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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The DOD announced a site for a new US missile defense system today: Adak Island.
This is exactly where I expected the first 21st century land-based ABM system would go. It is the most likely of two well placed islands in the Aleutians Chain extending south and west from Alaska. Adak Island is an old NSA Cold War listening post and has a military airfield.
It also just happens to sit almost exactly on the great circle route on which a North Korean based ICBM must travel to reach American soil. The DOD release doesn’t mention that little tidbit. You’ve heard it first on Samizdata.
I’ve just done a posting on my education blog about an organisation called Connexions Direct, which, together with its website ending in .gov.uk, I’ve just seen advertised on TV. It strikes me as just a tad creepy, at any rate potentially.
Finding someone to talk to.
Connexions Direct Advisers are here to listen to your relationship problems and can also help you to find support in your area. You can contact us via email, text, phone or webchat or pop into your local office. Look in the Connexions Service section for details of where your local office is.
Should an organisation with .gov.uk at the end of its website address be offering relationship advice?
I can see it developing into a sort of database of the unhappy. It of course swears that it won’t abuse all the information it will nevertheless be hoovering up, but then it would, wouldn’t it?
And since doing that posting at my blog, I’ve also noticed this. Guess what? Yes, it’s the Connections Card:
The Connexions Card is a secure smartcard, designed specially for you, which allows you to collect reward points for learning, work-based training and voluntary activities. These can be exchanged for discounted and free goods and services and other rewards, including some exclusive ‘money can’t buy’ experiences. The Card can also be used for on-the-spot discounts and special offers from outlets and business displaying the Connexions Card window sticker.
I’d be interested to hear what anyone else thinks about all this.
Most of us are fortunate enough to live our lives in peaceful obscurity. Not many of us do things that attract attention from more then our circle of friends and family.
There are those though that either through their skill or through opportunity attract unwanted attention. While Brian writes about the attention that Prince William is getting, in Australia, we who make princes of our sportsmen are debating the latest scandal involving cricketer Shane Warne.
Warne is one of the most gifted bowlers in the history of the game, but away from the field he is a rather unsavoury man who has gathered a well earned sleazy reputation.
An enterprising South African woman has tried to cash in on that reputation by making allegations against Warne. It seems that for once there is little truth to the story, and indeed she’s been charged by the South African police with extortion. Whatever the truth of this sordid affair, the media spotlight is once again firmly on Shane Warne. Sometimes that spotlight steps over the boundary of what is acceptable by the media after News Corporation’s flagship newspaper “The Australian” took a photograph of Warne having a smoke in his backyard.
While in general little sympathy need be wasted on Warne, in this case, I feel for him. His response to the affair has been to keep as low a profile as possible, and every person has the right not to be photographed if they don’t want to be.
Governments are notoriously inquisitive about the private matters of their citizens, but they are not the only intrusive Big Brother out there.
After a short hiatus due to snail mail from Basra involving wrong addresses and the usual off-line world confusions I give you the forth letter written by our illustrious ‘Man in Basra’. The following has been written partially as a response to
Virginia Postrel’s latest NY Times column highlights what may become a growing weakness in the regulatory state.
Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as someone who “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” To many people, that sounds like an economist or an executive.
But Wilde’s witticism ignores what prices do. They convey information about how people value different goods, including the intangibles an aesthete like Wilde would care about most.
. . .
Public policy often regards aesthetic value as illegitimate or nonexistent. This oversight comes less from ideological conviction than from technocratic practice. Unlike prices, regulatory policy requires articulated justifications and objective standards. So policy makers emphasize measurable factors and ignore subjective pleasures.
As the info-industrial economy advances, the regulatory state will look increasingly out of step and, one hopes, irrelevant and undesirable. Regulation is all about conformity, and while top down conformity might appear to be tolerable in a society that is struggling to make ends meet, one hopes that it will become increasingly intolerable as it becomes more of a barrier to the kinds of pleasure-seeking and self-realization that people are willing to go to great lengths to achieve when they have the means to do so. As Ms. Postrel points out, the pricing mechanism of the market lets people pursue these essentially aesthetic ends as far as they want (or can afford), while top-down policy-driven efficiencies all too often preclude these pursuits.
Future debates over the regulatory state may play out as a struggle between the competing values of risk-aversion and efficiency on the one hand, and self-individuation and aesthetics on the other.
To follow up on the discussion under Good news on guns, which drifted (and I do mean drifted) into comparisons of US and European crime and the unfortunate concentration of violent criminal activity in the US in the black community, I ran across a summary of statistics at the Useful Fools blog. You really should read the whole thing, but the relevant points are:
Here are Interpol 2001 crime statistics (rate per 100,000):
4161 – US
7736 – Germany
6941 – France
9927 – England and Wales
Thus the US has a substantially lower crime rate than the major European countries!
. . .
