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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Department of Defense (DoD) Biometrics announced that it has released a new Biometrics 101 Tutorial video and a publication entitled What DoD Thinks of Biometrics on its website. Both informational pieces – designed to contribute to the DoD community’s understanding of biometrics – can be accessed here.
The Biometrics 101 Tutorial video is a collaborative effort between the National Defense University at Fort McNair, Washington D.C. and DoD Biometrics. Presented by Lieutenant Colonel Craig Kaucher (U.S. Army Ret.), the video provides an introduction to biometric technologies, basic concepts, and societal issues associated with biometrics.
Today’s edition of Britain’s Sun tabloid features five readers who demand: “End our childcare misery, Mr Blair“. That so many middle and working class people in this country turn to the state to solve any challenges they face in life is, if depressing, unsurprising when one considers the prevailing British attitude towards government’s role in individuals’ lives. This comment from PM Tony Blair sums it up succinctly enough:
Some mothers will want to stay at home and look after their children, and that’s fine. But if they don’t we have to support them.
Actually, Mr Blair, we do not have to support financially any person who chooses to have children and then chooses to rely on others to look after them while they go out to work. (You may feel you need to ‘support’ them in order to be re-elected, but let us not confuse what you do in the interests of your career with what is right.)
I understand the dilemma – one may want to have children but not be able to afford to do so without earning a certain income, which may require full- or part-time work – but one makes such choices and then deals with the consequences. I doubt seriously that any of the women in the Sun asking Mr Blair to ‘end the misery’ of having to struggle to raise children on limited budgets, whose ages range from 31 to 39, went into parenthood without realising that making ends meet would be a concern. Kids are expensive, and although there are ways to make them less expensive (even the wealthiest parents I know buy and sell baby gear and other children’s stuff on eBay or in consignment shops or at NCT sales), people decide to have them with the full realisation that this life they are creating will need to be looked after and cared for. With that comes expense, and the need to work out how to meet that expense. All pretty basic stuff, one would think. But reading the complaints of parents who think that the state should be easing their burdens – brought about by choices they have made – with other peoples’ money, it becomes clear that we have in this country bred a population of adults who think and behave like children. I will do what I like – it will be fine! (But somebody better be there to rescue me and kiss my boo-boos better if it is not.)
Perhaps it is a shame that life is not so easy that we cannot always have everything our hearts desire (children, enough money in the bank, personal fulfilment outside of stay-at-home parenthood, trendy, slightly politically subversive t-shirts for our babies), but that is not a situation that the state can change with any amount of money they may take fom you and me.
“But think of the children!” comes the usual plaintive wail. To do so is terrifying: a nation of babies raising babies can only end in tears. How much will we be expected to spend on cleaning up this spill before the idea that individual choices matter ceases to be answered with a “Yes, but…” and a tax demand?
Hate crime. What it is exactly? Opinions vary but in essence it means that a given crime, such as assault, murder or defamation, will be treated more seriously if the perpetrator is judged to be motivated by certain politically disfavoured prejudices.
It means that if someone smashes a bottle in your face because you are black (or catholic or muslim or homosexual), rather than because they want to steal your wallet or because they caught you in flagrante delicto with their girlfriend, then that is more serious. The actual substance of the crime is not what makes it a ‘hate’ crime, just the motivation to commit it against a member of a designated group of people based on their race (which in reality means ‘certain races’), religions (meaning ‘certain religions’) or sexual orientations (meaning ‘homosexuals’), that then becomes a hate crime… crimes against philanderers, drunks, football supporters, loud mouths etc. are not hate crimes.
You may hate supporters of Celtic Football Club but if you bash one of them over the head with a two by four, that is not a ‘hate crime’, it is just assault and perhaps GBH. Unless of course the Celtic supporter in question happens to be a nominal Catholic but you are a nominal Protestant.
It is a criminal act which attracts extra sanction because of what the perpetrator was thinking at the time. In short, a ‘hate crime’ is a ‘thought crime’, albeit one usually only applied to thoughts held by certain politically disfavoured classifications of people.
Do you really trust something as corrupt and fallible as a political process to create laws not on demonstrable facts (who hit who with the two by four) but on what people think? Sure, motivation matters: for example being put in fear of your life can justify violence in self-defence, even (sometimes) in Britain. But to legislate that certain groups are more sacrosanct than others is collectivism at its most intellectually pernicious because it denies the individual basis of rights and assigns value on the basis of group membership. We all know where that can end up.
If you think laws should be based on crimes against individuals regardless of what race/religion or sexual orientation they have, then you might want to go over to the Hansard Society on-line consultation on Hate Crime in Northern Ireland and tell them that group rights are not a form of human rights, they are their antithesis.
I missed this one earlier in August about shoppers in Swansea joining a trial of a high-tech ID card that could become compulsory under Home Office plans. But better late than never.
Volunteers are being asked to have fingerprints, irises, and facial details recorded as part of the UK Passport Service (UKPS) trial. The experiment aims to weed out problems and get public feedback before the planned introduction date of 2007.
It is the only Welsh trial as the UK Passport Service looks for 10,000 volunteers across the UK over six months. Volunteers will get a demonstrator “smart card” containing their details on an electronic chip. It is planned to include biometrics (facial features) in passports and to build a base for the national compulsory identity cards scheme.
CNet news reports that when it comes to radio frequency identification tags for humans, the people have spoken. They hate it.
CNET News.com recently ran a report on companies with technologies that involve implanting RFID chips under people’s skin or inside a bracelet. Advocates say the tags could help paramedics deliver medical help to people in the field, reduce prison violence or give police a way to track victims of kidnapping, a major problem in Latin America.
