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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Gustave Le Bon would have something to say about this. He’d point to the sugestibility of the emotionally aroused crowd:
Almost three-quarters of the public believe that it is right to give up civil liberties to improve our security against terrorist attacks.
A Guardian/ICM poll published today shows that 73% of respondents back the trade-off, with only 17% rejecting it outright. The results provide evidence of public support for Tony Blair’s anti-terrorist reforms which he unveiled before leaving on his summer holiday earlier this month.
Full article here.
I simply do not accept there is a trade-off to be had. Our liberty is our safety.
The world is replete with counterexamples to the trade-off twitch. (One cannot call it a theory.)
Take Saudi Arabia. Civil liberty does not exist there. It is an alien concept, and, in common with other alien concepts, banned. There is no protection of citizen from state, and no limit to the actions that can be taken.
Yet terrorism is in robust health. The Kingdom’s official figures for the last two years (which one would expect to paint the rosiest picture) are 129 dead and 720 injured among civilians and security forces. More than twice Britain’s casualties among a population that may be around a third of ours–reliable figures on anything Saudi being hard to come by. (They probably have significantly more police, too.)
We were told that the CCTV footage of the fatal incident was not available because the media from the cameras had been removed before the shooting so that detectives could examine them for clues relating to the failed 21/7 bombings.
Not so. The tapes were ‘blank’.
According to the print edition of tonight’s Evening Standard:
Senior Tube sources have told the Evening Standard that three CCTV cameras trained on the platform at Stockwell station were in full working order. The source spoke out after it emerged that police had returned the tapes taken from the cameras saying” “These are no good to us. They are blank.”
A station log book has no reported faults concerning the CCTV cameras which would have been expected to record the crucial moments as Mr. de Menezes approach the train on 22 July.
Ok, so the cameras were working but the tapes are…blank. Of course just because everything else the authorities have said (the victim ran from the police, he was wearing an unseasonable padded jacket, he jumped the ticket barriers, he was not restrained when he was shot dead) has been a lie, we should not jump to the conclusion that the videos from these fully functional cameras were blank because some member of The Plod put them in a machine and pressed ‘ERASE’, right? I mean, without any evidence that would be jumping to conclusions, right?
I am sure many of you have heard the joke: An Arab meets one of the screenwriters from Star Trek and says “Hey, how come there are no Muslims on the Starship Enterprise?” The screenwriter replies “Because the story is set in the future.”
But many of the most puritanical and intolerant Muslims have their eyes very much on the future. Over on the Social Affairs Unit‘s blog, William Ridgeway has writen an interesting piece called “Those Drunken, Whoring Saudis: Desert Islam’s problem with women”:
Encroaching modernity has resulted in an increase in the place and power of Desert Islam in everyday society. Contrary to widespread Western beliefs about the trajectory of the Middle East as a hesitant but inevitable climb to liberal democracy, the region is actually going the other way – fast. Academics call this “Islamicisation”, the spread of radical Shi’a and Wahhabi beliefs and practices throughout the region. Because of this trend, the Middle East one sees nowadays is nothing like it was, say, fifty years ago. Around the 1950s, about the time oil was being discovered in the Gulf, many Muslim nations were relatively liberal by today’s standards. Alcohol flowed freely, women went uncovered and there was lively public debate about “Ataturk’s way”, the separation of Islam and state, modernisation, and dialogue with the West. The Middle East seemed to be going in the right direction.
Saudi oil changed all that.
I still think in the long run secular western civilisation will crush radical Islam under its sheer weight but it is an interesting article. Read the whole thing.
France has been attacked by an infestation of frogs! I know, the metaphors are even now exploding inside your head.
A campaign in France to exterminate frogs may sound like the beginning of a civil war, but these are no ordinary frogs.
The frogs are big, inedible, and Californian!
Since the frogs were first released, as a joke, on a private pond near Libourne in 1968, they have colonised ponds, lakes, marshes and gravel pits all over the département of the Gironde. They have been found in the Landes area to the south and in the Dordogne, Lot-et-Garonne and Loir-et-Cher départements, further north.
Some joke.
It turns out that the only way to kill these fearsome and deeply un-French frogs is to shoot them.
I have just heard a rumour from a usually reliable source that effective either yesterday or today, the UK state has put on-line some system by which all access to the internet in the UK now goes through a government server system to enable them to monitor, well, everything you do on-line. Is the UK state now rivaling China in its efforts to control and monitor its subject people?
Has anyone else heard anything about this?
The FT paper edition for 20th/21st August has feature on some of its writers sitting some of this years’ A-level exams. Though a stock sort of piece, this much the best of its type I’ve read and is full of insights, most provided by the examiners they involved in the exercise.
