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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I went out for a drink this evening and had two, which given my (in)ability to function under the influence of alcohol is the equivalent of more like four or five. So this posting may be erratic and won’t have any links. But it’s been a slow day here, so every bit helps.
I picked up a nice political anecdote while imbibing. It seems that not long ago, Blair’s media enforcer Alastair Campbell wanted the political editor of the Sun, Trevor Kavanagh fired. Kavanagh is the sort of bloke we like and who would like us, and may actually like us for all I know.
So anyway, Campbell invited himself to the office of Kavanagh’s boss, a man called … can’t remember but it may come to me. But this Boss, the editor I assume it must have been, was not as easily intimidated as Campbell would have liked. Because, as soon as Campbell started in on his usual effing and blinding and threatening and carrying on, the Boss pressed a button on his desk, which had the effect of broadcasting all this Campbellising all over the Sun offices. Everyone could hear it, and they were both appalled at its barbarity and amused by its presumption.
The usual description of Alastair Campbell is that he is, or was, a “Spin Doctor”, a job description which implies nuance, subtlety, finesse, and also mental stability and poise. None of that is true. “Attack Dog” would be nearer the mark, and it says a hell of a lot about Tony Blair’s true character that he should have such a bizarre and unbalanced individual as his Number Two, and for so long. Campbell in full flood is apparently a remarkable sound, but this time, it hurt him more than it hurt his victim.
Trevor Kavanagh kept his job. I still can’t remember the Boss’s name for sure, but it may have been Yelland. David Yelland, I think. Commenters feel free to correct me.
As I say, this wasn’t that long ago. Politically, in Britain now, the times they are a-changing.
An awful lot of people don’t like smoking. Given the passion a number of my friends show for putting themselves into early graves, I put up with the practice for social reasons. And I certainly believe that businessmen and women should be free to have establishments where their customers can escape from the risk of fumigation.
However, things are never that simple. People want to ban smoking simpliciter. Depriving businessmen and women of the choice of letting smokers in, or perhaps having a business at all. And this is precisely the reason 400 publicans in County Kerry say they’re willing to go to jail rather than enforce a ban on smoking in pubs proposed by the Irish Government (coming soon to a European Community near you!).
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS, for the acronym-addicted) began laying out its agenda for its upcoming session by announcing the cases that it has accepted for review, and those that it has not. Among the cases that it has refused to review is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (federal circuit courts are the appellate courts for the federal system in the US; the 9th Circuit has jurisdiction over the West Coast) decision barring the federal government from prosecuting (or persecuting, take your pick) doctors for recommending marijuana to their patients.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that physicians should be able to speak candidly with patients without fear of government sanctions, but they can be punished if they actually help patients obtain the drug.
So, this has been pitched relatively narrowly as a free speech issue, rather than as a broader liberty/self-ownership issue. That is probably a wise strategic decision on the part of marijuana advocates. I personally don’t see where the federal government has the Constitutional power to outlaw drug use in the first place, but I am old-fashioned and believe the Constitution means what it says. SCOTUS hasn’t subscribed to that view since FDR intimidated the Court into submission in the 1930s.
Nine states have laws legalizing marijuana for people with physician recommendations or prescriptions: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. And 35 states have passed legislation recognizing marijuana’s medicinal value.
But federal law bans the use of pot under any circumstances.
The case gave the court an opportunity to review its second medical marijuana case in two years. The last one involved cannabis clubs.
As I recall, in that case SCOTUS said that cannabis clubs could prosecuted even if they were supplying only medical marijuana users.
The optimism expressed by various advocates about the import of SCOTUS refusing to take this case is badly misplaced, in my opinion. A refusal to take a case is far short of a SCOTUS opinion upholding the ruling of the 9th Circuit, and the annals of the Court are replete with examples of cases declined, only to have the same issue come up in a different posture later on to be reversed by SCOTUS.
Still, this is qualified win for the forces of good, feel free to celebrate with your substance of choice.
I can’t wait to see their election manifesto:
Anti-war activists including the Guardian columnist George Monbiot are planning to form a coalition to challenge the Labour party in the European and local elections in June.
The attempt to unite socialist parties, anti-globalisation campaigners, peace activists, and faith groups, including Muslims, has already aroused the hostility of the Green party, which is branding the electoral project as “unhelpful”.
The Green hostility is understandable. They can’t very well be expected to just sit back and do nothing in the face of this open challenge to their monopoly on crackpot drivel.
