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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Democratic Undergrounder 1: “Dude, Bush is a god-damn fascist. I asked everyone I know and like no one voted for him! Patriot Act, wiretaps made easier, locking up people in Guantanamo Bay without a trial… he’s like some whacked out Christian dictator!”
Democratic Undergrounder 2: “Yeah man! It’s so good to see Chavez in Venezuela sticking it to Bush’s buddies in the oil business! He’s gonna make Venezuela totally free now!
Democratic Undergrounder 1: “That’s right! Did you hear? He’s been given powers to rule by decree and now he can close down opposition newspapers, silence non-socialist radio stations and throw his political enemy’s asses in jail if they don’t do whatever his decree says.”
Democratic Undergrounder 2: “Woah, cool! One day I hope we’re as free as that in the USA!”
Of course, I am just imagining that discussion. I am sure nothing like that ever happened.
There is a report in the Telegraph called Entire village suspected of mayor’s murder that caught my eye.
Although no official statement has yet been given, the Guardia Civil have indicated that they strongly believe those responsible for the murder of the 50-year-old mayor bore a grudge over his policies in the village. There is no shortage of contenders. During his 12 years in office, the mayor, a member of the conservative Popular Party and the owner of the village’s only guest house, had been involved in almost four dozen individual court cases with homeowners in Fago. He had taken out injunctions to prevent people making home improvements and closed down a bed and breakfast because it competed for business with his own establishment.
[…]
“He was an unpleasant man who ran this place like his personal kingdom. He made life difficult for most of us but for a select few he made life impossible,” he said.
I regard it as a truism that ‘the state is not your friend’, but it is easy to concentrate one’s attention on the outrages to personal freedom that come out of central government, the big sweeping laws that abridge liberties and which get talked about in the national newspapers. Yet in many ways the most fearful tyranny is the one which gets imposed by people living right next to you, because it is almost impossible to avoid or mitigate… well not entirely, as Mayor Miguel Grima discovered.
Well, fancy giving money to the Government!
Might as well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the Government!
Nobody will see the stuff again.
Well, they’ve no idea what money’s for –
Ten to one they’ll start another war
I’ve heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor’!
Fancy giving money to the Government!
– A.P. Herbert (no relation)
Thanks to Brian Walden for reminding me of this, in a brilliant but very depressing radio essay: Lessons from Herbert.
Will Hutton has an article in the Guardian called 2006: a vintage year for ideas that will change our world that is right on the money about the importance of that triumph of free expression, ‘Web 2.0’. Or as I would put it, the web is the tool that will break the old meta-contextual basis of old thinking… and then the rest of Hutton’s article then piles on wave after wave of ‘old think’ completely locked into the orthodoxy of a statist meta-context.
For two or three decades, economists and philosophers have questioned whether technology and rising wealth automatically mean greater well-being. In 2006, we finally realised that we are too inattentive to what makes us happy, a crucial step forward. Happiness is about earning the esteem of others, behaving ethically, contributing selflessly to human betterment and assuaging the need to belong. We have finally understood it is not economic growth that delivers these results – it is the way we behave. David Cameron caught the mood by saying that the object of the next Tory government would be greater well-being. The Observer published Professor Richard Layard’s Depression Report, arguing that because one in six of us suffers from anxiety or depression, the greatest contribution the government could make to promoting well-being is to prioritise the improvement of mental-health care.
Hutton quotes Richard Layard as if his conclusions and support for some very creepy totalitarian policies are self-evident and widely accepted outside the Benthamite circles in the two main UK political party HQs, which is not the case (although perhaps his use of ‘we’ means ‘Guardian & Independent readers like me’). Moreover it has probably not occurred to Hutton (i.e. he is locked onto meta-contextual assumptions that society must rotate around the state) as it is clearly an axiom for him that ‘well-being’ is something within the government’s power to dispense, that perhaps it is the decay of civil society and growth of the state, rather than a lack of ‘correct’ state policies at imposing happiness, that might be the problem. My view is that the likes of Dave Cameron can only be a solution to the purported ‘crisis of unhappiness’ if they all start acting like lemmings and go jump off a high cliff. Seeing that would certainly make me very happy.
But the web is indeed the future, not the Tory or Labour parties, nor the Guardian or Telegraph or BBC. Why? Because there are inherent dis-economies of scale when it comes to the web. By this I mean I can set up Samizdata and the Guardian can set up their own blogs (and fine worthwhile blogs they are… the Guardian is really one of the few newspapers in the world which really ‘gets’ the Internet), but in spite of their brand and wealth, it costs me a tiny fraction ‘per eyeball’ to get hundreds of thousands of readers per month compared to them. Sure, more people read their website than read Samizdata but in terms of bang-for-buck, I win hands down and a lot of people do read us… and there are a lot more blogs than newspapers. Likewise a worthy outfit like 18 Doughty Street can put together excellent podcasts and do top class vlogging, but a significant cost and investment in infrastructure and salaries… and Brian Micklethwait can put up very effective podcasts for more or less nothing.
