This is even better.
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One of the hardest things for a libertarian to do at the moment is to maintain any kind of optimism or sense of confidence that his or her ideas will catch on. The danger is that if one sinks into despair, then that despair will come across as a form of defeatism, which turns into a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. If I have a criticism of one of the head honchos of the UK-based Libertarian Alliance, Sean Gabb, is that he used to wallow so much in this sort of “we are all doomed” schtick that I almost imagined, that in a perverse kind of way, that he was secretly rather enjoying it and that it was all a bit tongue in cheek. Funnily enough, at last year’s annual LA conference in London – the next one is held this weekend – I sensed that Mr Gabb had cheered up a bit. Even so, reasons for to be grim about civil liberties issues remain but sometimes I think that momentum might be slowly changing at the level of public debate. Increasingly, if the government comes out with some new measure, it is geeted with a sort of wearied resignation or outright derision; enthusiasm for such measures are few, or supported by obvious toadies and fools. Take this story in the Daily Telegraph today. The outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions, no less, talks about the UK embracing the politics of fear:
Maybe they will not just bear it, but do something about it.
Paraphernalia of paranoia – that is a nice turn of phrase. October 21st, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Home Office plans to require registration of mobile phones (and to register the identities of hotel guests (pdf), record who calls whom and what they read online, etc …) have a familiar feel. In the Soviet Union, all printing machinery and typewriters were registered just in case they might be used for ‘anti-social’ purposes, when the people who had access to them could be tracked-down, watched and questioned.  October 21st, 2008 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
You might think that with all the worries about recession, bank failures and so on, that political leaders might want to avoid making ever greater commitments on public spending. Not so. Just to remind us about the kinds of concerns that animate the political classes, here is this story:
It is hardly a fear. It is a reality.
It is important to remember that even supposedly private sector firms such as Vodafone can easily find it next-to-impossible not to co-operate with governments on stuff like this, particularly if the government can threaten to cut off licences.
So let’s assume that the government has data on the 40 million-plus people who buy a pre-paid phone. Even leaving aside the moral objections to such a database, the practical issue of how on earth one can sift through the haystack of millions of such details for the possible pin of a terrorist plot does not seem to register. But then again, one must remember that the database state is not really about terrorism. It is a beast that is now acquiring a life of its own. After all, thousands of jobs, millions of profits, are tied up with this. If the Tories really do stick to their pledge to shut this thing down – and I would not want to bet my house on it – it is going to put a lot of “consultants” out of a job. A certain grim satisfaction would be involved in that. My wife, who is a consultant, refuses to work on any such things, god love her. October 20th, 2008 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
What follow is a somewhat edited version of a comment I left on a Hollywood gossip blog called JJ’s Dirt. As the blog owner decided not to approve my comment (as is indeed his right of course, so no nonsensical bleating about ‘censorship’… it is JJ’s blog and any comments on his turf are quite rightly at his unconditional sufferance. His blog = his rules), so I thought I would post my comment here. As it never saw the light of day, I have slightly expended it to more fully express my views. I came across the article in a google search for something quite unrelated and saw a short list of people who are purported to be homosexual or bisexual in various so called ‘public’ walks of life in the USA. Although I am utterly indifferent to people’s consensual sexual behaviour provided it is not aggressively thrust unwanted in my direction, I have always been deeply uncomfortable with the self-righteousness of people who ‘out’ others. This was the trigger phrase that moved me to comment and my (slightly expanded) reply follows.
