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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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…
I am sure at least most of you have heard of free and open source software. If not, I am not quite sure which part of the headwaters of the Rio Negro you are living on and how you managed to get your satellite internet link past the croc’s and piranha’s.
You can be excused however, if you are unaware of the open source hardware movement. There are people out there designing everything from CPU’s to rocket engines in a global network but only the very plugged in are aware of these efforts. One stands above them all in my mind, and not just because I know a ‘kiwi’ who is one of the key participants: the Darwin open source replicator project.
A replicator is a machine which cannot only make things, but can make copies of itself. In the ‘classical’ literature the macro versions of this are known as Von Neuman machines; in more recent decades most who keep up with such things have come to associate them with Drexlerian nanoscale replicators. The nanoreplicator may be decades away, but the first generation of macroscale open source replicators is already available and spreading.
Darwin is not quite a full Von Neuman machine but it is a good start:
RepRap 1.0 “Darwin” is a Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) rapid prototyping machine that is capable of making the majority of its own component parts. It is available free under the GNU General Public Licence from this website to everyone.
As Darwin can copy itself, once you have one you can make others for your friends; or if they have one you can ask them to make one for you. Of course, you can also make as many as you want for yourself; the more you have, the faster you will be able to make other items.
If you have some room to spare and want to play too, I suggest you join. Once there are enough of these gadgets around the world, I am sure there will be plenty of folks passing around the designs of all sorts of nifty things for you to build with it.
Within a handful or two of decades we will build spaceships this way.
On BBC News 24 TV this morning there was a tech show that was dominated by a report from the Republic of Korea (‘South Korea’).
After explaining how nasty some Korean people are in writing their opinions about other people, the BBC person said that the government of Korea was going to bring in a new law that would demand that anyone writing an opinion on to the internet would have to give their name and ID number. The only criticism of this new law (which I believe is going to come into effect next year) offered was “some people do not think it goes far enough”.
I wonder if the ‘Federalist’ would have been written if ‘Publius‘ and the rest had to sign their correct names. Or ‘Cato’s letters‘ – or so many of the other great publications in history.
Or indeed most opinion comments on this (or many other) internet sites.
“If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear by giving your right name” – I hope I do not have to explain how absurd that position is. Some people (such as me) really do not have anything to lose and can sign their name to any opinion they believe in – but most people have families, jobs, positions (and so on) and may sometimes wish to give their true opinion about a person or issue without putting their life on the line.
I could mention historical examples to the BBC (some of which I mention above), but as the BBC people think (to judge by one show I watched) that the “tribes of Angles and Saxons” brought Christianity to “pagan Roman Britain” and (in the ads for another show) claimed that the war that brought Constantine to power had broken “centuries of peace” I do not think they would understand what I was talking about.
I do not know whether it is the statism of the BBC or their lack of knowledge that bothers me more.
You don’t need identifiable personal information to understand trends and patterns, but British government data sharing focuses on pinpointing individuals. Some government departments are already planning to analyse public and private-sector databases for suspicious activity. The new Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is reviewing public and private-sector databases, to find data-matching opportunities that could highlight suspicious behaviour by individuals that implies they are involved in organised or financial crime. The SOCA consultation paper ‘New Powers Against Organised and Financial Crime’, says the public sector could share private-sector suspicions of fraud by joining CIFAS, the UK’s fraud-prevention service. It also proposes matching suspicious activity reports with data from Revenue & Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Passport Office and Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) databases. This, it says, would be quite legal.
– from Share and share alike by Christine Evans-Pughe on IEE Networks. (Thanks to the great Chris Lightfoot for pointing out this piece.)
Naive foreigners with a belief in privacy and liberty may not understand that if in Britain you oppose state surveillance of just about everything, then you’ll be accused of wanting to protect people who torture and/or murder children. The article in passing explains how, if not why.
