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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Over at ConservativeHome there’s a survey suggesting the social conservatives are doing the Guardian’s work for it by trying to make one’s position on abortion a party-political issue in Britain. The next generation of Conservative MPs support a lower time limit for abortions says an email questionnaire to 225 candidates, answered by just under half. I’m as irritated by this sort of spinning of some very doubtful evidence as I am by the contrary stuff – to the same effect – from the Guardian, which has recently started to suggest (as a measure of its desperation) that no-one who favours abortion choice should vote Conservative.
What really winds me up, though, is the mendacious presentation of their position by the proponents of this staged debate. The legal position of abortion in Britain is the sort of muddy compromise people with a clear ideas about the question are quite right to resent. But the approach of many abortion-banners (as they actually are) is anything but frank, and reminiscent of the step-by-step strategy of the anti-smoking lobby. For every principled (usually religiously principled) pro-lifer, there is someone who secretly shares their conviction, but makes the case for just a little cut in the time-limit now “because science tells us that babies of that age can now survive outside the womb”.
It’s nonsense. Without a lot of help a two-year-old can’t survive outside the womb. And the prospect of those few born at the limit of current paediatric technology surviving uncrippled to live a normal life is tiny even with a massive input of medical and nursing resources. But worse, it is mendacious nonsense – they don’t care about “viability” in the slightest. What they want is a plausible excuse to cut the availability of abortion just a bit.
So I have a test to flush them out. It is provided by that ghastly muddy compromise. Britain doesn’t in law permit women to choose abortion, unlike most rich countries. It is an extraordinary construct of bureaucratic paternalism.
What British (mainland) law does is to permit pregnant women to petition doctors to give them permission to abort on the grounds that it will be bad for their well-being to carry the baby to term. With two doctors assenting to this opinion in writing (that is, as the doctors’ professional opinion – the woman’s view doesn’t matter in law), you may have an abortion. Where the ‘time-limit’ comes in is that those two doctors can only approve an abortion to preserving the patient’s social or mental well-being before a certain point. After that terminations may only occur where there is a substantial risk to life or health, or in cases of severe foetal abnormality.
So in practice, in the UK you have a choice only if you approach the right doctor armed with the right argument. A naive or poorly educated, woman who seeks help from her GP when the GP happens to oppose abortion, or who mistakenly calls a pro-life charity canvassing itself as offering help to the unexpectedly pregnant (as opposed to one of the pro-choice groups who do the same thing) may never find out how to get an abortion, or at least not until it is too late. The late abortions themselves aren’t occuring as a lifestyle choice – which is another mendacious narrative element in the pseudo-debate.
My test is this: Next time anyone says they want the time-limit for abortion cut to because “science shows” the baby can survive outside the womb after X weeks. Say, “And of course you support changing the law to allow abortion on demand before that date, don’t you?” Then watch them flounder.
Here is a long and quite good article at the Wall Street Journal about the recent ban on consumption of alcohol on London’s underground metro system. The ban is one of the first measures of the new London mayor, Boris Johnson. On Saturday, with the clock ticking away before the ban came into force from 1 June, large numbers of young people – they seemed to be mostly a bunch of young students – were openly drinking, some playing lots of music, and generally whooping it up on the Tube. Yours truly and Mrs P. forgot all about the ban and so we got a bit of a shock when, on the Circle line, our cabin was full of these raucous, and already extremely drunk, folk. They seemed pretty good natured although I was already betting that the end would end in arrests. It did. Walking by High Street Kensington Tube station later on, I could hear the PA system blare out the message that the station was being closed. In the end, 17 people were arrested for crimes including assault.
I guess this proves Boris’s point for him. Some liberal-minded folk might claim that his ban on drinking on the Tube is nanny statism, not what one would expect from the fun-loving newspaper columnist, former MP and bon viveur. Mind you, defending the right of people to drink and get slammed on the Tube late at night is not the sort of freedom I am particularly inclined to go over the top for. It is not an obvious assault on private property rights as was, say, the banning of smoking in pubs and restaurants. The Tube, after all, receives tax funds and is not a completely private entity. If it were, then the owners could of course decide the matter. They might even ban it anyway to protect the bulk of people who find it possible to travel from A to B without holding a can of beer.
