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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It will not have escaped the notice of our regular readers that I have shown a somewhat less than charitable attitude towards the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron. I think the time has come to provide some reasons for my hostility.
I realise that some people (maybe Cameron supporters among them) would dismiss my onslaught as the product of a crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant personality. Well, as a matter of fact, I am crotchety, pessimistic and intolerant but I have what I consider to be very good reasons for singling out David Cameron as the particular object of my animosity.
I also want to make it clear that I am not hostile to Cameron because he is not a libertarian. I do not expect Conservatives to be libertarians hence they are called ‘Conservatives’. Nor am I bitter about the fact that he is not a Conservative either. I expect very little from the current crop of moral and intellectual midgets that have aggregated in the Conservative Party and I am seldom disappointed.
Nor am I especially, or even moderately, outraged by his brazen careerism, his opportunism and his readiness not just to be cynical but to openly be seen to be cynical (e.g. peddling his eco-friendly bicycle to work, a few yards in front of the gas-guzzling limo bearing his briefcase). To this extent Mr. Cameron is probably no better or no worse than any of the other political jobbists who have infested our public realm like a colony of plague bacteria in the lymph node of a 14th Century peasant and from where they can, and do, distribute their pathogens around the national bloodstream. → Continue reading: What’s that coming over the hill?
My apologies for writing very little for a while. I have ideas but not much time. And I am a slow writer. By way of explanation if not excuse:
Today I visited the consulate of an Asian nation to apply for a tourist visa. When observing the visa application fee, I noticed that those travelling on a U.S. passport must pay almost three times more for a visa to enter this particular country. I believe many other countries impose an extraordinary surcharge for visa applicants travelling as U.S. citizens, too. Talk about American exceptionalism.
Still, I expect Americans are used to this sort of arrangement. When it comes to a whole suite of multilateral projects, the rest of the world expects the American taxpayer to cough up a hugely disproportionate share. When the American taxpayer wants to travel to the rest of the world, they find themselves paying considerably more for an entry visa to many countries as punishment for their poor choice of nationality.
Being a U.S. citizen must rankle at times.
I just picked up Tuesday’s Guardian to do my clippings (everything is behind), and found an article by George Monbiot, an attack on loony-toon ‘documentary’ Loose Change, almost all of which I agree with. Even when he says:
People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil that runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos that really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues – global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality – while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for the New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.
He is right. Those are the real issues. He is on the wrong side of them mostly, but they are worth arguing about. When he suggests that the delusional state of politics is caused insufficient democracy, he is wrong about that too as there is actually too much, the principal form of governance in the English-speaking world being imbecility howlback. But at least he has identified the problem.
Shock of recognition: Monbiot and I are brothers under the skin. We belong to recognisably the same impersonal, evolving, rationalist civilization in which there are real contentions, even though we have extremely different takes on it. The screw-Loose-Changers, bin-Laden-ists, the creationists, all live in a personified universe where humans are ants: someone is permanently in charge of everything, and anyone who disagrees is not just wrong but marked for destruction.
On occasion over the last 20 years I have met an animal-rights hysteric who sobbingly insisted the ALF “are not terrorists”, and that their campaigns of persecution were justified – though never someone who would say scientists should be murdered. Equally I have only rarely come across Irish republican sympathisers who passively supported the IRA in fighting ‘British colonialism’ – though never anyone who thought bombing civilians was a good idea. But yesterday alone I spoke to three people, respectable middle-class people in politics and business, who volunteered remarks on our latest letter-bombings that very much suggested they were pleased, and they expected me to be too.
That is surprising enough. But the trouble is, dear reader, I was.
I certainly do not want more bombings. I hope it is stopped before anyone is hurt. I would not countenance doing something myself that by deliberate action might injure some unknown other person. But nonetheless there is something in me that exults in this violence in way I – a person revolted by boxing and war-footage – have never felt. Someone, somewhere, is fighting back!
There is no excuse for this. I am fighting back myself in a peaceful liberal way, through the legitimate means of political campaigning within the law. The persistent fantasy about long-handled bolt-cutters that springs out of the back of my mind 100 times a day, every time I see the snakey armoured cables of a CCTV camera, remains a fantasy. No need for violence. Not even against things, let alone people. And the spreading conception, that resort to violence is a right if people do not do what you want is a recipe for bloody anarchy. Violence is counter-productive.
But my emotions, and those of my interlocutors, hint that just beneath the surface parts of Britain are boiling. A lot of people have had enough of the surveillance state, though they are bonded, compliant, cowed by the suggestion that to oppose it makes them “a friend of terrorists,” an enemy of Helfansafey, or even of Skoolzanospitalz. The people who spoke to me believed that whoever is doing it is doing it as a protest against the tracking of motorists, and that my public position as an uncowed opponent of the securocrats made me someone it was safe to say such things to.
