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]
|
Taking a bus to Brixton from Streatham this afternoon, I saw the Big Brother posters which assured me I was safe. Considering I was in one of London’s three murder hotspots, the posters seemed appropriate. In Coldharbour Lane the new multimedia telephone kiosks were empty yet there were queues outside them. These were the drugs hustlers who called out “Grass”, “Charlie” and “Horse” as I walked past.
Directly beneath a bus lane camera a car blocked the bus lane. I was reminded that when the security cameras were installed in Coldharbour Lane one of them didn’t work. Any guesses where a murder was committed? Yup, directly beneath the faulty camera.
In Kingston-upon-Thames a few years ago a jeweller’s shop was discovered to be the only shop in the street which couldn’t be seen from the array of cameras. A nice dark alleyway running alongside was also unaccountably off-screen. Any guesses how this was discovered? Yup, when a gang burgled the shop.
At least there is no suggestion that inside information could possibly have contributed to these crimes.
I finally found the right Microsoft compatible audio codec for Linux and have watched the video of Netanyahu’s press conference which I discussed yesterday.
I must admit I am impressed. I’d never before got the measure of the man. If your opinions of him, like mine, were formed by watching the BBC or other evening news, I highly recommend you take the time to listen. He is a very strong defender of Freedom of Speech.
I think he should get his own blog. He’d fit in nicely with the rest of us.
I have been reading my morning dose of news when I came across ZDNet reporting that a new law against gambling was passed in Greece. Law Number 3037, enacted at the end of July, explicitly forbids electronic games with ‘electronic mechanisms and software’ from public and private places, and people have already been fined tens of thousands of euros for playing or owning games.
It also transpires that the true meaning of the wording of the law means that anybody carrying an electronic game – even if it is just on a mobile phone – could face a hefty fine or lengthy jail sentence! According to the Greek newspaper Kathimerini,
“The police will be responsible for catching offenders, who will face fines of 5,000 to 75,000 euros (US$4,967 to US$74,506) and imprisonment of one to 12 months. The blanket ban was decided in February after the government admitted it was incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines.”
One online report said that even watching a film on DVD – many of which contain promotional games linked to the movie – had resulted in an arrest and a 10,000-euro (US$9,934) fine.
Internet cafes are allowed to continue to operate, providing all gaming is prohibited: if a client is found to be running any sort of game, including online chess, the café owner will be fined and the place closed. The law applies equally to visitors from abroad:
“If you know these things are banned, you should not bring them in”
said the commercial attaché at the Greek Embassy in London – who declined to give her name.
Now, so many words spring to mind – most of them not suitable for a ‘family’ blog. I will restrain myself and focus my disbelief and fury on one point – the government imposes a blanket ban on games (electronic in this case presumably because it has already banned the other kind) because it is incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines! Not only have governments been preventing people from all sort of activities, now they can’t even be bothered to find out what exactly it is they don’t want us to do! Somebody wake me up, please, I must be having a nightmare…
I’ve just listened to Lawrence Lessig’s lecture on Free Culture and highly recommend it. Larry describes how much liberty we have lost in the last fifty years. A small number of giant media Corps have used their lobbying power to criminalize more and more of what was once unregulated behavior.
Government acting alone is not the only threat to liberty. The self interest of exceedingly greedy corporations in conjunction with exceedingly greedy lawmakers is a formula for the destruction of civil society. Think how close the world of William Gibson’s Corp ruled dystopia is. The combination of latent totalitarians such as Jack Valenti and outright crooked politicians – Sen Hollings (D Disney) comes to mind – is a deadly one for everything we as libertarians stand for. It is also an attack on the core of everything the Left and the Right believe in as well.
Therein lies our hope.
As Ben Franklin said: “We must indeed all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Ace blogger John Weidner of Random Jottings has written about a truly shocking decision by Yahoo to help the Chinese government censor the Internet for the 1 billion people living in China (and of course that open air prison camp called Tibet).