Whether the ban can be properly enforced or not is another matter. I expect a raging trade in small, easy-to-conceal hipflasks.
In some countries an interest in ideas, and history, even quite recent history, can get you arbitrarily arrested. It can happen even if you are an academic whose research is being paid for by the government of the country.
On Tuesday they [the police] read me a statement confirming it was an illegal document which shouldn’t be used for research purposes. To this day no one has ever clarified that point. They released me. I was shaking violently, I fell against the wall, then on the floor and I just cried.
What sort of place has ‘illegal documents’? And how would you get one? In this case the document obtained by the masters student in question was published by the US government, and simply downloaded from an official website.
– China? Russia?
In the country concerned, the term ‘illegal document’ does not actually appear in any legislation. It is not, in theory, illegal merely to possess any document there – except for some unusually broad and harsh laws about indecent images. What sort of place is it that the police make up the law as they go along, and threaten academics for having the intention to read about the subject they are studying?
– Saudi Arabia? Egypt? → Continue reading: Freedom of speech? How about freedom to read?
Everyone has things that they would destroy them if they were publicised. I once orchestrated a coup in a small African country from a base in an extinct volcano with the aid of a lot of fit-birds in 1960’s specs and very short lab coats, holding clipboards for no apparent reason, whilst I stroked my Persian cat. That should never be revealed. Oh, bugger! Like all Bond villians I give it away towards the end.
I love that. Readers will recognise the inimitable prose style of regular Samizdata commenter NickM, who now writes regularly at this place. This is taken from an excellent attack on the idiotic efforts of UK police to prevent people from criticising Scientology. It shows how respect for freedom of speech – which must, by definition, include the right to offend and upset – is now under serious assault in this country.
Any attempt to censor criticism of belief systems is an outrage. So long as the critics do not try to violate the lives and property of the people they are criticisng, the law should stay well out of it.
Read the whole of Nick’s piece.
Gordon Ramsay, the ‘outspoken’ celeb chief wants the state to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. I kid you not. That the man is an arrogant little shit has always been apparent from his TV shows but this sort of national socialist volkish crap really does mark him as truly authoritarian.
The TV chef said it was “fundamentally important” for chefs to provide locally-sourced food. “Fruit and veg should be seasonal,” he said. “Chefs should be fined if they haven’t got ingredients in season on their menu. I don’t want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown.”
The ‘I am’ does not want to see something and so thinks his views should be the force backed law of the land: the psychopathology of the expert that we so often see coming from doctors is at work again. The great unwashed must be forced to follow expert opinion, which means their opinion, naturally.
I like the idea of third world farmers pulling themselves out of poverty and selling me their products whenever I want to buy them and why should a loud mouthed self important chief and a bunch of fascistic green activists get to have a say in that? Their craving to impose their will on others should stop being socially acceptable and they need to be called authoritarian thugs to their faces.
From The Times:
Jansen Versfeld, the solicitor who conducted the fruitless search for a barrister, said: “Because of the very low rate of pay for these hearings, £175.25 per day, and the amount of work and complexity involved, with no payment for preparation, none could undertake to do it.”
Mr Versfeld, who is with Morgan Rose solicitors, said that there were 6,586 pages of documents and a total of 4,548 transactions that would require arranging into a manageable form by experienced senior counsel for an estimated six-week hearing.
[…]
“So although this defendant was convicted of offences only involving a few hundred pounds’ worth of cannabis, he found himself at risk of losing £4.5 million worth of assets – with the burden on him to prove that they were not ill-gotten gains. On top of that, he was prohibited from using those assets for his own defence.”
I predict that the law will be changed. It is plainly intolerable to the state that people’s property should not be seized merely because the unfair procedure is inadequately funded.
The distinction between the legal order in Western democracies and the tyrannies of Stalinist Russia or modern China or the Arab gulf states, is often thought to be stark. In Britain in particular, we are complacent that 800 years of the common law will protect us against the overreaching power of state functionaries.