I hope that this is not as bad as it seems. I am sure that we are not so desperate, yet, in Britain that liberty requires insurrection. But I also hope that the bomber is not an isolated madman. I hope he is an extreme outlier of a general public anger at being constantly watched and continually chivvied by officialdom. If is, then a peaceful counter-revolution does require people to speak out against the inspectorate, not just to those they think might share their views, but publicly.
I am fed up with Western companies collaborating with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, helping them restrict the internet and monitor communications by those who disagree and oppose them. Julien Pain of Reporters without Borders writes in Dictatorships catching up with Web 2.0.
These days, “subversive” or “counter-revolutionary” material goes on the Internet and political dissidents and journalists have become “cyberdissidents” and “online journalists.” … The Web makes networking much easier, for political activists as well as teenagers. Unfortunately, this progress and use of new tools by activists is now being matched by the efforts of dictatorships to fight them. Dictators, too, have entered the world of Web 2.0.
He expands:
The predators of free expression are not all the same. China keeps a tight grip on what is written and downloaded by users, spends an enormous amount on Internet surveillance equipment, and hires armies of informants and cyberpolice. It also has the political weight to force the companies in the sector–such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems–to do what it wants them to; all have agreed to censor their search engines to filter out Web sites overcritical of the authorities.
Long-time readers of Samizdata.net will know that one of the bees in our bonnet is collaboration of Western corporations with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes anywhere, in any way but especially when it comes to limiting the technology that could help dissidents to communicate among themselves and with the outside world – the first step to any meaningful resistance. Both Perry and I and others have blogged about it when Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft or Google put their foot among the oppressors’ jackboots.
I have often said, although have not blogged it anywhere in detail yet, that had the internet existed in the days of the Cold War, its end would have come much sooner and possibly in a different manner. I say this on the basis of my own experience of the power of communication and information dissemination within an oppressed society. Not just the serious political information. I remember the first 15 minutes of any clandestine meeting was spent sharing new jokes. All of them political, of course. And then there were western adverts that caused considerable damage to the communist propaganda. Soft-focus commercials for washing powder, chocolates, electrical appliances that we did not know even existed. The images of a world beyond got through thanks to the clear reception of the few TV channels near the borders with the Western countries. Speed that up, add scale and the rips the internet could have made in the Iron Curtain are beyond measure… imagine all the YouTube videos testifying to the ubiquitous presence of technology (cameras, computers and connectivity, not to mention homes, past-times and the luxury of being able to post inane clips online) for the exploited workers in the corrupt and decaying capitalist countries. Hmmm.
Even without quaint anecdotes from dissident days, most people can appreciate the importance of free flow of information and see what the internet has done for freedom of speech. What I see is a shift in the balance of power between systems (political and corporate) and the individual (citizen or consumer). That is why I do what I do (crusade against advertising and for individual empowerment) and why I am a big fan of technology like blogs, wikis, tagging, VoIP etc, and especially of applications such as Skype that is P2P, encrypted and distributed by individuals. Since its beginnings a few years ago, it has spread like wildfire precisely because it is secure and decentralised and, most importantly, unmonitored.
The Web phone service Skype, for example, has made it much easier for journalists – and Reporters Without Borders – to communicate with their sources. It works especially well because it is encrypted, so conversations are hard to tap.
Apparently, not any longer, which is the source of my anger and disappointment:
But China has already signed an agreement with Skype to block key words, so how can we be sure our conversations are not being listened to? How do we know if Skype will not also allow (or already has allowed) the Chinese police to spy on its customers?
After Googling “Skype” and “Chinese government”, I found more about the story which broke some time ago. Shame on me for missing it:
In September 2005 Skype and TOM formed a joint venture company to “develop, customize and distribute a simplified Chinese version of the Skype software and premium services to Internet users and service providers in China.” The Chinese client distributed by TOM Online employs a filtering mechanism that prevents users from sending text messages with banned phrases such as “Falungong” and “Dalai Lama.”
Human Rights Watch provides a comprehensive summary well worth reading in How Multinational Internet Companies assist Government Censorship in China. (Scroll down to point 4 for Skype.)
The real issue for me here is a moral one, not political or technological, although they define the context within which the moral choice should be exercised. I know and believe that technological innovation will prevail in the end. In fact, I am banking on it. For each repressive use of technology there will be new ways of bypassing it. My problem is that this merely treats the symptoms, not the disease. It leads to a kind of arms race, dictators and geeks locked in a battle to bypass each others’ technological resources and cleverness. True, geeks may be winning on that front. But the dictators are still oppressing and the losers (apart from the victims), in more ways than one, are the companies that have made the pact with the devil. → Continue reading: Complicity in a crime is also a crime
In Australia, the federal government’s propaganda tends to condescendingly heckle citizens about various issues that are pretty much always best left to the individual’s discretion – not unlike the output from NuLabour’s Ministry of Truth – similar beast, albeit with a more sinister bark. So in Britain you get this (probably one of the more egregious examples), and in Australia, this (ditto).