The issue has united people with fairly strong religious beliefs and libertarian privacy advocates.
The fear that the technology will enable governments to keep tabs on everyone was the concern raised most often. Hypothetically, law enforcement agencies or even private security companies will be able to track where you’ve been, with whom you associate and what you own with this technology. Imagine a semiretired senior citizen in a rented maroon blazer knowing everything about your day.
A large number of letters also asserted that human RFID tags are a demonic tool.
There is much interesting stuff, read the whole thing.
Islamists oppose us not because of what we do, but because of what we are: secular, pluralist and tolerant.
–Oliver Kamm
I have been doing more chucking out of old paper today, mostly of old newspaper and magazine articles that were vaguely interesting, but not interesting enough to be worth the bother of keeping them for another decade and a half. My life having worked well enough without me having read any of them during the previous decade and a half, out they went. Demand for black plastic bags in the Pimlico area has definitely surged lately. I am that surge.
The irony is, however, that much of the space thus liberated is going to be used to store … books. Remember them? Piles of paper in little heaps, glued or sewn together at one side. I find that the difference between an actual heep of articles just piled up, in an almost random order, and articles joined at the hip, so to speak, and then – and this is absolutely crucial – labelled at the edge, and on the outside, is: all the difference. Books do not merely contain lots of printed verbiage. Crucially, they also include their own automatic filing system built into them. Books still matter. Why, we even review them here, from time to time. Come to think of it, my last posting but one here was about a book. And nobody thought that odd for a blog to be publishing. (My next posting here could well be about another book.)
The mere disembodied article, like all those Libertarian Alliance articles that I chucked out a week or two ago, has now almost entirely migrated to the Internet. It may have a brief paper infancy, but then it enters the world of virtuality, only to return to print if a computer owner decides to print it out. But this print out soon dies. But books refuse to hide among the electrons. They remain, stubbornly, on their shelves, this being one of the most famous Internet businesses on the planet.
What this leads me to want to learn more about is not just the history of the printing press as such, but about the history of book binding. Who worked that out? And who invented the idea of books having a spine at the side, and having a title on the outside? When were hard cardboard covers decided upon, so that books could be stored vertically, in shelves. I did some googling a day or two ago, and got to this generic piece about what a wonderful advance books would be if they had only recently been thought of. But I could find nothing about the details of who sorted out binding, spines, outside titles, etc., and where, and when. My googlincompetence, no doubt.
The person I would normally ask about such things is my friend Sean Gabb, who writes this. But he is away just now. So instead I ask the Samizdata commentariat, a group of people who are, I believe, at their best when asked exact, technical questions about matters of fact, preferably technical or better yet technological fact.
And when we have sorted all that out, we can discuss whether the compact disc has any future. (I have been making new CD shelves also.) If the CD does have a future, it is, I think, because the CD is rather book-like. It has a spine, pointing outwards, and stores easily, vertically, and can be found with relative ease, especially when you consider that, unlike books, CDs are all the same size and thus do not cry out to be sorted into clumps that are merely the same size (as happens with books – mine anyway) but can instead be ordered rationally and hence retrievably. No, I am not really serious about that. But if the CD (and its proposed higher-tech successors) does stagger on for a few more years before it is engulfed by all our hard discs, it will be because it is like a book. And that is an entertaining irony, I think.
I have been invited to join a panel discussion on Nanny State .vs. Personal Responsibility scheduled for 10.00pm UK time tonight on BBC Radio Five.
I do not know the identity of my protagonists yet, nor do I have any idea as to whether or not the broadcast is available outside of the UK.
Should be fun, though.
And no, I did not rearrange anything for the photo.
noun. The ‘birthday’ of the establishment of a blog.
On today’s morning news, a BBC presenter referred to the Chechen terrorists responsible for the Beslan massacre as zealots. I think zealots ought to be told…
Perhaps it is just sloppy editing or slipshod reporting that turns what is supposed to be a serious news article into an exercise in bladder-evacuation. Or perhaps it is meant to be funny?
Who knows? Just enjoy the results:
The leading showbiz lights of the anti-globalisation movement descended on Venice this weekend, amid complaints that the world’s oldest film festival has sold out to the Hollywood glamour industry.
Surely, if they wanted to oppose globalisation they would be better off staying put?
Actor Tim Robbins and author Naomi Klein will tomorrow launch the Global Beach, an alternative “festival” down the road from the main event, which is expected to get the backing of actor-director Spike Lee and gay indie-punk star Gregg Araki.
Oh, that Gregg Araki. Illustrious star of such notable films as…er, give me a minute here…
Both Robbins and Klein are noted critics of Hollywood mores and of the failure of actors to criticise their corporate bosses.
That may have something to do with the lear jets and limos provided by those corporate bosses.
Naomi Klein flew in yesterday morning to promote her film The Take, an account of a co-operative business set up by Argentine workers after the 2001 economic collapse, directed by radical Canadian journalist Avi Lewis.
With action, adventure, thrills, spills, ingenious plot twists, dazzling special effects and a stellar cast, ‘The Take’ is set to be the blockbuster hit of 2004. A total sell-out everywhere. Queues of film-lovers round the block. Get your tickets now!
Supporters of the Global Beach project caused disturbances at the premiere of The Terminal, directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, which opened the festival on Wednesday. Members of the group parked a car disguised as a pirate ship near the red carpet, a protest, one of them claimed, against “ostentatious show of Hollywood wealth and power”.
Wow! A car disguised as a pirate ship. That is so…significant: a devastating critique of crass commercialism that will really force people to sit up and take notice.
They are not actors, they are clowns.
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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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