Today comes a case that shows this conceit to be ill-founded. It was already widely known that the Home Secretary would like the power to lock anyone up for seven weeks on her say-so. But it is not in effect yet, and is likely to be opposed in parliament. Who knew that the British state is already punishing 70 people with effective suspension of all their economic rights on mere accusation, by freezing their assets by Treasury order without any legal warrant or process?
The Terrorism (UN Measures) Order 2006 and the 2006 al-Qaeda and Taleban (UN Measures) Order were made under section 1 of the 1946 UN Act in order to implement resolutions of the UN Security Council. These orders are not parliamentary instruments but “orders in council” – the council in question being the Queen’s Privy Council, so that the rules under which (according to solicitors for the victims)…
We have the madness of civil servants checking Tesco receipts, a child having to ask for a receipt every time it does a chore by running to the shops for a pint of milk and a neighbour possibly committing a criminal offence by lending a lawnmower.
…have not troubled parliament even under the pathetic ‘negative resolution’ procedure by which most of our law is now made. Nor has any judge or other independent authority been in involved in these seizures or assessed the evidence (if any) that justifies them. Nor is there any time limit. Or need to bring charges to support the indefinite punishment.
Which remains, though the learned judge found it entirely illegal, indefinite:
Jonathan Crow QC, for HM Treasury, had told him the UK government would be left in violation of a UN Security Council order were the orders to be quashed immediately.
The Treasury said the asset-freezing regime and individual asset freezes would remain in place pending the appeal.
A spokesman said the asset-freezing regime made an “important contribution” to national security by helping prevent funds being used for terrorism and was “central to our obligations under successive UN Security Council resolutions”.
To which I say, and not for the first time, damn the UN. Neither the UN nor Treasury officials are supposed to make our law. And if this proscription stands, then we might as well have no law.
Via the website BoingBoing is a good new directory showing where the most and least censored internet systems are. A handy reference guide for people keeping an eye on governments’ efforts to control content. Suffice to say that nations like Saudi Arabia or China do not score very well.
Outside our web-world, some people may sneer that only geeks get upset by censorship, but given its growing importance as a communications medium, those sneers are misplaced. The loss of freedoms tends to diminish those of everyone else.
Some people I chat with in Indonesia on an almost daily basis have just told me that the Indonesian government have just blocked all access to YouTube, MySpace and Rapidshare. Apparently using proxy servers lets you get to a YouTube page but they cannot actual view the videos for some reason.
Does anyone out there have any technical suggestions to pass on to some freedom loving folks in Indonesia? If so, leave them in the comments here. Quite a few people there want to make a mockery of this blatant censorship, which is being done to pander to the most intolerant Islamist elements in that country.
I previously reported on the saga of Mikko Ellilä. Here is the trial (in English) and now the state has spoken its verdict: guilty.
So it has happened: thoughtcrime is now officially a crime in Finland. Stating your opinion, moreover stating your opinions based of government statistics, is illegal. Finns may now only express a politically sanctioned range of opinions subject to supervision by official Gauleiters like Mikko Puumalainen. The fine is small but so what? The message is clear. Dissent will not be tolerated by the Finnish state. It should not matter a damn if you agree with what Mikko Ellilä says, it is outrageous that he is not being allowed to say what he thinks.
The thing I find so nauseating is these sanctimonious pathological control freaks act as those they are not repressive government thugs using force to prevent dissent. The freedom to only state popular opinions is no freedom at all because freedom of speech is the right to say what some other people do not want to hear. It is the right to express opinions that may offend because if you cannot do that, you do not have freedom of speech.
People like Finnish bureaucrat Mikko Puumalainen exist everywhere (see the Ezra Levant case in Canada) and they must be resisted by any means necessary.
What is it this week? Ah, tobacco again. Now displaying them for sale is to be banned. It is a public consultation – but the point of public consultation is to be able to point to endorsement of policy and to disarm objectors at the point of actual legislation, not to discover anything. Departmental minds are clearly made up:
Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo said it was “vital” to teach children that “smoking is bad”.
“If that means stripping out vending machines or removing cigarettes from behind the counter, I’m willing to do that,” she said.
‘Its-for-the-children!’ – usually delivered in a sobbing voice on the edge of hysteria – remains an unstoppable weapon by which public life crushes private life.
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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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