[The US] murder rate is high largely due to the multicultural nature of our society. Inner city blacks, members of a distinct subculture, have a vastly higher criminal and victim homicide rate than our society as an average:
Homicide Offender Rate/100,000 by Race in US (2000):
3.4 – White
25.8 – Black
3.2 – Other
It is often hypothesized that blacks are overrepresented in murder statistics due to racism on the part of police and the justice system. If this were true, one would expect that the race of victims would have significantly different distribution than the race of the perpetrators, but this is not the case:
Homicide Victim Rate/100,000 by Race in US (2000):
3.3 – White
20.5 – Black
2.7 – Other
Thus if you remove homicides committed by blacks (total: 21862, Blacks:9316), and assume a proportionality between number of offenders and number of offenses, you can extrapolate US homicide offender rate of only 2.6/100,000, lower than Germany (3.27) and France (3.91).
I asked John Moore, the author of the Useful Fools post, to give us links to the studies or data that he used, but he replied that he had gathered the numbers from a Interpol and FBI stats without keeping the links. Tsk, tsk, John! I had hoped to track down the data myself, but have been unable to do so, and am unlikely to get a chance anytime soon. The data is consistent with a number of other items that I have read over the years, so I think its legit, but caveat blogster.
The data can be read to support any number of things, as I am sure the comment mob will demonstrate soon. I tend to look at it as consistent with my preconceptions (yet another reason why I think that the data is probably good – it makes me look smart!). First and foremost, though, I think it refutes the notion that “cowboy” America is a violent and dangerous place. It is also consistent with the view that, in America at least, more gun control equals more crime, as the high crime areas (large urban centers) labor for the most part under the very restrictive gun controls (and have for decades).
In short, it is safer to be free and self-reliant (that is, armed) than to trust the state to provide safety and security from crime.
Frank J. at IMHO has come up with the perfect way to fish for links (well, I fell for it at least)… he has declared war on the mighty Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit .
And what is our view on this revolt against The InstaPowers That Be?
We are one of Glenn’s blog children… fie on that false prophet Frank J. and all hail to Glenn Reynolds, the Dark Lord of the net, the Ayatollah of Rock and Rollah, the Balrog of the Blogosphere!
Behold the fate of those who defy the InstaPowers That Be
Photo: D.Amon, all rights reserved
Those liberty-loving cyber-guerillas over at Bureaucrash have cooked up a wry little animation the subject of which is a Canadian (I presume) politician caught red-handed (and gold-wristed) in the act of selling snake-oil.
Well worth a look.
[My thanks to reader Ernest Young for the link.]
Sir Ernest Benn’s The State The Enemy was first published in 1953, in other words exactly half a century ago. Chapter 1, also entitled “The State The Enemy” begins with a justification for this title:
To the Individualist the State is the Enemy. Herbert Spencer put the whole matter into five words in the title of his book The Man Versus The State. Talk of the people, the country, or the nation stirs the emotions, but the word State has a hard steely ruthless suggestion, and the notion of a State with a soul or a heart does not occur because it cannot exist.
But Benn was aware that this word “State” might suggest different things, and different emotions to potential American readers. So he concluded his first chapter thus:
I am not unhopeful that these arguments may be of interest, and indeed use, to those in America who are concerned at the growth of governmental power and influence – and I must therefore justify my use of the word State to signify the evil which it is my aim to describe and mitigate. This book could be named The Bureaucracy, but that would only put the blame upon the hirelings who have undertaken for a price to do the will of an evil spirit which resides above them.
From a purely British point of view I conclude that the word State signifies more correctly the troubles with which I am concerned; but to the American reader still jealous of the rights and privileges of each of the forty-eight States my meaning may be obscured by the label I put on to it. Had I used the title Whitehall the Enemy the American sympathiser with my view could easily read “Washington” for “Whitehall.” I hope, however, that my use of the word State will not deter my American cousins, who look to the forty-eight separate self-governing States as instruments for restraining the Super-State at Washington, from examining arguments which apply to them as much as to us in Britain.
For some Americans, in other words, the “State” is a friend. But such Americans shouldn’t be put off from reading The State The Enemy.
And the same applies to reading Samizdata, no matter what they may sometimes read here.
A cascade of power blackouts have hit the north eastern USA and parts of Canada, causing widespread chaos. It was also reported that due to the power cuts, the United Nations building in New York City has been closed.
So, not entirely bad news then.
I’ve just done a posting here using this BBC report, about the Prince William 21st Birthday break-in at Windsor Castle, concerning the matter of who is supposed to watch all the surveillance cameras that the world is now being flooded with.
But another point about that report struck me as also worth commenting on, and in a separate posting. One thing at a time, and all that.
Here’s the bit that particularly caught my attention, concerning the report on the incident that has just been published:
The report – by Commander Frank Armstrong of the City of London force – gives 28 recommendations for changes to the way the Royal Family is protected in future.
Among them, it calls for legislation to create a new offence of trespassing on royal or government property.