There is only one way to deal with a company like Yahoo and that is to made them pay a price in the market for their collaboration with the brutal regime in Peking: Boycott Yahoo!
I have always believed that the political classes have one project and one project only: maintaining power. All other considerations are dispensible; smoke and mirrors for the voters come election time.
The political class that we are lumbered with in Britain wish to tighten their grip somewhat by removing the obstacle of an 800 year-old Common Law right known as Double Jeopardy i.e. a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime.
This was not a defence mechanism fabricated on some altruistic frolic. It was seen as essential if a citizen was to maintain their liberty against an all-powerful state which had the resources to pursue them at will if so desired. It was a mechanism which maintained the rule of law not the rule of whim.
Home Secretary David Blunkett has announced plans to ‘modernise’ our legal system by abolishing this hard-won right. He wants to make it easier for the State to pursue serious criminals who are seen to ‘get away with it’. It sounds like a noble impulse but the truth is far darker. Of course, the government has been at pains to stress that it will only abolished in so far as it relates to very serious matters e.g. murder but I’m afraid that we’ve heard this one before. Once the principle is established it is only a matter of time before mission creep drives it forward to cover all and any offences (including, possibly, EU-mandated offences such as ‘xenophobia’ or the deliberately vague ‘computer-related crime’).
The ability to prosecute by instalments will manifest itself as a tool of control in politically-sensitive cases with any risk of the ‘wrong’ result. The State will simply be able to drag a defendant back into Court time after time until it gets the result it wants. Sooner or later, with its ability to write a blank cheque, the State will win and everybody will know it.
There are few more pointed weapons of political control than this. There mere threat of it is enough to silence or cow difficult or even unpopular people into quiessence. With the endless threat of constant prosecution hanging over their heads, normal life becomes all but impossible. Keep quiet and do as you are told or your life will simply become unbearable.
Like my now defunct hard-drive, our collective memories are no longer accessible. If they were, the polity would rise up in revolt at the merest hint of the government arrogating this kind of power unto itself, but by the time iron rule has replaced rule of law, nobody will be able to remember a time when it was any different.
It’s bad therefore it should be banned. No hesitation, no intervening punctuation. Just add -nne- to bad and you’re there. That’s the meme we have to hack to death.
An article in yesterday’s Sunday Times (News Review, 5.7) spreads this same poisonous little idea, far more poisonous than anything in junk food itself. Junk food, says Medicine Today editor Jerome Burne, is bad for you. It contains too much sugar and screws around with the way your brain cells operate. People who have given groups of children non-junk-food diets have seen remarkable improvements in their behaviour. Ergo corporation chasing American lawyers are launching class actions against junk food makers, and Congress is considering taxing junk food.
That is the kind of legislation Alan Simpson, MP for Nottingham South and chair of the reform group Food Justice, would like to see in this country. “It is time the government took the side of society rather than the food industry,” he says. “I would support a tax on junk food, on sugar or on snack food advertising. That could then fudn effective campaigns to promote healthy eating.”
But what is wrong with simply saying that you think junk food is bad, and saying why, as publicly as you can, if that is what you think? Why do you need government money to say something? Why should people who like junk food and don’t misbehave as a result be hit by the law and by the tax man merely to sort out all those kids who eat badly? I read the article. It had me convinced about everything except the need for the lawmakers to get involved. What’s wrong with that as a general strategy?
Next to this junk article about junk food there’s another one about why sleep is a good thing. (I know. There we all were thinking we didn’t need any.) Presumably they couldn’t think of any laws to pass to make us sleep better. So they just had some advice: sleep better. That’s the way to do these things.
The Labour’s government’s Extradition Bill is a legal obscenity and a dire threat to the liberty of everyone, says the Libertarian Alliance, the radical free market and civil liberties think tank and pressure group.
Libertarian Alliance spokesman Dr. Sean Gabb and Libertarian Alliance Director Dr. Chris R. Tame, say:
“This bill formally applies the EU wide arrest warrant proposals to the UK. What it means, simply and crudely, is that British citizens can be carted off to other European countries on the say so of a foreign judge without the slightest benefit of any legal due process in this country. Moreover, they could be arrested for an array of so-called offences that are not – and never should be – crimes in this country.
