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It would be quite wrong to suggest that the issue of self-defence (and the law relating thereto) is a libertarian issue. But it is probably true that, for many years, there was next to no debate about it as an issue outside of libertarian circles.
For free market advocates, self-defence (and the natural right thereto) is not just an important issue, it is a cornerstone of individualist philosophy. Yet, while libertarian scholars and writers debated passionately about the issue, it barely registered a blip on the radar of wider public interest.
That is, until a certain Tony Martin shot two intruders who had broken into his remote Norfolk farmhouse, killing one of them. The news that he had been arrested and charged with murder, led to a broken-dam deluge of furious and passionate debate about the right of self-defence and which flooded every medium.
Overnight, it seemed, self-defence had become a hot topic, not least because, as with so many debates, it has tended to generate more heat than light.
I do not intend to simply re-hash the Martin case and the various reasons why his actions either were or were not justified. That has already been done in some length here and elsewhere. What I want is to examine the reasons why practical self-defence has, to all intents and purposes, become illegal in the UK.
The obvious starting point is the law itself. While I believe that broader phenomena have played their part in creating the current situation, it is critical to examine how they worked to shape both law and custom as it stands. → Continue reading: The way we were
White Rose has a post about the launch of the Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) to raise awareness about the IP Enforcement proposal’s threat to consumer rights and market competition.
Forbiding tools that are required for the exercise of legally protected rights, like private use, preservation of works by libraries, and reverse engineering, means giving a complete monopoly to right-holders on the basic infrastructure needed to communicate in the digital world.
The government has enthusiastically taken up the cause of introducing more ‘flexible’ voting methods in order to increase electoral turnout. The fragility of their new experimental systems was brought home to me when my father asked me to witness his postal vote (a requirement that is now being dropped). I wasn’t too concerned because he was voting for the Residents Association rather than a political party.
I am not the only one. The e-voting systems have been criticised. Dr Ben Fairweather, Research Fellow at De Montford University, has analysed the local elections and found some disturbing results. These involved eighteen elections and 1.5 million voters.
He said the system used in Shrewsbury and Kerrier, Cornwall adopted a CESG security model that called for candidate codes to be sent to voters by post, as a security precaution. But people could request this information online on the day in violation of this security policy.
In Sheffield matters were worse. Many polling stations were without an Internet connection on polling day. As a result voters could get a vote at a poling station while still being able to vote again online from home.
The good fellow is also concerned about inappropriate influences within the home, and one could point to our more tight-knit communities where vulnerable members could be forced to vote for particular candidates. These changes encourage communalism in voting patterns.
“For one thing how do you know who’s in the room with someone when they vote and how can you be sure they are not trying to influence someone’s vote?” he asked.
Dr Fairweather’s work is here. The Foundation for Information Policy Research made similar criticisms.
So far, none of these elections have been rerun, even though their flaws have been documented.
In an amazingly petty act of vengeful spite, the US Treasury Department is fining a peace protestor $10,000. Faith Fippinger was one of many who went to Iraq to act as a “human shield”. She has now been told that her action was in breach of trade sanctions because whilst in Iraq she spent around $200, mainly on food and water. She has also been accused of “providing services” to the Iraqi regime by her presence.
If she can’t or won’t pay she could face 12 years in jail.
Whether or not you supported the war, the right to protest against it was supposedly one of the things that US citizens had and Iraqi citizens were denied. Now a minor technical breach of sanctions legislation is being used to punish a citizen who dared exercise her civil liberties.
The message from King George’s regime is clear: defy us at your peril.
BBC report here
Cross-posted from An It Harm None
An international coalition of 47 civil liberties groups and consumer rights campaigns sent a letter to the European Union today urging rejection of the proposed Intellectual property Enforcement Directive .
