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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Ordinary Britons struggling to get on with their lives are being menaced by a small number of bullies who do not care about the rights of their victims. These ‘Tsars’, as they are sometimes known, impose themselves and their lifestyle choices on others with an almost psychopathic disregard for other people’s viewpoints, and regardless of all attempts by police and others to maintain traditional values.
When the Government’s antisocial behaviour tsar was out on patrol with the police on a housing estate last week, she was amazed to find that the officer was handing out sweets rather than enforcing Asbos.
– according to The Independent on Sunday
“Family intervention projects – I really believe this is the approach that will work,” she said. “It ain’t cheap and it also isn’t easy. Basically it’s the end of the road.”
“The priority was to do families, because they have children, first. But we are working on doing something for chaotic adults where the same approach will be taken.”
Ms Casey added she was working with Whitehall to adapt the centres to cater for single people.
She said other measures to tackle anti-social behaviour included plans to extend parenting courses across the country, and powers for imposing compulsory parenting orders.
“If you are not going to take parenting help then we are going to make you take parenting help,” she said.
As the same interview is (puzzlingly) slightly differently reported by the BBC. Anyone would think that the Indy report did not sound tough enough, and was re-spun for presentation to the Beeb.
This anecdote from Ian Brown is just too much fun not to share: Killer wasp brings passport office to halt.
Any wasp-trainers out there? Your country needs you.
The threats to liberty in Britain are too numerous to keep track of. Thanks to Josie Appleton on Spiked! for this, which I had entirely missed before now:
The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill, due to return to the House of Commons next week, will mean that 9.5million adults – one third of the adult working population – will be subject to ongoing criminal checks.
It is a House of Lords Bill, but has Government backing.
The Bill would create an Independent Barring Board (IBB), which would maintain “barred lists” preventing listed individuals from engaging in “regulated activities”. “In respect of an individual who is included in a barred list, IBB must keep other information of such description as is prescribed.” [cl.2(5)]
As the Bill was originally presented, you would have no right to damages if you were mistakenly or maliciously included in a barred list, and nor would anyone else. And the IBB would have been an absolute finder of fact, with appeal allowed only on a point of law. So among the things the IBB would have been independent of is responsibility for its actions.
Now things are slightly better, but there’s a cunning pseudo-compromise. You can sue. And you can now appeal the facts. But the criteria applied in the application of policy to an individual case – the core of what the IBB would do – is expressly (with a shade of Guantanamo) deemed not to be a matter of law or fact, and are therefore not to be subject to examination by the courts [cl.4(3)].
The schedule of “regulated activity” is 5 pages long in the printed copy. So you’ll have to look it up yourselves if you are interested.
The practical effect? Well, as an example, as I understand it, if the Bill were currently law, I would be committing a criminal offence in paying someone I trust to look after my elderly mother, who is currently convalescing from an operation, without both of us being made subject to official monitoring first.
Once it is in force, if you wish to be self sufficient – even if you don’t value your privacy, and are confident that theree’s nothing about you to which an official could possibly have objected in the past, and that you might not be confused with anyone else – you’ll need to know if a family member is going to be ill in sufficient time to fill in all the forms and wait for them to be processed. Better leave it to the state – which is of course always perfect.
The government’s plan to help the disadvantaged was outlined in its Social Exclusion Plan on Monday.
The moral basis of the Plan was “rights and responsibilities”. That is, the right of the government to interfere in the lives of people it thinks don’t know what’s good for them, and the responsibility of these “customers” to acquiesce.
Mark Ballard pins it down precisely in The Register.
Where the people of Malaysia would be without their government to do their thinking for them, I really do not know.
Malaysian authorities have published a list of undesirable titles to prevent parents giving their children names such as Hitler, smelly dog or 007.
It is a classic ‘Samizdata’ story which allows us to make fun of the silly politicians but behind it is the serious point that the Malaysian government is arrogating for itself the right to have a say in what a citizen calls him or herself. A person’s name is at the heart of their identity in many ways, and it is sad that governments think they have the right to interfere with whatever name a person chooses to call themselves.
Overseas readers often scoff at my pessimism about the state we are in in Britain. Scoff may be the wrong word. Scoffing is now under close supervision:
David Ashley, headmaster of Greenslade primary, says that pupils who bring in packed lunches “are allowed chocolate on a biscuit but not a Mars bar”. If such sweeties are spotted, parents are called in for a quiet word.
At Charlton Manor primary, the head, Tim Baker, says: “Children get stickers for healthy boxes . . . If a child brings in a chocolate bar, we take it out of the lunchbox and give it back to the parent at the end of the day.” Pupils give each other away, he confides: “They say, ‘Miss, he’s got sweets in his box’.”
Perhaps the scariest thing about the article from which that comes is the vaguely approving tone. Here is information about what is being done, no questioning that it needs and should have government attention.
Virginia Postrel, who recently donated an organ herself, writes:
Expecting people to take risks and give up something of value without compensation strikes me as far more blatant exploitation than paying them. I don’t expect soldiers or police officers to work for free, and I don’t think we should base our entire organ donation system on the idea that everyone but the donor should get paid. Like all price controls, that creates a shortage – in this case, a deadly one.
Further:
The issue of lost wages is a significant one, especially since kidney patients and their friends and families are disproportionately likely to be of lower socioeconomic status. In many cases, people who might be willing to serve as living donors simply cannot take the chance of financial ruin posed by losing a few weeks of pay (and that’s assuming their understanding bosses would give them leave).