Compare:
Labour is planning to attack David Cameron next week, accusing him of helping paedophiles escape British justice.
In what is billed as a campaign to portray the Tories as soft on crime, the home secretary, John Reid, is intending to hound the Tories over their refusal to vote for extradition laws that would allow fugitives to be forced to return to the UK. […]
Labour believes the Tories are wrong on potential crimes of the future, symbolised by the identity cards issue; wrong on terrorism by refusing to support 90-day detention and control orders; and wrong over the use of antisocial behaviour orders and extradition.
– Report in The Guardian this morning.
With this, from a review by Stephen Fidler in the FT Magazine of MIchael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes:
Burleigh understands that totalitarian states are founded not only on the will for power of ambitious, amoral men, but also on a popular desire for security.
Nancy Pelosi was on fine form on Friday – denouncing the people who made certain documents (now withdrawn) available on a United States government website.
As the New York Times (and, surprise surprise, a United Nations agency) reported the story it was all about wicked Republicans publishing documents that could help people build atomic bombs. Of course, what Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the left really objected to was that the documents came from the government of Saddam Hussain and show that he WAS planning to build atomic bombs right up to the invasion of Iraq (information the left has been trying to sit on for years).
The Economist (a journal that has often been very critical of President Bush and other Republicans) also published an interesting article (subscription required) on Nancy Pelosi in its present issue.
It is well know that Nancy Pelosi represents (and reflects) the extreme left San Francisco area, but her money raising activities (at least one hundred million Dollars over the last few years) are less well known, as is her history.
It is not just that Nancy Pelosi’s father was a leftist Congressman and then Mayor of the corrupt city of Baltimore (no one can help who their father is), it is the fact that Nancy Pelosi personally “kept the book” for him – i.e. the record of favours received and delivered. I do not know how the lady can keep a straight face when she talks about the “culture of corruption” in Washington DC Nancy Pelosi has been involved in corruption her whole life – but I doubt that one voter in ten knows this.
The Republicans are at least partly to blame for people not knowing what they are getting. I can guess the sort of talk that justifies just making token attacks rather than full attacks – “Nancy Pelosi is a women, we can not attack her all out as we would look like beasts” and “we can not say what Nancy Pelosi is as it would look like an ethnic slur and we do not want to upset Italian-American voters”.
So the ‘attack dog’ Republicans (or at least the Republican leadership) do not really fight – and thus help give the United States a Speaker Pelosi.
Another point that the Economist article makes is the iron discipline that Nancy Pelosi has imposed on the Democratic party. Whoever the voters think they are being presented with (“the Democrat is very nice and they went to Iraq”) the fact remains that these people will vote the big government way that Nancy Pelosi tells them to (the Republicans may have been soft on spending, but the Democrats want to spend hundreds of billions more – and it is a similar story on regulations).
Almost needless to say, the Democratic party leadership supports Nancy Pelosi – including the people set to head the key committees in the House. Barney Frank is already boasting (for example to the British Financial Times newspaper) of the world government financial services regulator he intends to help create.
There will also be lots of ‘investigations’ – designed to tie the Administration up in knots (in order to bash Bush) and, thus, lose the war (both in Iraq, and in Afghanistan – and everywhere else).
Radical Islam (of both Shia and Sunni types) will win and moderate Muslims (and the West) will lose.
I very much doubt that Nancy Pelosi actually wants this result, but she does not really care – at least not enough for the Democrats not to do it anyway.
Tom Wright of wrightwing.net wrote the following as a comment but it is simply too splendid to languish in the comment section…
I have said this before and in other venues:
I will support public [CCTV] cameras only if they are first placed in those areas where the worst and most egregious crimes occur:
In every room and every hallway of every police station in every nation.
In every room and every hallway of every legislative body in every nation.
In every room and every hallway of every executive and judicial branch of every nation.
And, as a condition of employment, upon taking the oath of office, permanently bolted to the head of every elected official, every appointed official, and every official authorized to carry arms in the course of duty.