Every now and then somebody writes a piece (such as the one Brian referred to the other day) which talks about “Some pestilential scientist has invented a device that allows parents to trace their child’s location via his mobile telephone” or similar.
Now it actually isn’t actually scientific or technical issues that are the issue here, for mobile phones are tracking devices by their very nature, and have been since their invention. You see, if you call a mobile phone, then the phone has to be made to ring. In order to be able to make it ring, the network as to know where it is. And in order that this be so, your mobile phone network is tracking you at all times. It isn’t tracking you that precisely, but with sharing of information between networks (which they do, in order to track down mobile phones and sometimes to cooperate with the police) it is possible to track the location of anyone with a mobile phone to within a couple of street blocks. In terms of tracking the person with the phone, although the technology can be improved to track movements more accurately – particularly by putting GPS devices or similar into phones, in some sense it is good enough already. In this case the issues are not so much technological – the technology is already there – but regulatory and legal. Just how much of this information will be logged and stored. Having a database recording everywhere I have been in the last five years is different from being able to record where I am now on demand. How much of this information may or must be shared with government and law enforcement. And how much of this information may be used commercially and in what ways. Is it appropriate to provide a service to parents that allows them to track the movements of their children? (Certainly if I was a teenager, I would find it pretty rough if my mother was tracking me at all times).
But, of course, technology is advancing. Reading this article suggests that things are going to get far worse. Before too long we may have so called “passive radar”. Essentially the point of this is that our mobile phones are throwing lots and lots of radio signals around all the time. These signals are bouncing off things, being partially absorbed by other objects, and similar. If our phones and base-stations record signal strength, signal direction, gaps in the signal, doppler effects, and other such pieces of information, it may be possible to essentially construct an electronic map of the terrain that the signals are travelling through. Essentially if you are walking down the street not carrying a mobile phone or any form of electronic tag, it may be possible to track you using the mobile phones of other people in the street. Unlike conventional radar systems, this type of tracking cannot easily be detected, as it uses radio signals that have other purposes and are there already. The privacy implications of this are, of course, worrying.
Even if this particular means of ubiquitous tracking does not come into being, or at least not quickly, some technology that achieves essentially the same thing is going to come into being at some point, like it or not. If we want to attempt to establish rights to not be tracked, or clear laws as to how such information can and cannot be used, we need to do so now, when tracking is possible but not ubiquitous. Trying to do so so after it becomes ubiquitous is going to be too late.
There was a grain of seriousness to my second option for dealing with spammers. We can’t actually shoot spammers – however pleasant that might be – but we can expose them. The Blogosphere is a huge intelligence collection and dissemination service. There are agents (bloggers) everywhere. There are highly proficient engineers and scientists amongst us. How long could the whereabouts of a spammer remain secret with the the entire Blogosphere out to get them?
With personal contact details in hand there are simple, legal means of retaliation. We could make their life hell and do so without violating the libertarian ethos.
Small expressions of annoyance have little import if taken singly… but what happens when 10,000 people ring the spammer at home and say: “Please stop”? Or 10 people a day ring the doorbell and say the same? Or 100,000 each send one email to the home email address of the spammer? Or 1,000,000 bring a class action suit against the spammer for one pound each plus court costs?
It is not as if this hasn’t happened before. James Taranto (Opinion Journal) recently published the phone numbers of people and organizations involved in telephone soliciting. He caused them no end of grief. Six years ago the fax phone number for the London Metropolitan Police was published after they threatened a brutal and heavy handed censorship of internet news groups. They ran out of fax paper rather quickly and more importantly, ISP’s were neither raided nor shut down. (I will admit to a personal interest in the event as I was the Tech Director of the first ISP in Northern Ireland at the time).
Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming this would wipe out spam. It raises the cost of doing business. That is enough because it means less spam.
It seems quite a few blogs got hit by a massive porn spam in the last few days. There is a good summary and links at Winds of Change
We were hit pretty solidly by it at Samizdata. Brian Micklethwaite reports he deleted a large number of them.
I’ve an idea for a technical solution if anyone at MT is listening. It would be to have a settable time threshold on comments. Commenting on an article would be closed after a specified number of days. All the Lolita posts I saw went to articles that were 3 months old. This tells me the spammers want to bolster their search engine ratings by getting lots of links in lots of different places. Otherwise we’d have seen the posts go to new articles. You don’t get many eyeballs on 3 month old news archives.
It would not be terribly onerous to remove spam from the current twenty or so ‘active’ articles. We are already are moderating those.