The implication of this ‘dis-economy of scale’ is something that will have little effect in the short run but will change everything in the long run. It means that although the Internet can be used by huge corporations and even huger governments, individuals motivated by something other than accountants have intrinsic advantages. Most importantly I think this points the way to how civil society will eventually redress the balance of power vis a vis the state and those who feed off the state, and abruptly reverse the trends of last century of moving towards Rousseau’s goal of suppressing the free and several interactions of civil society and replacing them with politically mediated regulatory formulae.
Now that is future-think.
Apologies for not flagging up sooner that I recently had a recorded conversation about Samizdata with Perry de Havilland. It took me over a week to edit the thing, by which I mean over a week to get around to stitching the two chunks it happened in together (I find everything involving computers to be hard until I know how to do it). And after posting about it on my blog, it has taken me another two days to mention it here. I had a busy weekend. But the mills of Samizdata grind small, and slowly. A week and a half’s delay will make no huge difference to the big picture, or to the meta-context as Perry likes to call it.
Anyway, click here to have a listen. It lasts about forty minutes.
Our conversation reminded me of something I first heard myself say to Madsen Pirie a long time ago, in the old Alternative Bookshop. What will this achieve? – said Madsen, waving some pamphlet I had just done in my face. I replied: “In the short run, nothing. In the long run, everything.” Samizdata is like that.
Jackie D liked it too.
Today, assuming the plan goes according to plan, I will be doing another of these things, with Alex Singleton, about… Gilbert and Sullivan. There is more to life than what governments do.
Where coercive institutions are strong a fanatical minority is well placed to capture them and turn them to its own purposes.
– Natalie Solent, in this discussion, which is a an interesting touchstone of liberalism.
It’s the danger of tidy-minded people…
– Andrew Marr, in an extempore line, almost thrown away, to close an item on the surveillance state on the BBC’s radio talk-show Start the Week.
I think Marr pins it down precisely. Oppressive regimes are frequently driven by a desire for order, seen as conformity to explicit rules. The most insidious, most universally oppressive castes, don’t seek order because they want to be obeyed. They seek order for its own sake. They want the security of rules for everything, and recording everything.
On the other hand there are countries where the law is changed in order to prosecute the ordinary activities of those whom the government chooses to classify as criminals because it is politically convenient to do so. Should there be no evidence on which a jury will convict, the law can be changed till the public enemy is punished, you can punish them anyway even if they are acquitted, or you can always keep juries, burden of proof and testing of evidence out of it altogether in selected cases.
The traditional test in designing the criminal law in western legal systems – common law or civil law – was to ask, “What mischief does the law address?” or “What harm to persons, property, or society as a whole, does it seek to prevent or punish?” Libertarians might be troubled by the unlimited scope of “society as a whole”, but universalism – the treatment of all persons the same in the same circumstances, and framing the law on general principle rather than special cases – was once deemed fundamental to the rule of law. Indeed there is a common law maxim: hard cases make bad law, that warns that attempts to extract jurisprudence from the merits of the parties involved result in dangerous incoherence and uncertainty (the career of the late Lord Denning is replete with example) .
What should we call a jurisdiction where criminal liability is determined principally by the identity of ‘the criminal’ which is to say, whoever it is the authorities determine should be punished? Not lawless, because all these things are done under the colours of law, most legalistically. I think Tony Blair would call it ‘modern’. I think I would call it a ‘pyramid of bullies’.
In the Dutch town of Drachten, they have removed nearly all the traffic lights in a bold experiment that seems to be paying off. There was typically one road death every three years in Drachten but there have been none whatsoever since the traffic light removal began seven years ago.:
“We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt,” he said yesterday. “It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.
It is also nice to see the correct message from such examples starting to sink into a few brains in the mainstream media.
Meanwhile back in Britain…
Glenn Reynolds posted this link to an almost forgotten but pivotal story of the early civil rights movement. A group of young men opened an entire chain of stores to black americans by patience and nonviolence, and more notably without disrespect of private property or sobbing to mama government to kiss and make better.
They broke no laws. They neither committed nor threatened to initiate any violence. They just sat at a counter day after day, waiting to be served until:
On August 11, while the early arrivals were sitting at the counter waiting for their friends to show, a white man around 40 walked in and looked at them for several minutes. Then he looked at the store manager, and said, simply, “Serve them. I’m losing too much money.” He then walked back out. That man was the owner of the Dockum drug store chain.
The owner then gave the same orders to all of his other stores.
These people deserve to be better known than they are.