In addition to such vague nonsense as “environmental crime” and “computer related” crime the Bill explicitly
allows for the extradition of UK citizens for PC-thought-crimes of “racism and xenophobia”. It is clear that the EU, and this government, is using this phrase in an obscene attempt to smear critics of the EU as “racist” and any advocacy of the virtues of hard-won British liberties as “xenophobia”. Other “crimes” for which British citizens could be deported to Europe include advocating “holocaust denial”, selling Nazi memorabilia and advocating a wide range of unpopular (and sometimes silly, offensive or nasty) opinions – and, of course, plane-spotting. The legal system of Britain, whilst far from perfect, seems a paradise in comparison to the politically corrupt and ruthlessly illiberal Code Napoleon systems of Europe – where you are deemed guilty until proven innocent and can be incarcerated without trial for absurd periods of time.”
Drs. Gabb and Tame conclude:
“If the British government succeeds in passing this tyrannical and obscene legislation it is clear that the social contract has been abrogated in an unprecedented act of treason by our own government. Nothing less than mass civil disobedience and physical resistance by any means necessary is justified by this attempt to allow the abduction and incarceration of British citizens by foreign powers.”
Although I am not an uncritical fan of Lew Rockwell‘s flavour of libertarianism, he has written an excellent article about that most inconsistent of the many conservative intellectual inconsistencies… conscription.
His article about acceptable face of state slavery is on the Lew Rockwell.com site.
It is interesting that some of the same people who claim the United States is the ‘freest country in the world’ seem to have no problem with supporting so many American ways of denying the very concept of self-ownership and replacing it with state ‘social’ ownership rather than ‘several’ property… and even extending to a person’s actual body.
…So what? British Home Secretary David Blunkett has been disarmingly frank about the fact he has had to back down on the horrendous planned extension to the already Draconian Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA). Some commentators have actually been patting him on the back for his admission that the whole plan was ill conceived .
Yet it should be clear that this is in no way a realisation on his part that he was wrong to try and extend this authoritarian infringement of civil liberties on moral grounds, but rather an admission of a failure to read the political support for such an action.
Blunkett and Blair still do not actually see any ethical/moral problems with such people as local councils and the Food Standards Agency being able to read your e-mails and tap your phone calls. No, their contrite remarks are nothing more than acceptance it was foolish of them to assume they could count on widespread political support for such a move.
These people should be abominated for what they tried to do, regardless of the fact they failed. The government are profoundly authoritarian and if the Tories were smart (which they are not), they would use the vast exposed flank Labour has to make this a key issue… but then of course these are the people who have the likes of Ann Widdecombe and Michael Howard in their ranks so I would not hold my breath if I were you.
At the last two Putney Debates, the ones addressed by Simon Davies of Privacy International on May 10, and by Mark Littlewood of Liberty on June 14, I have heard myself giving a little speech and have liked what I heard. This speech has gone approximately as follows.
Current debate about the proper limits of anti-terrorism, internet snooping, sharing of such information by different government departments, and so on and so forth, is now framed as a conflict between the demands of, on the one hand, the ever more centralised and ever more powerful state, and on the other hand, the freedom and the privacy of the individual. The first is assumed to be necessary for the satisfactory achievement of public safety. The second is presented only as a privately desirable benefit that must inevitably be sacrificed to a lesser or greater degree, the argument being merely about how much of this private benefit should be sacrificed. “Is this a price worth paying?” “Are we paying too big a price?” That an improvement in public safety will be purchased with this price is assumed.
The likes of Simon Davies and Mark Littlewood are both painfully aware that they spend their lives saying “yes but”. “Yes”, protecting the public is indeed important. “But”, we shouldn’t be quite so ready as we seem to be now to sacrifice personal freedom and personal privacy for public safety. Adriana Cronin‘s piece just below this one is also a good example of the kind of fighting-a-losing-battle agonising that I have in mind. And Samizdata’s most recent Slogan of the day also embodied this assumed relationship, which we were urged to defy, but not to disagree with as a false assumption. Once again, safety was presented as a price worth paying, although by including the word “temporary”, Ben Franklin at least hinted at a contrary theory of how things might really be.