For example, here’s Matthew Lumby of the QCA:
A lot of people think that in an essay question you are just judged on content and style when in fact the markers will be looking for a number of specific things.
What else is there?
Spiked carries a fascinating, if frightening, piece by Charles Pither, a private doctor, on the invasive requirements of galloping regulation on those working in the healthcare sector. Just being able to check and list their employees (and their own) slave-number online will no doubt come as a relief.
What I hadn’t appreciated, until the man came to make his inspection, was all the personal data that we needed to keep for our staff (in a locked cabinet, of course). Two references, a recent photo, a copy of their passport, copies of their qualification certificates, a curriculum vitae with explanations for any gaps, a copy of their contract and job description.
Including the cleaner? Yes, including the cleaner. ‘It’s not me who makes the regulations’, said the man from the HCC. ‘The onus is on you to comply with the statutory requirements as set out in the standards of care regulations.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
What’s most disturbing is how suddenly these bureaucratic personal checks have sprung up, and how it has happened with no resistence. The Health Care Commission was created by the Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Act 2003, and started its interfering on April 1st 2004. The Criminal Records Bureau was established under the Police Act 1997, but its functions have been rapidly widened, in legislation on children, education, financial services, and health, but also notably by a series of Exceptions Orders to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Acts that have made the idea of a spent conviction (an old, minor one you need not acknowledge) pretty much obsolete. The operative Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations are dated 2002.
Never mind 1890, it would be nice to get the British state back to the size it was in 1990.
Although I spent the bulk of my recent trip to northern California north of the Bay Area, on my final day I went south, as there was one particular place I wished to visit. This was the town of San Juan Bautista, just inland from Monterrey, and in particular I wished to visit the historic Mission San Juan Bautista, whose bell tower from which Kim Novak falls to her death around halfway through Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and then again at the very end of the movie.
This particular movie is a favourite of many film nerds, although it was not a box office success when it was released. Possibly it is the theme of the film – it isn’t really a thriller but is more a study of the descent into madness of the character played by James Stewart, as his obsession with Kim Novak becomes more and more weird and destructive. This is perhaps the movie in which Hitchcock’s various obsessions came closest to the surface, and is perhaps about a kind of obsessiveness that those of us who spend a lot of time watching movies in dark rooms understand. I certainly do. It is perhaps my favourite movie.
Or perhaps it is just the beautiful way that Hitchcock used his locations. San Francisco may have been shot better in other movies, but it has seldom been shot in a way that captures the feel of the city as much as does this one. You wander round the various locations in the city, you feel the steepness of the hills, and the coldness of San Francisco Bay and you feel, even today, that Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak might walk down the corner. It’s a slightly less genteel city than those on the east coast. You can tell it is the city of gold rushes, and the characters in the movie, who in some instances have great wealth or work for people who do, but who none the less act from rather depraved motives, seem to belong there.
Hitchcock was famously disdainful of actors – once referring to them as “cattle”, but he was none the less brilliant at getting great performances out of stars. None of these were better than those he got out of Jimmy Stewart in this movie and in Rear Window. In both cases, Hitchcock created characters who were almost the classic James Stewart everyman, and which certainly drew on this aspect of his stardom, but cracks appeared in the persona as the movie went on, as the characters became warped and twisted. (Oddly, Hitchcock’s use of Stewart in a third movie, Rope is in my mind a failure. In that case the character is clearly required to be warped and twisted (and gay) in the script, but Stewart plays the character far too clean cut). Kim Novak was not Hitchcock’s first choice for the role of Madeleine/Judy in Vertigo, Vera Miles having had to pull out because she was pregnant, and Hitchcock apparently was unable to hide his displeasure about the fact that he was directing his second choice, but Kim Novak plays fragile, scheming, vulnerable, caught up in the consequences of her own machinations, and does so beautifully. I personally cannot imagine anyone else in the role.
In any event, I had visited the San Francisco locations of Vertigo on previous trips to the cities. I wanted to visit the location where the climactic events take place at the end. Watching the movie, I have always got a sense of the church in which the finals events occur being in a place of isolation, and almost unworldly place, but when you get there, you realise it is not so.