The coalition warns that the proposed Directive is overbroad and threatens civil liberties, innovation, and competition policy. It requires EU Member States to criminalize all violations of any intellectual property right that can be tied to any commercial purpose, with penalties to include imprisonment. Andy Müller-Maguhn, a board member of European Digital Rights and speaker for the Chaos Computer Club explains:
If this proposal becomes a reality, major companies from abroad can use ‘intellectual property’ regulations to gain control over the lives of ordinary European citizens and threaten digital freedoms. Under this proposal, a person’s individual liberty to use his own property is replaced with a limited license that can be revoked or its terms changed at any time and for any reason.
Ville Oksanen, a lawyer and Vice Chairman of Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFi) who signed the letter, points out:
Currently EU-Member states are implementing the EU Copyright Directive and the EU Software Patent Directive is next in the line. We should really wait and see what effect these new laws have before adding any new legislation organizational letter. Contrary to what the Enforcement Directive claims, Member States are already obliged by international treaties like TRIPS to protect intellectual property rights.
The letter marked the launch of the Campaign for an Open Digital Environment (CODE) to raise awareness about the IP Enforcement proposal’s threat to consumer rights and market competition. → Continue reading: IP Enforcement Directive – DMCA on steroids
David Sucher asks: “why are libertarians so much wittier than liberals?”
The answer is that the sense of humour comes from a libertarian understanding of the world. Statists see a world of oppression and pain, and get depressed because of global warming and evil multinationals. Libertarians see the world in a different way, seeing the bad in the world, but also seeing the great advances that humankind has experienced over the past few hundred years. They have greater confidence in humanity, progress and the future. So they can afford to not take life completely seriously. The sense of humour is profoundly libertarian. (Thanks to Madsen Pirie for giving me the idea for this post.)
When I leave university and get a job, I want to live and die by my own efforts, but if they are especially productive, I want to enjoy the fruits of my labour without being penalised by the state for my success. I don’t want to see people starve, or to go without basic needs, but rather than having the state steal my money and use it to pay them to stay poor, I want them to have the opportunity to work, earn and live for themselves. I also want, through free charity, to be able to decide for myself in whose aid the money I donate will be spent: perhaps I might find the starving Iraqi child a more deserving cause than the perpetually-unemployed Dundonian who can’t afford the monthly satellite television subscription; perhaps I won’t think that the fact that one has been born in closer geographical proximity to me gives them a greater claim to the money I worked for. I don’t want these choices to be taken from me and decided centrally, by those whose very jobs require them to please as many local people as they can.
– David Bean, part of the St Andrews Liberty Club’s new committee, writing on The Liberty Log
Communist leaders plan to amend China’s constitution to formally enshrine the ideology of Jiang Zemin, the recently retired leader who invited capitalists to join the Communist Party. Despite sweeping economic and social changes, the political status of China’s entrepreneurs is still ambiguous.
There have been no details of the possible changes although foreign analysts say they include the communist era’s first guarantee of property rights. Certain amendments are still needed to promote economic and social development, said the party newspaper People’s Daily. It said the changes were meant to cope with accelerating globalization and advances in science and technology.
Jiang’s theory, the awkwardly named “Three Represents,” calls for the 67 million-member party to embrace capitalists, updating its traditional role as a “vanguard of the working class” and for the constitution to formally uphold property rights and the rights of entrepreneurs.
As someone who has more than passing acquaintance with communism, I see this is as a big change indeed. Even under most dire oppression you cannot entirely stop people exchanging goods and services. And so it was in the countries of the former Communist bloc, although the private sector was not officially recognised, there were shades of grey in the ‘socialist worker economy’. Former Yugoslavia, for example, ventured furthest in its recognition of private enterprise and some semblance of property rights and in return relatively prospered. Also in practice, Poland and Hungary were kinder to their small landowners and tradesmen than the communist ideologues allowed.
Nevertheless, there was no question of formally acknowledging property rights and any form of private enterprise by governments whose grasp of economics was based entirely on Marxism. It was one thing to tolerate existence of non-state markets and even benefit from them, but changing their opposition to individual’s property rights, so firmly embedded in political systems that were barely surviving, would have been a political, ideological and social suicide. (As a matter of fact, not changing it amounted to the same, just by other means: No, no, no, comrade, let’s not play with this (freedom of the press, speech, travel, association, trade, property rights etc) it has sharp edges and will cut your wrists, let’s just circle round the drain together, holding hands and singing the Internationale…)
China’s development has been very different to that of Eastern Europe, politically and economically, although both were waving the Red Flag. The proposed change to the China’s constitution may amount to a symbolic amendment given that China’s entrepreneurs have driven its two-decade-old economic boom. But then, symbols can be very powerful.