Or maybe they just have the notion that it is none of anyone else’s damn business and that unless they choose to openly discuss their private life, they should have their privacy respected by others when they are not on the job. If someone is a politician, they are a person controlling the violence backed means of collective coercion and quite reasonably should have no right to privacy whatsoever, be it sexual, social or financial. Being an athlete or actor/actress on the other hand is just a job, not a public office. Why should your wish to ‘out’ someone trump their wish to perhaps not have what they do in private known? Certainly no one can or should force you to stop this (unless they feel you have defamed them, which is a rather different issue that I am not addressing), but that does not make what you are doing right. Perhaps you define yourself by your sexuality but most homosexual people I know do not, so why try to force them to make common cause with you when they may well feel no affinity with you or your world view at all? It is already the case that in most of the civilised world (i.e. the western world) the law does not prohibit homosexual public displays of affection. You have legal protection against violence directed at you and being homosexual no longer mitigates your legal right not to be assaulted… and rightly so of course. Moreover by and large you have tolerance socially too, in that people will not take action to try and stop you holding hands with your partner. That is what tolerance means. It is the natural right of everyone to have their consensual behaviour with others tolerated. However if your ‘comfort’ means it is ‘acceptance’ you want from straight people, rather than just tolerance, well you may ask people for it but you have no right to it and a significant number of people will choose to not accept you. No one has a right to be accepted. As long as someone tolerates you (as they must), it is their right, not yours, to judge you according to their sensibilities. In short, if all someone does is sneer at you and your partner holding hands in public, deal with it. The world is full of jackasses and always will be. But please, stop poking into people’s private affairs if they do not want them poked into. I do not think what you are doing is immensely harmful but it is neither admirable nor justified. September 30th, 2008 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Overwhelmingly carried by the TUC. Coming not very long after the British Air Transport Association (the association of airlines and airports) expressed its “joint and determined opposition to the proposal” [pdf], this suggests the current scheduling of the UK National Identity Scheme may have some problems. Expect yet another repositioning shortly. (My guess: it’ll be about “immigration control”.) September 10th, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
This release is just in from Michael Babka at Downsize DC:
I would also suggest that if you are a Montana resident you write your governor a hearty thank you for standing up to the power hungry DC bureaucracy. If you do not live in Montana, find out if your governor is one of the ones rebelling against DC and thank them if they are and ask them to join with the others if they are not. Liberte! Fraternite! Up the Revolution! May the fleas of ten thousand camels reside in Michael Chertoffs armpits! August 5th, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
When I made my last post about the small piece of incompetence I had encountered from the Home Office upon attempting to apply for a passport immediately upon becoming a naturalised British citizen, I wrote the sentence
One commenter left a response that more or less translated as “You poor deluded fool”. I concluded the post on a surprisingly upbeat note, however
It is now two and a half weeks later, and all I can conclude is that yes, I was a poor deluded fool. However, the situation is somewhat more sinister than this. The general layout of passport application forms has not changed particularly since the Home Office started setting up its apparatus for ID cards and databases. Essentially you are asked to prove that you are a British citizen and also prove your identity. If your claim to citizenship is based upon being born to parents of particular nationality and/or in particular places at particular times, the combination of supporting documents required can be very complex, as the unravelling of the British Empire and the creation of many different kinds of citizenship in the former empire when there used to be only one has led to British nationality law being extremely complex. However, if your claim to citizenship is a simple one, the supporting documents requested are quite simple. There are (at least so I thought) fewer simpler and less controversial proofs of citizenship than an obviously genuine naturalisation certificate dated the previous Wednesday. In addition to this, I was also requested to send my Australian passport as proof of identity. The Home Office probably at least partly wants this to record its details and index them with my British passport in its database so that my movements and actions become clearer to then, but this is a reasonable thing to ask for. Checking that my place of birth and date of birth on my Australian passport are the same as those on my naturalisation certificate, and that the photograph and signature in my Australian passport and the new British one are obviously of the same person. In any event, these documents were all that the form and its supporting notes asked me to send. They proved pretty unambiguously that I was a British citizen and that the new passport was being issued to the same person who had been naturalised. I was not expecting any problems. The form had sated that people applying for their first British passport might be required to attend an interview, so I thought this was a possibility. Although the Home Office have set up “passport interview offices” as part of the infrastructure for issuing ID cards in the future, this is again something I don’t find inherently wrong. Asking the person who is applying for a passport to appear in person to confirm that he is indeed the person in the photograph doesn’t strike me as particularly unreasonable, and when I had to replace a stolen Australian passport the Australian officials did precisely this. However this is not what happened. Instead, a few days after I had sorted out the payment issue (and after I had passed that “Your application cannot be processed further until….” roadblock, I received another letter. This one rather sadly needs fisking. July 27th, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers’ money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We’d despaired of reaching ‘the youth’ ourselves, too expensive. I’m very glad they decided to do it for us. With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows ‘kids’ not to be quite the suckers they’d hoped. Enjoy. July 11th, 2008 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Pretty gruesome stuff happening. This is old news:
But this not so. And happening via backdoor of telecoms regulation.
These two items have in common the attempt to undermine the infrastructure of the net/web by controlling those who provide or maintain it. Not good. July 8th, 2008 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
That invaluable organisation, the Taxpayer’s Alliance, has worked out that the total cost of the various surveillance and data-gathering services favoured by the UK government is just under £20 billion, or about £800 per household. The figure is a total, not an annual sum. £20 billion is a huge figure, even in these times of inflated financial sums. Now the question arises whether, if we really do face serious security threats – and I think we do – what else could that £20 billion have purchased that might actually have made us safer? Of course, £20 billion could also enable quite a few tax cuts, but that is obviously hark heresy these days (sarcasm alert). July 7th, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
At my education blog late last night, I found myself putting, in connection with this (which is a story about how two French science students were brutally murdered in London yesterday), this:
Something about the extreme savagery of that double murder yesterday made me think that now was the exact time to be saying such a thing, not just to those few of my devoted libertarian friends so devoted that they read that education blog of mine, but also to any eco-friendly home-schoolers or weary school teachers who happen to drop by there. Suddenly, the anti-gun-control message felt very right, like an idea whose time, finally, might have come. → Continue reading: Is gun control about to be rolled back in Britain? July 4th, 2008 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
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