There is another more satisfying solution though. Given the number of libertarian and fellow travelers blogging about the world, someone should find the address of the spammers and pay a visit. A Glock has a certain, je ne c’est quoi, especially when displayed at close range to one’s nose.
It makes the words “Please stop” seem an eminently reasonable request.
Dale ponders where to place the next round
Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
This looks really interesting, from one of the constantly excellent not-so-political pages of the New York Times:
Monkeys that can move a robot arm with thoughts alone have brought the merger of mind and machine one step closer.
In experiments at Duke University, implants in the monkeys’ brains picked up brain signals and sent them to a robotic arm, which carried out reaching and grasping movements on a computer screen driven only by the monkeys’ thoughts.
The achievement is a significant advance in the continuing effort to devise thought-controlled machines that could be a great benefit for people who are paralyzed, or have lost control over their physical movements.
As seems to be the usual practice nowadays, a technology fraught with general implications for mankind and his ever increasing power to manipulate his environment is first presented as a mere trick to enable cripples to do just a bit less badly. But okay, if that’s what it takes. And I suppose that this is where the first big money for this stuff has come from and the first money-making applications will be applied.
That trivial grumble aside, just think of it … Soon we’ll all be able to put on our Telekinesis 5.2 helmets and do the washing up while still at the office just by thinking about it. We will be able to live our entire lives without ever getting out of bed.
I gave up believing a long time ago that robots would ever be much use at telling themselves what to do other than in the case of totally repetitive tasks like car making. Any job requiring initiative, like pouring out a cup of tea, say, or flower arranging or doing a half decent blog posting, needs a human in charge. If, in the future, Metal Mickeys get to push vacuum cleaners around our houses this will be because real men (well maybe not Real Men but you know what I mean) are operating them in some House Cleaning Control Office nearby.
And now that day is nearer, because our ability to communicate our wishes to the Metal Mickeys just got better.
Last night until late, high up in the Hollywood Hills, a veritable multiplicity of LA Bloggers swarmed into Casa Bad Dude…
Bill Whittle & Rand Simberg… Jets and Rockets
Cathy & Cecile
Matt Welch & Martin Devon
Rand Simberg & Mickey Kaus
Kate Sullivan & Emmanuelle Richard
Martin Devon, Ann Salisbury, Kevin Drum & the pseudonymous Armed Liberal
I finally got to meet Rand Simberg face to face
Sara & Moxie, who contrary to some scurrilous rumours, is most certainly not deformed!
This being Casa Bad Dude, the air was thick with cigar smoke
Update: The morning after the night before…
Brian Linse recovers slowly from last night’s festivities
During my ongoing travels in the USA, I encountered two splendid examples of the idiocy of regulation…
What you see in the above picture, taken a few days ago in Newark, New Jersey, is a steep concrete stairway leading to a carpark next to a roller-skate rink. Now I was rather puzzled to see a bunch of mandated disabled carpark bays next to a roller-skate rink, but the really funny bit was the small curb at the bottom of the stairs with… a wheelchair ramp. Ignoring for a moment the sheer idiocy of the notion someone in a wheelchair would use those stairs at all, somehow I suspect if they had somehow negotiated that imposing set of stairs, they are not going to need a ramp to get over the damn curb at the bottom.
Next for your edification, we have what is in effect a mandated warning posted on a bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, taken yesterday…
Yet for some reason the state wants the same people who drink in bars to vote on who gets to put their finger on The Button.
Why do people tolerate being treated like cretins? America is a very strange place sometimes.
The great Californian ‘brain drain’ may be about to begin:
Already the “buzz” among philosophers is that the election of the absurd Schwarzenegger, in a state already facing enormous problems, is going to lead philosophers in California, especially at UC system campuses, to start thinking about leaving.
Those selfish Arnie voters have gone and done it now. See how they like struggling along without their philosophers. Hah! Serves them right.
[My thanks to Crooked Timber for the link.]
The GATSO killers must be starting to give the state a serious headache.
From the UK Times:
THE police have come up with a new way to catch irate motorists who vandalise speed cameras: set up other cameras to film them in the act.
And then other cameras to film those cameras and still more cameras to film those cameras and……
A closed-circuit television system would be installed beside the speed traps under plans being considered to curb a spate of attacks in which 700 cameras have been burnt, pulled down or had their lenses spray painted.
Of course this means that the closed-circuit security cameras will become targets as well. It seems that the campaign of the GATSO killers is moving beyond the sporadic outbursts of pique and onto a low-grade insurrection.
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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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