With Mr Schwarzenegger throwing his hat into the ring of the California Governorship, I thought it was my aspiring libertarian duty to the spirit of freedom, to take in the Austrian candidate’s latest mega-movie, Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines. So I beat a warm and humid trail from a jet-engine air-conditioned hotel in the salubrious Euston area of London, to the fragrant Leicester Square, home to a million and one interesting smells emanating from the great hoi polloi of old London Town.
I managed to scramble about the last ticket sold, for the early evening performance at the Odeon cinema, and only managed to sit down and switch off my mobile phone ten seconds before the opening credits began.
So, first impressions? If there’s a Terminator 4, I’ll be back. (Come on, we’ve got to get these things out of the way when reviewing Arnie films. I’ll try to get all the others in as soon as I can, to ease the pain.)
Second impressions? To hell with what the literati London critics said about this film. I’m a lowbrow and I need regular jolts of science-fiction-style entertainment to get me through this rollercoaster we know as life. And Arnie films almost always do the trick (except for Twins, of course.)
In Terminator 3, Arnold once again delivers the goods. Can he really be 56 years old? I hope I have pectorals like that when I’m 56. Hell, I wish I’d had pectorals like that when I was 23. → Continue reading: Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines
CNET News.com reports:
Lawmakers in California have scheduled a hearing for later this month to discuss privacy issues surrounding a controversial technology designed to wirelessly monitor everything from clothing to currency.
Sen. Debra Bowen, a California legislator recently on the forefront of an antispam legislation movement, is spearheading the August 18 hearing, which will focus on an emerging area of technology known as radio frequency identification (RFID), a representative for Bowen has confirmed.
RFID tags are miniscule microchips, which already have shrunk to half the size of a grain of sand. They listen for a radio query and respond by transmitting their unique ID code. Retailers adore the concept, which enables them to automatically detect the movement of merchandise in stores and monitor inventory in warehouses using millions of special sensors. CNET News.com wrote about how Wal-Mart and the U.K.-based grocery chain Tesco are starting to install “smart shelves” with networked RFID readers.
According to Declan McCullagh of CNET News.com Proponents hail the technology as the next-generation bar code, allowing merchants and manufacturers to operate more efficiently and cut down on theft. The privacy threat comes when RFID tags remain active once you leave a store. That’s the scenario that should raise alarms – and currently the RFID industry seems to be giving mixed signals about whether the tags will be disabled or left enabled by default.
Further, unchecked use of RFID could end up trampling consumer privacy by allowing retailers to gather unprecedented amounts of information about activity in their stores and link it to customer information databases. They also worry about the possibility that companies and would-be thieves might be able to track people’s personal belongings, embedded with tiny RFID microchips, after they are purchased. Katherine Albrecht, the head of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, a fierce critic of RFID technology says:
If you are walking around emanating an electric cloud of these devices wherever you go, you have no more privacy. Every door way you walk through could be scanning you.
Policy makers in Britain are also starting to ponder the privacy implications of RFID. A member of Britain’s Parliament has submitted a motion for debate on the regulation of RFID devices when the government returns from its summer recess next month.
My first reaction to this story was “Aha! Another reason to despise the UN and its tranzi fellow travellers! As if I needed one.” And indeed, there is plenty to despise in this story. It turns out that a thriving market in endangered animal skins has sprung up in Afghanistan to serve the demands of the UN and NGO personnel assigned there.
When I asked him if he had any coats made of snow leopard skin, he said no. But the reason was far from reassuring – he had sold out.
They have become so expensive for us – $500. Too expensive for Afghans but foreigners can buy them,” he said.