On balance, the naff Australian stuff is the lesser of two evils, but it is still deeply irritating, patronising bilge. Take the abovementioned ‘understanding money really pays off’ campaign the government is running via billboards and television commercials. Thanks so much for spending my tax money on delivering that sterling piece of advice – let me just make a note of it on my invisible typewriter. The most wasteful entity in society is wasting more of our money by telling us to mind our pennies! That is rich – even if we are not.
Still, it is exactly the sort of hypocritical, wealth-destroying enterprise one would expect the government to embark upon. However, it is pretty depressing when your (private sector) employer gets in on the act. I arrived home today to find the company I work for have decided to post me a brochure titled ‘Safety At Home’. Apparently “every day is Safety Day – think safety 24/7”. It is full of handy tips along the lines of “don’t hold any part of your body over a boiling kettle – steam can be hotter than water” and “read labels before use…take notice of cautions and warnings” and “try not to stick your head in the oven when the gas is on but not lit – unless you feel suicidal. If you feel only slightly suicidal, keep reading this brochure and you will want to get it over and done with in no time at all.” And in the foreword from our CEO:
We have produced this booklet as a reminder of the simple [really, painfully, embarrassingly simple – JW] things that we can all do outside the workplace to make sure we’re thinking safety 24/7 (…) stay safe and keep well.
Where does a nice big steaming hot mug of “fuck the hell off!” flung at your nether regions fit into your Safety at Home recommendations, Mr CEO? And get the hell out of my house while you are at it, you finger-wagging ponce. Shareholders bankroll enough useless expenditure via the taxation system as things are; corporate nannies are not welcome. Give us our money back.
Just got an e-mail from someone I met in Beijing in late 2005. I enjoyed his company especially because we shared a similarly self-deprecating, absurdist sense of humour. A good bloke – the sort that makes you understand why Aussies and Brits get along so well in spite of the silly state of sporting rivalry that exists between us. Craig was a thirty-something English teacher who had been on the Asia circuit for some time. Stories of his doomed-in-hindsight relationship forays amused me. When we were hanging out in 2005, his current romantic interest spoke no English and they (barely) communicated via the ridiculously inadequate translator installed on their respective mobile phones – think sub-2000 Alta Vista Babelfish – painfully erroneous. They had been out to dinner a couple of times. Boggles the mind, yes. Anyway, today I received an e-mail from him:
hey james….hows sunny australia these days? i got this email from kanjing, the girl with the very cute smile at the jade youth hostel. haha, this poor guys trying to chat her up and she goes and forwards the reply to every westerner she knows. ahhh, chinese girls.
He is right – she did have an awfully cute smile and was really quite lovely – in an untouchable sort of way. And he is also right about her forwarding said correspondence to a bunch of vague acquaintances – that is exactly the sort of thing a Chinese girl would do! Gotta love ’em. It is all one big English lesson.
What our amorous charge wrote to his fair damsel – and her response – is somewhat beside the point, but I could not help but note that the English proficiency he demonstrated was not enormously superior to that of our (slightly coherent) Chinese heroine. If I was feeling sympathetic, I would mark it down to the less rigorous standards demanded of e-mail communication. But still… awww… I had such a great time in China! I want to be there now. I laughed a lot. The glorious clash of customs taking place can be quite hilarious.
I would like to draw your attention to what’s happened to The Times’s Law section in the noughties. Once upon a time this was a lively mini-newspaper on a Tuesday, aimed at lawyers, with two or three substantial comment pieces, news, Law Reports and lots of job ads. Now it is a single sheet of newsprint, and found buried inside a growing section entitled Public Agenda.
From an advertisement in last week’s Economist:
Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a Pakistan based non-governmental organisation funded by a consortium of donors through UNDP, is plannning to undertake a social audit in 110 districts across the country compatible with baseline social audit established in 2001/02 and first annual follow-up application undertaken in 2004/05. The objective of the exercise is to obtain policy feedback on citizens’ views and experience in relation to key public services sectors like health, education, water and sanitation, police, access to justice and engagement in local governance arrangements. The study design should consider the comparison overtime [sic] with the baseline and follow-up applicaions in citizens’ views, use and experience of public services under the devolved local government system in Pakistan with a strong element of institutionalization of the social audit process.
Meanwhile, working the other way round, a flyer reaches me from De Havilland information services [no relation] for a conference on “Embedding the Third Sector in Public Services”:
Third Sector public service delivery is a new, effective and exciting avenue to further revolutionise and modernise service provision as we know it. However, this is no longer an innovation, it is a reality and public money already funds multiple public services through third sector organisations. It is acknowledged that the opportunities, expertise and fresh, grass-roots approach the third sector brings will bring improvement and better value to public services.
