel of lovey-dovey Euro-warmth, Mr.Brown told the nation that, with great reluctance, he must rule out adoption of the Euro because his ‘economic tests’ have not been met.
Cue shrugs, eyeball-rolls and ‘whaddaygonnado?’ sighs from Mr.Brown and a chorus of booing, hissing, spitting and puppy-kicking from an assembled throng of federasts in both Parliament and the nations newsrooms. It is all a pantomime, of course. Blair and the rest of the executive want to the Euro with the kind of slavering intensity with which an alcoholic needs a shot of gin. The so-called ‘economic tests’ that must be met beforehand are purely a fig-leaf to mask the fact that they cannot convince an increasingly skeptical and surly British public to go along with them. The very nano-second the government thinks it can win a referendum on the issue the ‘economic tests’ will have miraculously been met.
But let no-one be fooled into thinking that Euro-geddon has been postponed. Beneath the blizzard of high-falutin’ fiscal gobbledegook being whipped up by the ‘meeja’ talking heads, an even more sinister tentacle of the Belgian Empire is slowly and quietly coiling around us. → Continue reading: The real EU threat
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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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