Now is it just me, or is this not a rather odd thing to recommend? Surely the problem that this “comedian” posed to police that night was not that they didn’t have the law on their side to enable them to stop something bad. It was simply that they didn’t do the job that the law already gave them ample entitlement to do.
It’s extremely common among silly people who know no better, such as voters and politicians, to want to solve every problem that ever happens by suggesting a new law to stop it. I once took part in a vox-pop studio debate of the sort one agrees to be on but would never dream of watching, in which one of my fellow debaters on the subject of bank robbery came within about a quarter of a second of saying, on national television, that there ought to be a law against it. Okay, from the mere public you can maybe expect no better. But when a senior police officer, invited to comment on a security cock-up and suggest lessons to be learned, also reaches for the law, we really are in trouble, it seems to me.
It may be that in this particular case, there really is good reason to think that a “new offence” should indeed be created. But me, I choose to doubt it.
So what? A policeman thinks a new crime should be invented. Why does that matter?
It matters because there is already a Himalayan mountain range of legislation, with tons more pouring forth from Parliaments everywhere, every day, week, month, year.
And a world in which there is so much law that nobody – not even lawyers, let alone policemen, politicians, and certainly not the general public – can possibly be aware of what it all consists of is not a good world to live in. It actually has quite a lot in common with a world with no law at all.
I don’t know when it happened, but some years ago I came to two conclusions about my own personal law-abidingness. (1) At any particular moment I am probably always breaking some damn law or other. (2) To hell with it. I still try to be good. But I have given up trying to obey the law.
The trouble starts for me if the powers-that-be, or more likely a power-that-is decide(s) that they (it) want(s) to get me. Suppose I surprise all of us and say something here which really angers the government, or, more likely, some particular powerful individual towards the top end of it. In a world of infinite law, this person can be absolutely confident that a search for a law that I am breaking will turn up something, and maybe a great deal. He may never take it as far as me having to talk my way out of it in a court of law, but he may be able to make a deal of trouble for me nevertheless, just by going through the legal motions and stopping them just before they go public, but not letting me know about that until the last minute.
Remember all those poets and academics who used to annoy the government of the old USSR? What did the government of the USSR do to them? Did it complain about their poems, or have complicated arguments with them about the nuances of how to interpret the Soviet “Constitution”? Did it hell? It just found some law that the poor wretch had been breaking (because everyone broke the law in the old USSR – just to stay alive) and set the legal wheels in motion. I mean, we can’t have currency smuggling, now can we? Course not.
That’s the world we may find ourselves in quite soon, and I dare say that the experience of not a few persons is that we are already there. It may seem a long argument from a policeman trying to avoid blaming idiot fellow policemen for some policing fiasco and instead blaming the law, to Soviet dissidents, but I hope I have explained that there is a genuine connection here. Discuss.
The case of the comedian who strolled into Prince William’s 21st birthday party on June 21 illustrates the point that surveillance cameras are only as much use as the people supposedly manning them and paying attention to them. That night, the members of the Metropolitan Police and of the various Royal Security organisations who were supposed to be doing this weren’t. Had our joker been a real suicide bomber he might have landed us all with King Edward, so I heard on the TV today.
The thing is, criminals of the more usual in-out don’t-make-a-fuss sort have already worked out that merely being photographed doesn’t matter if no one is paying attention to the photographs until they’ve done their criminal deeds.
I believe that the spread of surveillance cameras means that there will soon be a whole new class of people in the world, the surveillers. We will become aware of these people rather as we recently became aware of call centre operatives, for there will have to be a lot of them to keep up with the flow of pictures. One thing’s for sure. They’ll know a lot more stuff than they’ll officially be allowed to tell, and there’ll be lots of arguments about what their rights and responsibilities will be, and who they will have to report to.
I suppose it is possible that “expert” computer programmes will enable CCTV security to be entirely automated, to the point where robots will spot trouble and act against it, but it seems unlikely. Too much to go wrong, I would have thought. (Comments on the immediate likelihood, say in the next two decades, of such expert systems would be most welcome.) I wonder, will the day ever come when a human can be arrested and charged by a robot? Maybe not. But computers will have work to do in observing what they think might be unusual or anomalous events, which require serious human attention.
An extra dimension of interesting could be added to such matters by the fact that, what with modern communications racing ahead the way they are, the people looking at the pictures (assuming computers don’t muscle in on this job) won’t even have to be in the same countries as the cameras, any more than call centre people have to be now. People who became skilled in the art of watching television (I reckon I’m pretty good at this myself) could win national awards for export achievement.
The Baby Boom is getting old, and is going to be very hard to keep in nice fat juicy pensions like they (we) are now expecting, and they (we) will have a lot of votes. We will, I anticipate, be demanding undemanding jobs to top up our pensions. Snooping on other people with CCTV cameras would be just the thing. The 21st century equivalent of peeking at the passing scene through net curtains.
Not a very pretty picture. Not a definitely nice world. Please understand that I am describing the way I think things are heading, not recommending it or approving of it.
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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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