Major efforts to reinforce this through building an infrastructure and action planning to rationalize and embed this are underway in te Third Sector Review, recently conducted by the Office of the Third Sector. The final report is due in March [and?] will culminate in summarising the sector’s contribution and propose how this will work in a better, stronger, more resilient infrastructure.
[all sic]
The Office of the Third Sector is very pleased with what has happened to the role of charities, and will be colonising more of British civil society presently..
“Metaphors furnish clues to transformation, but they are not the powers that resist or engender such new realities,” a literary theorist once wrote.
I know a lot of Samizdata contributors and readers are cricket buffs. So, what do you all think about the Twenty20 limited overs format now that it has had some more exposure since last being discussed here?
Why am I so uninspired when it comes to blogging these days? Is it the alcohol? I could cut down – come the new year, I have cut down. Weekends only (except when I am drinking during the week). Or the caffeine? I only drink coffee when I am asked out ‘for coffee’ or if I have had a particularly satisfying meal that cannot be denied a ristretto chaser – I do not drink coffee as a coping mechanism for human interaction in the ‘am’ hours any more. Perhaps these recent lifestyle adjustments will cause the shingles to fall from my mind and thus bloggable considerations will gush forth as readily as, well, the clichés did when I was constructing this sentence. That would be nice.
As an entirely unrelated aside, I recently had a sort-of bigwig in the large organisation I work for sit me down and tell me what a credit I could be to said organisation if I got into its graduate programme. His schtick was familiar 21st Centurese motivationary-speak – casually, genially, avuncularly domineering – “Here’s what I want you to do by the end of next week…” Despite an arguably unhealthy self-belief in my critical faculties, I found myself drawn to this man (who barely knows me) and his vision for my future; a spell that only lapsed after he had breezed out the door to no doubt galvanise some other vessel with the company mettle. Not a bad trick – identify the promising juniors and intimidate/flatter them into the arms of the company via the personal attention and counsel of vastly senior colleagues. I must remember that one when I have my own business. I did not sign anything.
The point is that up until the early months of 2006 I have always written, argued and thought voraciously. Inspiration was never a problem, an elegant turn-of-phrase never hard to deploy. It is now – I feel barren. And it is not the booze or caffeine or any other drug; I need to leave Perth. Perth is too easy. Having left Perth for more exotic destinations in the past, I now realise that not being in Perth piques my intellectual curiosity like no other. Okay, not being on Easy Street piques my intellectual curiosity like no other, but that is practically the same thing. Perth is a marvellous city to live in, especially if you want an uncomplicated life, but I need to struggle. I need to challenge myself beyond the stultifying rigours of a weekend team-building exercise conducted at some five star hobby farm resort. Yes, I trust you will catch me if I fall back ramrod-straight into your arms, but how will I fare on the Ropes Course with only my team members to spot me? What a load of wank! I’ve been offered a promising career path in one of Australia’s biggest and most successful companies. But to be honest, the very thought bores the absolute tits off of me. I am going to leave Australia and try to make my own way in the New World – Asia.
Ta-ra.
(TBC)
Given that the papers are full of the most appalling socialist commentators sharpening their knives to butcher Britain’s remaining economic freedoms, when ‘right-wing’ (in their terms, God help us) Tony Blair leaves office, it is nice to be able to point out a ray of sunshine.
I like Nick Cohen. He is often wrong, but he does have the sense to follow his own mind rather than retailing the received wisdom . And he is intellectually honest and self-aware, which is more than can be said for most commentators on the left. This is an impressive example:
Too many on the liberal-left, including me, don’t feel in our bones that it is as wrong for the state to take billions of pounds from taxpayers and waste them on, say, the fatally overambitious National Health Service IT project as it is for the owners of Farepak to take the Christmas savings of thousands of poor families and throw them away.
Leave aside for the moment that no one was compelled to take the appalling bargain offered by Farepak in the first place, and that no one, including the same poor families, has an option about the taxes going to the mad NPfIT or the destruction of their privacy that it entails. Leave aside that, even if one counts as robbery in the same way as the other, the NPfIT is more than 120 times as bad. (Though one couldn’t pass that topic without noting Gordon Brown took out of the nation’s pension funds in one early budget, what it would have taken 300 Robert Maxwells to steal.)
Cohen has recognised (1) that there is something not quite right about the disproportionate outrage lavished by the left on the Farepak disaster, when government spending takes money from people who need it and gives them nothing; and (2) that some other people do not share the reflex. He offers the insight as a matter of electoral strategy for Labour, so insight (1) may be a bit weak. But it looks to me like progress. Cohen can not quite see what is wrong with his viewpoint clearly enough to shift his ingrained value-judgements, but he can see that it might be wrong.
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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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