The National Kidney Foundation is shamefully, unbelievably trying to put a stop to any discussion of the use of market mechanisms to reduce the national organ shortage. They even wrote a letter to the AEI, urging them not to hold a debate on the matter.
Virginia has also written a column for Forbes (not available online for free, sadly) about how some prominent hospitals are actually refusing to do kidney transplants for people who have found their donors online or through other media. Hospitals which are denying patients legal, nonexperimental, life-saving surgery for ideological reasons include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical School. On her blog, Virginia writes:
The transplant establishment is, unfortunately, all too accustomed to managing the shortage rather than expanding the supply of organs. Too many powerful “experts” consider a donor who is moved by a particular stranger’s story to be a generic “altruistic donor,” for whom one stranger should be exactly the same as another. By their lights, favoring someone you’ve read about over whoever’s first on the list is “unfair.”
If you have ever seen the benefits of online conversation, through blogs or journals or message boards or chat rooms, think about that. The human kindness extended to you by another individual in that context, according to these hospitals, is somehow tainted.
I thought things were bad enough with the creepazoids who want to violate every human’s civil liberties at birth by reversing non-consent to make organ donation an opt-out rather than opt-in personal decision (“You think your body belongs to you? Think again, buster. It’s just government inventory…”). This outright hostility from hospitals and the National Kidney Foundation towards methods which would resolve the shortage and save lives is downright evil.
(Cross-posted to JackieDanicki.com)
It is part of being a good citizen to prove who you are day in, day out.
– Andy Burnham MP
The headline of the print Daily Telegraph today trumpeted ‘Mini-brothels get go-ahead to operate on your doorstep’. I immediately took a peek at my doorstep but alas nothing to report yet.
To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?
As someone who follows such things I had expected the latest Home Office consultation exercise to go according to the standard pattern, thus:
- Home Office makes suggestions for changes in public policy…
- …’evidence’ is taken from interested parties including police in search of promotion, contractors in search of contracts, and researchers seeking posts on the new quango to be created…
- Home Office considers, announces its plans have ‘general support’, ticks box marked ‘public consulted’ and carries on with making legislation for parliament to approve.
So I was gearing myself up to write a piece on the repulsive sight of a department torn between the desire to regulate everything and to maintain PC social norms. Citing the ignominious failure of the Victorian Contagious Diseases Acts, I was going to pour scorn on the futility of a regulatory regime that licensed brothels while denying the most basic economic rights to prostitutes, and created ‘zones of toleration’ in an effort to buck the market while punishing the streetwalkers it purported to protect.
The Goverment has shot my fox. And it turns out the fox was packed with explosives. Someone has overturned the (paradoxical) regulatory liberalisers and has decided puritan prohibitions are what we need. The move is instead to be to “Zero Tolerance” of ‘kerb crawlers’ – and quite without comment, the continuation of zero civil-law rights and next to zero criminal-law protections for prostitutes themselves.
The Home Office minister Fiona McTaggart was quoted yesterday on the BBC as saying that prostitution “is child abuse” because many prostitutes begin selling sex below the age of consent. That is an insane argument driven by the demands of moralism. By the same token unpaid sexual contact must also be child abuse, because most people’s sex lives begin before that arbitary, if increasingly rigidly totemic, mark. Someone, somewhere, is making David Blunkett, who was responsible for the original pseudo-tolerant proposals, look like a liberal.
Does the devil’s name begin with B? The emphasis on cleaning up public untidiness by bullying is of a piece with the respec’ agenda. And there have been suggestions that the inate liberalism of the Home Office – not something spotted by many commentators before now – is interfering with the operation of the Anti-Social Behaviour Unit.
Just another brick in the wall, perhaps. But turning the public agenda on a sixpence, and producing plainly mad arguments for doing so, are ominous. The Head Boy is ever more a dictator, and ever more the apostle of social conformity.
This is not some silly idea of the phoney left. It is a mainstream idea of modern times. It is a new kind of identity and a new kind of freedom. I respect the noble Lords’ views, but it would help if they respected the fact that the Bill and the identity cards represent the future: a new kind of freedom and a new kind of identity.
– Lord Gould of Brookwood (most decidedly New Labour) speaking at yesterday’s Committee of the Whole House on the Identity Cards Bill.
Chilling, eh?
I file this under “Self ownership” because the Bill (do read it) seeks to end all that sort of thing. No more of the messy business of people deciding for themselves who they are and how much to involve the government in their lives.
Alexia Harriton, an Australian woman who is deaf, blind, physically and mentally disabled and requires round-the-clock care, is suing a doctor for allowing her to be born, with the full support by her mother. Never mind that rubella during pregnancy does not guarantee what happened to Ms. Harriton.
I have a better idea. If she is competent to sue the doctor, she is competent to tell the people giving her round-the-clock medical care to get lost and let nature take its course. Hell, she could tell one of them to leave a nice sharp knife or a cup of water and a bottle of sleeping pills within reach if she wants to expedite things and if she cannot manage that, well seeing as how her mother is so supportive…
Why should a doctor be liable for an ‘act of God’? So he did not diagnose how thing would shake out correctly. Too bad, no one is perfect.
Seems to me that Alexia Harriton and her mother were born moral and emotional cripples too. Nature dealt them a seriously crap hand and that is truly tragic but it is no one’s fault. It happens. Deal with it, but please, deal with it yourself. Think I am being a little harsh? Well I do not think so and I have my reasons.
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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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