We should also remember the owner of the chain for being a businessman and a reasonable human being who did the right thing in a time and a place where ideologic racists abounded.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies, The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
– C.S. Lewis
A lot of people have been talking to me about the pubs of Yeovil this week. Not because of my unwise enthusiasm when young for rough cider. But because of this, first covered at the beginning of the year:
Revellers in the Somerset town of Yeovil, often seen as Britain’s answer to the Wild West on a Friday and Saturday night, were this weekend getting to grips with a unique scheme which is more science fiction than Wild West. Customers entering the town’s six main late-night drinking and dancing joints were being asked to register their personal details, have their photograph taken and submit to a biometric finger scan.
That’s from a report in The Guardian in May, which went on to explain:
The clubs and Avon and Somerset police, who are supporting the scheme, argue that it is not compulsory. Nobody can be forced to give a finger scan, which works by analysing a fingertip’s ridges and furrows. However, the clubs admit they will not allow people in if they refuse to take part in the scheme.
But things have moved on. “Don’t like it? You can drink elsewhere. Let the market sort it out… let these awful surveillance clubs go out of business and free-wheeling ones thrive,” was my immediate reaction. It appears that was naive. While it may be “voluntary” for drinkers, it appears that it is not voluntary for pubs and clubs. Not any longer. The Register explains,
“The Home Office have looked at our system and are looking at trials in other towns including Coventry, Hull & Sheffield,” said Julia Bradburn, principal licensing manager at South Somerset District Council.
Gwent and Nottingham police have also shown an interest, while Taunton, a town neighbouring Yeovil, is discussing the installation of fingerprint systems in 10 pubs and clubs with the systems supplier CreativeCode. […]
The council had assumed it was its duty under the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) to reduce drunken disorder by fingerprinting drinkers in the town centre.
Some licensees were not happy to have their punters fingerprinted, but are all now apparently behind the idea. Not only does the council let them open later if they join the scheme, but the system costs them only £1.50 a day to run.
Oh, and they are also coerced into taking the fingerprint system. New licences stipulate that a landlord who doesn’t install fingerprint security and fails to show a “considerable” reduction in alcohol-related violence, will be put on report by the police and have their licences revoked.
The fingerprinting is epiphenomenon. What’s deeply disturbing here is the construction of new regimes of official control out of powers granted nominally in the spirit of “liberalisation”. The Licensing Act 2003 passed licensing the sale of alcohol and permits for music and dancing – yes, you need a permit to let your customers dance in England and Wales – from magistrates to local authorities. And it provided for local authorities to set conditions on licenses as they saw fit.
Though local authorities are notionally elected bodies, and magistrates appointees, this looked like democratic reform. But all the powers of local authorities are actually exercised by permanent officials – who also tell elected councillors what their duties are. And there are an awful lot of them.
Magistrates used to hear licensing applications quickly. They had other things to do. And they exercised their power judicially: deciding, but not seeking to control. Ms Bradburn and her staff have time to work with the police and the Home Office on innovative schemes. I’ve noted before how simple-sounding powers can be pooled by otherwise separate agencies to common purpose, gaining leverage over the citizen. I call it The Power Wedge.
They are entirely dedicated to making us safer. How terrifying. “A Republic?” said the Seagreen, with one of his dry husky unsportful laughs, “What is that?”
GIve me the foul air of corruption, if that is the only way I may be permitted to breath at all.
Mary Ann Sieghart has written an interesting article about the rush to subject more or less everyone who comes in contact with children to checks by the state. She rightly points out what a paranoid example this sets by presupposing that people are pederasts. I heartily agree with her article and see this as one of the more extreme examples of the state replacing social interactions with politically mediated ones.
One of the nicer aspects of being a child used to be the random acts of kindness offered by adults outside the family: the friendly shopkeeper who ruffled your hair and gave you a sweet; the enthusiastic PE coach who gave up time after school to help with your gymnastics and was constantly – and wholly innocently – adjusting your body position to get the moves right. These adults were generous with their time and their affection. We knew who the pervs were and took pains to avoid them. Now all adults are deemed to be perverts unless they can prove that they are not. Most will now avoid contact with other people’s children and will refrain from touching them for fear of the action being misconstrued.
And then, in the next snippet by her, she writes lamenting the fact more people do not join political parties. Tellingly she mentions the two main (and largely indistinguishable) political parties.
Labour has a leadership contest coming up, in which members have a vote. Wouldn’t it be fun to cast one? And my local constituency is being split into two, so there will be selection processes for both new seats. I would love to have a say in the candidate selection, especially for the Tories. Having lectured them for years about the importance of choosing more women, it would be great to be able to make a difference.
What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it? What puzzles me is that so few people do want to join parties these days. Voters are always complaining about feeling disempowered. Here’s a chance at last to exert some power. Why not stop whingeing and take it?
I find that interesting as on one hand she clearly laments the destruction of civil society by the regulatory state and on the other, she urges people to join the institutions who are responsible for doing precisely that. In effect she might just as well be saying: “it is terrible that gangs which threaten people with violence are invading our neighbourhoods and fostering a climate of fear… I wonder why more people are not empowering themselves over other people by joining a gang?”
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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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