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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Increasingly in Britain people are punished for who they are; but it is not a completely new trend. Here, from today’s London Evening Standard is a sad, and to me disturbing, instance of a thoughtcrime that’s been on the books and zealously pursued for over a decade:
Paul Thomas, 45, a former Hackney councillor, had more than 60 CDs of child pornography in his Bow Home, many showing underage girls in swimwear, Southwark Crown Court heard. Damian van Duyvenbode, prosecuting, said: “This defendant has stored large numbers of images of children in swimwear which the prosecution say is part of his sexual gratification.”
Thomas, who did have previous convictions, admitted 14 counts of “making indecent photographs of children” and was jailed for 18 months.
We don’t know from the account what the pictures were that didn’t feature girls in swimwear. But it is pretty clear that the swimwear is being offered as an aggravating factor. Why?
Holiday supplements of magazines and newspapers, clothes catalogues, travel brochures, and family albums are all full of children in swimwear. Though perhaps they ought to fear it, since there appears to be no defence, at least half the households in the land must therefore possess similarly “indecent” photographs without fear of prosecution.
But they aren’t downloading them from the internet and storing them on disk – which is all that “making” means in this context. They aren’t presumed to be getting sexual pleasure from seeing them. Nobody thinks that children are injured merely by being photographed in swimwear, do they? That man is being prosecuted and punished, or at least his punishment is being increased, for what he might be thinking.
This is the chain of magical contagion at work, an arpeggio of tendentious definitions: The man’s a textbook middle-aged usual suspect; the pictures he collects are indecent because he collects them; indecent pictures of children are child pornography; child pornography is child abuse, by definition. Note that it has a doubly magical property… the presumptive equivalences turn a sad case into a mass rapist and they work both ways at once. Everything in the chain is bound by taboo and high emotion. We’re not allowed to ask, “Was anyone harmed?” It’s irrelevant. The existence of indecency is sufficient to convict. And the court, taking the advice of prosecution experts, will decide what’s indecent.
So be careful what you think. Be careful, in fact, what others might think you think. That you aren’t hurting anybody, that nobody has in fact been hurt, is no excuse.
The British pub chain JD Wetherspoon has decided to postpone a ban on smoking in all its pubs, although a nation-wide ban will come into force at the start of 2007, due to the government’s new law. A rather ironic tale.
How odd. In many ways, JDW was a good example of how, in a free market, people who wanted a quiet pint without breathing cigarette smoke or listening to loud music could do so. In my own area of Westminister, there is a large chain called the Willow Walk which I and a number of friends use from time to time. Everyone is happy, smokers and non-smokers alike. Considering that the majority of the adult population do not smoke, one would expect plenty of entrepreneurial pub and restaurant owners to cater to the tastes of said public, and indeed many such businesses have developed.
But of course, markets are messy and full of tradeoffs. And for our tidyminded masters, that is unacceptable.
Perhaps it is the little things that gradually turn people against the priggish, curtain twitching statists who cannot bare the idea of people doing as they please.
People generally shrug wearily at the annoying impositions and regulations that grow by the year but that is why it is important that folks like us and journalists like Tom Utley let it be known that it is not alright that these things happen. We also need to convince people that those who enforce and apologise for the endless regulations are not alright either, they are psychologically twisted by compulsions to impose their will on others. Perhaps it will be when enough of society see the idea of prohibiting people from doing peaceably doing consensual things as the psychologically disordered behaviour that it is will real progress be possible.
… and why not? After all, as we now live in a de facto one ideology state (and that ideology is populist utilitarianism), what difference do the antics of what goes on in Parliament really make? The sooner we have the government doing away with this fiction of political process and just start ruling mostly by administrative edict, the better really. Far too many people are just hiding behind comfortable fictions.
The other day I made a less-than-complimentary reference to the thoughts of so-called “crunchy con” Rod Dreher, who has taken against the ugliness of modern capitalism and its assorted vulgarity. Blogger Clive Davis thought that I was being a touch unfair.
Well, if you thought I was harsh, then check this out by Radley Balko:
“Only after raw, unabashed capitalism has taken care of more primitive problems can we begin to have places like Whole Foods, or targeted products like no-chemical, no-additive, no-hormone, free-range chicken. Only after industry has knocked down a lot of trees and sullied a lot of streams on its way to feeding us, medicating us, and giving us good reason to think we’ll live past the age of forty do we get the luxury of beginning to worry about the health of the environment, and the survival of beings outside our own families, much less outside our own species.
I don’t begrudge Dreher his Birks and his granola, but talk about the excesses of capitalism and so-called conspicuous consumption are innevitably followed by calls to slow things down — maybe idle the engines of progress for a bit. There’s generally little acknowledgement that it is excess and consumption that have put them in the position of being able to write books about the problems associated with…you guessed it…excess and consumption.”
Absolutely. My only query: what on earth is a Birk?
I find the notion that it is news that Tory leader David Cameron is a Blairite so unremarkable that I am puzzled the Telegraph even runs with the story.
The closest thing to an actual conservative party is the UKIP because it sure as hell is not the Conservative Party.
The Khaleej Times is reporting that the Danish consul to Dubai has said:
The massive protests in the Muslim world against the Danish cartoons have helped Denmark, as also Europe, have a better understanding of, and respect for, Islam
Well that is both quite correct and completely false, but of course a diplomat is someone whose job it is to lie for his country. It has indeed given millions of Europeans a better understanding of Islam… and thereby led them to an utter lack of respect for it. Now every time I hear someone saying “Islam is one of the world’s great religions”, I tend to get very rude rather quickly.