Turned on, broadcasting, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in a manner I, and every one else, can monitor and record.
Then I will support cameras on me.
Not before.
Mark Edwards lays out some arguments against the Panopticon State
Yesterday I spent rather more time than I should have reading and commenting on the BBC ‘Have Your Say’ discussion about the surveillance society. Faced with the predictable response from the obedient serfs that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” I tried to make three main points.
The first was that you have nothing to fear only if the authorities are perfect, all the time and every time. Imperfections could be mistaken identity, linking you with some criminal activity; if the bloke who asked me for the time as I bought my paper this morning went on to rob the newsagent after I left, might I be an accomplice? There is also the risk of blatant corruption, where a government employee abuses the data they collect as part of their job to identify you as being worth burgling, or to watch through your teenage daughters’ bedroom windows.
My second point was that all of this surveillance does not make us any safer; the least implausible case for it suggests that evidence may be obtained that makes conviction of those committing crimes easier. This however is not proven beyond doubt. What is well established is that the constant surveillance creates an atmosphere of paranoia, in which we are convinced there is a greater threat to each of us than is actually the case. I have found no evidence that crime has fallen where cameras have been installed (I have seen reference to situations where crime fell when cameras were installed and police activity on the ground increased, but that is by no means the same thing).
Thirdly, I tried to explain that the level of surveillance in Britain had radically changed the relationship between government and governed, and between people and the law. There is no longer any presumption of innocence, because we are all suspects. Worse than that, we are suspected of crimes that we may not have committed yet. I feel we have moved from having a Civil Service that was motivated to serve the public (even if they were often misguided), to government employees who now see themselves as ‘the authorities’.
Later in the evening I thought back over the day and realised that I had tried to justify, on purely utilitarian grounds, something that should need no justification; why should I have to justify my desire to protect my privacy? And why are so many people so careless of theirs?
You may be asking why I would want to spend my time posting to what is actually an authoritarian left wing site (the BBC), when I regard myself as libertarian right wing. My reason is simple, and, frankly, arrogant. I kid myself that my arguments may be so persuasive that someone will read my comment, and understand it enough for me to have sown a seed of doubt. I suspect this is so unlikely as be a delusion, but I keep trying. I fear I am not even nearly as persuasive as I like to think I am, and my arguments are doomed to failure, so I am wasting my time but I continue anyway.
To end on a positive note, I counted the most recommended comments at 16:00, and found the first pro camera comment was number 70. None of my contributions were in the preceding 69 but at least the forces of common sense seemed to be carrying the argument.
It is, I suspect, no accident that it is in Europe that climate change absolutism has found the most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest popular hold. Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of Green alarmism and what has been termed global salvationism – of which the climate change issue is the most striking example, but by no means the only one – which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as a form of blasphemy.
– Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, quoted today by Guido Fawkes
This reports states that Britain’s armed forces are considered to be below strength for the tasks they have been ordered to perform. Nothing very surprising about that, given that although Blair has been almost indecently keen to deploy troops, sailors and airmen to various theatres of operations, he has not backed this up with a corresponding deployment of resources.
As a minimal statist rather than an anarcho-capitalist libertarian, I accept that providing for the defence of this country is a basic task of the state, but that of course leaves wide open how exactly that task is carried out, by whom, and at what cost. Does it mean things like standing armies, or navies, or large airforces, or anti-missile batteries dotting the coasts? Does it mean an armed citizenry called upon to defend the nation at short notice? Does it mean getting into alliances with other powers to share this role, or focusing entirely on one’s own resources?
It is Friday and we like a good debate ahead of the weekend. Let the comments fly! Try not to get hurt.
There has been some interesting discussion on Peaktalk in the subject of freedom of expression, marking the second anniversary of the murder of Theo van Gogh. As there are several relevant articles, I have not linked to any in particular.
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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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