We have asked most of the foreigners not to buy these things and if there is not a market from the foreigners the Afghan people probably don’t need it,” [Afghan Environment Minister Yousef Nouristani] says.
“It’s the market created by the foreigners – particularly those who are working with the UN or other NGOs.”
The tooth-grinding hypocrisy of UN and NGO personnel flouting international law banning the trade in these skins is bad enough. The fact that most tranzis are also pious “movement” environmentalists is merely salt in the wound.
However, for dedicated libertarians, it raises one of the perennial dilemmas: what to do with wild animals? Laws restricting the harvesting and sale of wild animal skins, organs, meat, and whatnot would appear to run afoul of libertarian principles espousing free trade and free markets, and indeed the Afghan government is trying to reach the benchmark for protection of these animals set by, gulp, the Taliban.
The dilemma is sharpened in Afghanistan because the dire poverty of many people there puts their interests in direct conflict with protection of endangered species.
Snow leopards are most commonly found in north-eastern Afghanistan in an area known as the Wakhan.
I spoke to Ali Azimi, the author of a report on Afghanistan’s environmental problems, who has just returned from a 10-day trip to the area.
“I was struck by the abject poverty of the people,” he said. “Most can barely afford to have one meal a day.
“And the meal usually consists of a type of grass that grows in the Wakhan six months of the year. Six months it is snowbound.
“What they eat is what has been collected over the summer months – and it is a desperate situation for them. So they’re facing poverty and starvation in the Wakhan.”
This poverty and starvation is forcing people to hunt animals that would normally be the prey of the snow leopards – and the thousands of dollars that some people are prepared to pay for their skins is encouraging poachers to hunt these rare and beautiful creatures.
The long-term solution to these environmental issues is, of course, to raise the level of income and wealth in Afghanistan so that no one is forced to compete with wild animals for survival, and so that the “luxury good” of protected lands and species becomes affordable. In the shorter run (and in the long run as well) it is difficult to see how wild lands and, especially, wild animals can be protected from the tragedy of the commons without some form of state intervention, whether it is via market regulation outlawing the trade in animal products, the purchase and “protection” of lands, the regulation of hunting activity, or some variant or combination of all three.
Thanks to the inevitable and ubiquitous Instapundit for the first link to this story. Thanks also to (this hurts, folks) the BBC for originating the story.
We noted here earlier the controversial proposed appointment of a new Director of Public Prosecutions. Today’s Telegraph reports that Britain’s Conservative Opposition are continuing to making an issue of this:
The appointment of one of Cherie Blair’s “cronies” as the new Director of Public Prosecutions is a “matter of deepest concern” because of his work on terrorist cases, Michael Howard, the shadow chancellor, said yesterday.
Mr Howard suggested that Ken Macdonald was not fit to serve as the country’s top prosecutor because of his views on the motives of those charged with terrorism.
Mr Howard, a QC, singled out Mr Macdonald’s website at Matrix Chambers, where Mrs Blair works as a public law barrister, and his use of the phrase “political violence”.
A website? Yes, this one.
The website detailing Mr Macdonald’s work as a criminal lawyer says: “He is very well known for his work in cases where serious allegations of political violence are made against Irish republicans, Sikhs, Palestinians and Islamists. He is especially interested in fair trial issues arising out of recent anti-terrorist legislation in Britain and abroad.”
Although Mr Howard stopped short of suggesting that Mr Macdonald was sympathetic to the cause of terrorist groups, he said the concept of “political violence” was not recognised under English law.
This is an argument that will presumably divide White Rose readers along political lines. But it is very White-Rose-relevant, as I’ve been saying of a number of stories here.
Howard admits that if Macdonald hadn’t had that Blair connection he wouldn’t be making so much fuss. Fair enough. Neither would I. As it is, says Howard, the appointment should be closely scrutinised. Here’s what is probably Howard’s most telling punch:
“If you engage in that kind of scrutiny, you discover that this is a man who has no experience of prosecution at all. He’s never prosecuted a single significant case in his career.
If you want to get stuck into Michael Howard, the Telegraph also supplies the link to his website.
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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.
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