This is the one place in the movie which does not feel it has been shot as itself, which is intriguing given that the setting is clearly indicated as being the real place. (Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak turn down a road down which a sign points to “San Juan Bautista” on their way to the final scene of the film). Rather than being isolated, the church is in the middle of the town. Watching the DVD of the movie again, Hitchcock makes no attempt to hide the fact that the church is in the middle of a town, and yet somehow I never got that sense until visiting the location. And the bell tower: the bell tower which looks enormous and looms over everything is in fact in reality quite small. The real church tower is shown in the film, but it is shot in such a way as to hide its true lack of size. One suspects that if Kim Novak fell off it in reality she might perhaps hurt herself, but she would have to be unlucky to die. And of course, there is the small matter that the inside of the tower seen in the film is clearly a set. The characters go round and round a seemingly endless spiral staircase, and there is no possible way that this would fit inside the exterior of that particular bell tower.
But it doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter for a very particular and clever reason. Jimmy Stewart’s character has suffered from vertigo ever since watching his police partner fall to his death from a high building in the first scenes of the movies. A lot of the film is seen through his eyes, and Hitchcock shows his vertigo through doing interesting things with the camera. He simultaneously moves the camera forwards and zooms out, causing the relative positions of objects to appear to change.(Hitchcock is often given credit for inventing this shot. That may be true, and if it isn’t he is certainly the person who brought it into mainstream movies. It has been used endlessly since). Objects such as the bell tower are very distorted, and we just see this as part of the mental state of the character. The fact that the location makes no sense in reality is largely lost on us. And Hitchcock understood that this would be so when he made the movie.
But when you visit the location, this is immediately obvious.
(I have actually written about Vertigo before, in the context of Terry Gilliam’s film 12 Monkeys, which is sort of a simultaneous science fiction remake of Vertigo and Chris Marker’s La Jetee all crossed with James Tiptree Jr’s The Last Flight of Dr Ain. People who were interested in this post might also find that one interesting).
Here is an interesting contrast between the UK and the US.
The Boston Globe, a Democrat newspaper in a Democrat town, is attacking President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts. Nothing particularly exciting or shocking about that. You might not agree with them, but it’s legitimate, and that is how things are done there.
What intrigues me is the manner of the most recent attack:
Roberts, as Reagan aide, backed national ID card, yells the headline.
It is plainly the Globe’s assumption that its readers will take this is a sign of a fundamentally illiberal personality, not fit to be entrusted on the bench with the defence of American liberties. British popular assumptions, even in the liberal press, have a long way to go. It is still not appreciated much here that state control of personal identity is a big deal, never mind that its fans are poisionous advocates of evil.
While I am inclined to think that flat taxes are not as easy in practice as they are cracked up to be, and I would in any case prefer to scrap personal income tax altogether, a radically simplified tax system would benefit everyone but tax-collectors and accountants. (Even the holy skoolznospitles, and the policemen doing £80,000 of overtime a year, would approve of more net revenue from the same tax burden.)
However, Revenue officials in Britain are trying to censor even the discussion of flat tax:
According to yesterday’s account in the Daily Telegraph
The original version of secret work by officials posted on the Treasury website – after freedom of information request – pooh-poohed the claims of flat tax advocates as “misleading”.
But large parts of the work had been removed. The complete version reveals that most, but not all, of the elements which were blacked out present compelling arguments in favour of the flat tax.
Some ‘freedom of information’!
The Telegraph concluded that since such political excisions must have been at the orders of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown MP, but today this is officially denied in a letter from the permanent civil servant who heads HM Treasury:
The Chancellor had never seen any version of the released documents and no minister had any involvement in the decisions regarding their release. To suggest otherwise is completely false.
Should we conclude that the elected Government is being kept in the dark about its policy options too?
Next time someone tells me that Tony Blair does not run the country, Gordon Brown does, I reserve the right to be skeptical. Government by officials, for officials, subject to no law but Parkinson’s, is nearer the mark.
A very nice line up on Instapundit of the blogosphere’s reactions to MSN journos putting their foot in it again…
Bill Quick on reading an article in Philadelphia Inquirer (registration required):
Sorry, but for me, this entire article was a joyous exercise of schadenfruede on my part. The agony evidenced on the part of the writer that MSM is no longer the gatekeeper, portal, and arbiter of what is news is delicious.
The brain terminal on Paul Krugman’s cavalier attitude to the truth:
Good thing all those editors at the Times provide the layers of rigorous fact-checking that blogs lack!
Annoying gadfly blogswarms indeed.
…is Kenneth Clarke to defy the odds and end up the head honcho of the Conservative Party. Why? Because appointing a Europhile statist would be the absolute best way to split the party so irretrievably that it writes the party off once and for all.
Then maybe we can work on getting a proper opposition party that actually has a coherent ideological position, well, at least as coherent as a main stream party can even be. Hell, it can even call itself the ‘Conservative Party’ for all I care.
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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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