I believe that if public safety and liberty continue to be regarded, even (especially!) by libertarians, as things that the people in general are to be asked to choose between, liberty is bound to be the loser.
This dangerous contrast reminds me of an earlier time, somewhat less than a century ago, when liberty was widely regarded as being a private benefit that ought to be sacrificed for economic reasons. Centralised state control of the economy was presented as being essential to achieve the maximum of public prosperity, in much the same way that large convoys were a better way to protect wartime merchant shipping than individually scattered vessels. (By the way, the convoy parallel is not my illustration only. I distinctly remember reading George Bernard Shaw, in a preface to one of his plays I think, using this illustration to make this exact argument.)
There then followed the “Economic Calculation Debate”, in which the likes of Hayek and von Mises did something that they are still not perhaps fully appreciated for. As academics they eventually triumphed. They stated their theoretical objections to centralised economic planning, and enough people in the West were convinced to keep capitalism bumbling onwards, thus enabling it to triumph utterly against centralised economic planning. In short, Mises and Hayek were right, and were proved right. But they also triumphed as propaganda street-fighters. What they did was turn the argument about economics from being freedom-versus-prosperty into freedom-is-necessary-for-prosperity. In order to have yourself an even semi-satisfactory twentieth century economy, you had to have freedom, if not for political stirrers then at least in the form of “economic freedom”, for people such as businessmen and industrial investors.
I wonder, might the same thing apply to public safety? Is centralised power the answer to achieving the defence of good people against bad people, or is centralised power actually one of the biggest problems? It is now being said, and I’m most definitely one of the ones saying it, that the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington were not completely missed. Quite a lot of people observed various fishy things going on. The problem was that the one almighty, all powerful, all knowing, all seeing Washington Public Protection Apparatus had its single, collective, bureaucratic mind on other things.
But suppose that the power to act had been as dispersed as the power to observe. Consider those people who picked up those vital stories that were actually not acted upon by the great Washington Security Monster, about strange Saudi Arabians taking flying lessons but being indifferent to the usually somewhat essential art of actually landing an airplane. Suppose that those people had been allowed simply to announce, perhaps to their local media, that these guys sure were behaving strangely, and suppose they’d urged the local media hacks to chase the story up. Hey, what are you guys doing? Who are you? What are your real names? Would those strange Saudis have had such an easy ride, so to speak? I think not. I think it distinctly possible that they might have called the whole thing off.
You’ll never prove this kind of thing (although you can illustrate your generalised theory/suspicions) merely with individual anecdotes. What’s needed is a transformed theoretical framework, a repainted big picture, a different and utterly contrary way of looking at things to the way things are looked at now. A new meta-context.
The widely reported attempt by the state to extravagantly expend the list of state bodies with access to e-mail and telephone intercepts has been withdrawn in the face of strong cross-party opposition from politicians with a modicum of respect for at least the fiction of civil liberties.
However it is very important that people not judge the government just by the laws it has passed but by the laws it has tried to pass. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (RIPA) is bad enough as it stands without the latest astonishing power grab by the state, yet it shows once again if anyone doubted it that no matter what the state says about its modest intentions when taking upon itself new powers, the belly of Leviathan is filled with an insatiable hunger for more.
Bob Ainsworth, the Home Office minister is using The Big Lie technique to claim this is not in fact about crushing civil liberties but ‘protecting’ us all, so do not kid yourself that the advocate of a Panopticon Britain will give up so easily. What we need protection against is the British state or we will soon have a system of pervasive surveillance and intrusion that rivals that of the INS and IRS in the United States. Tony Blair was not joking when he promised to bring us ‘joined up government’. The line being drawn between those dots being joined up runs through the centre of our lives.
 When the state watches you, dare to stare back
|
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.
|