The diplomat was quite sound on the core issue however.
The Danish diplomat made it clear that, however, ‘We will not change our constitution (to exert controls over the media)’.
And that is why this site has a ‘support Denmark: no burqa on free speech’ graphic in the sidebar. Hold the line.
Update: It would appear that Imran Khan is now officially a moron:
I don’t think the message has got through that for us it’s far more painful than perhaps even the Holocaust for the Jews. Any caricature or any ridicule or any humiliation of the holy prophet is far more painful for the Muslims
These cartoons are more ‘painful’ that the mass extermination of six million Jews? And this from a much acclaimed ‘moderate’? Yes indeed, I think a great many people’s understanding of Islam is improving pretty much by the day.
There was an excellent article the other day in the Prague Post about the whole Jyllands-Posten ‘Mohammed cartoons’ issue. What a pity such sentiments seem few and far between in the craven media in Britain.
To many, the notion that a cartoon could provoke global riots, dozens of deaths, a $1 million assassination contract and vacillation among Western leaders seems like an abstract fantasy, a trip down the rabbit hole into a theater of the absurd.
But that perspective remains precisely what these protesters have attacked: the rejection of the idea that it’s justified – or even rational – to kill people over their speech, particularly a statement as trifling as a cartoon.
The purple elephant in the middle of this crossfire is the contemporary notion – or, more accurately, the Western one – that the values of most Islamic societies have modernized along with the rest of the world.
[…]
The West has naively greeted this scorpion with its Cold War handshake, believing that the virtues of peace and democracy appear self-evident; as if good intentions, by definition, will be good enough. But even the mainstream Islamic mindset has proven inscrutable to the West in a way that communism was mythologized to be but never truly was.
Good stuff. Read the whole thing.
Also, some of the people very much at ‘fatwa ground zero’, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie, are taking a stand against the new Islamic totalitarianism.
(hat tip to JP)
In a land where Mormons, Muslims, and masochists walk side by side, and none is specially positioned to certify the correct concept of value, the role of government is not to pick a philosophy and shove it down our throats. It is to provide a reasonably neutral framework that allows each of us to pursue our ends peacefully in the light of our own convictions about the good. There’s a reason liberal democracies get top marks in happiness
– The always highly readable Will Wilkinson, of the CATO thinktank and blogger, dissecting UK economist Richard Layard’s argument in favour of more state intervention and higher taxes to make us all happier (yes, really).
Very nice writeup here of a vast retrospective of the paintings of the Frenchman Ingres, who worked around the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. Even as I put aside my distaste for Bonaparte, I cannot but admire the man who painted so much of life in Napoleon’s era so cleverly. A good excuse to take that long weekend to Paris and check out some art (not that I usually need many excuses). And meanwhile it is the 400th anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt. A nice appreciation here by Robert Hughes.
Oh, and I can seriously recommend this to China art fans.
This is a fascinating mystery story. As someone who loves books and has worked in publishing, I have long been perplexed by the massive sales of leaden conspiracy ‘thrillers’ (as I have to write it, being really very ungripped) and of pseudo-histories.
These are strange alien artefacts in the literary world. They appear to be books, having the same physical manifestation. Yet the words in them have no rhythm, and make no sense, the world they portray is all surface, all banality: all invented, but paradoxically without imagination.
The familiar book, grounded in fact or rich in fiction, sells (mostly slowly) to an audience that comes back for more books. These… I need another wordname… reads are bought in vast numbers by people who do not otherwise read. You see them swarming on the tube, at bus-stops, in advertisements as book-club special offers, everywhere. And then they are gone. Where?
Few have the life-span of a book, it seems. But where do they go to die? They are seldom seen in second-hand shops. And why are they so successful when they are plainly so inbred?
The genus is so narrow that there’s always been some doubt in my mind whether it is two species or one. Now a strange court-case may inform us on that matter (if not why the infernal things are so popular). It appears that two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a “non-fiction” work of non-history, are suing in the High Court the writer of a fictional read called The Da Vinci Code for copyright infringement.
If the author of a history book were to sue an historical novelist, then we would expect it to be on the ground that passages of text were quoted without permission. For use of expression, not content. There is no copyright in facts.
But weirdly that’s not what is going on here. Jonathan Rayner-James QC for the plaintiffs said:
HBHG is a book of historical conjecture setting out the authors’ hypothesis. The authors’ historical conjecture has spawned many other books that developed aspects of this conjecture in a variety of directions. But none has lifted the central theme of the book
Which is what Dan Brown is accused of.
What could make “historical conjecture” original work capable of copyright protection? Only that it bears no relation to history, it seems to me. Can it really be the plaintiffs’ case that the novel is not novel enough, because their read – sold all over the world labeled ‘non-fiction’ – is in fact a fantasy?
If that is their case, and that case prevails prevails, then I am interested to know what the publishers of HBHG, HarperCollins who also published The Da Vinci Code and are joint defendants, might do. Did their contract with the plaintiffs contain that standard apotropaic against libel, a warranty from the author that “all statements purporting to be facts are true”? The consequence for the pseudo-historical read as a genre could be interesting.
Extinction of the species would be too much to hope for, I suppose. But for once a thriller has me gripped.
This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.
– Dr Brian Day, of Vancouver, explaining what happens if you make private health care illegal, but leave private veterinary clinics alone. (It’s a shame about the picture of Dr Day and Fidel Castro though).
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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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