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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Amid the recent revival of the spectre of large tax increases, a simply splendid post by David Farrer pointing out exactly why the political classes need them:
The truth is that the welfare state is bankrupt and almost no one, not the Scotsman editorial writer and certainly not the Tories, is willing to say that the Emperor has no clothes.
And not just the British welfare state either. For all the robust free market rhetoric that frightens the piss out of European lefties, the American welfare state is in just as parlous a condition:
Are we really broke? The answer is clearly, YES, but living on borrowed time and money. A recent study was done by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters which measures our government’s current debts and projected debts based on the proposed federal budget and revenues for 2004. By extending the numbers in constant 2003 dollars, they have come to the conclusion that the Federal government is officially insolvent to the tune of $44 trillion.
According to Financial Sense Online (from whence the above quote is lifted) both Medicare and Social Security will be bankrupt by 2010 or 2011.
This is really the big, global, dirty, open secret: the 20th century welfare state constructs are lurching, creaking and on the verge of collapse. Yet, in polite circles, this looming disaster cannot even be discussed, let alone addressed. Such is the taboo status of the welfare state that most Western politicians would rather be seen to publicly champion child molestation than any serious reform agenda.
It is for this reason that the reactionaries are trying to float various methods for the state to plunder everything and anything they can in the desperate, febrile, frantic hope that they can put off the Day of Reckoning for just a few more precious years.
Guardian argues that the key question about ID cards is not whether we have to carry them but what will be on the national database:
Now it is about how much information the government has on each of us, what the authorities want to do with it, and what rights are lost by those who don’t have what is, after all, officially being called an “entitlement” card. The real dangers now are over “function creep” and what will happen to a new cardless underclass who could be called the sans plastiques – a new British cousin for the French sans papiers.
Already function creep is beginning to surface, even though the cabinet is only now getting down to discussing the fine detail of the legislation to be introduced this autumn. In fact, as Blunkett’s white paper last July made clear, the proposal is really about setting up the first national central database of all people over 16, including foreign nationals, who are legally resident in Britain. It is this register, and not the bit of plastic in our wallet, that causes the real anxiety.
The white paper makes clear that one of the aims of the scheme is to “establish for official purposes a person’s identity so that there is one definitive record which all government departments can use if they wish”.
Some commenters have already complained about the bovine and passive nature of the British public, so this should just confirm their views:
The real problem is that we are only too willing to sell our privacy cheap. We will happily give a supermarket our entire personal lifestyle profile simply to get a plastic loyalty card. We are going to help the government create an immensely powerful personal database on each of us, not because of some damnable Whitehall conspiracy but because we couldn’t wait to get our hands on a new piece of plastic.
Also, an earlier Observer article calls for outright abandonment of the whole idea of identity cards:
The arguments against are clear and unchanging. Identity cards create new crimes and criminals while being blunt and ineffectual weapons against fraud and identity theft. They are expensive (Mr Blunkett bypasses Treasury objections only by suggesting we pay £25 for the privilege of holding records of our own fingerprints). Above all, a regime of ID cards, whether kept in a drawer or carried on our person, will create new tensions between police and ethnic minority communities, undoing much positive progress. The divisive ‘sus’ laws will be back with a vengeance.
The Home Secretary hopes to bring forward legislation after a general election. We hope the Cabinet will change his mind.
Guardian has an interview with Beverley Hughes, Home Office minister for immigration, about asylum centres, entitlement cards, and the future for refugees in the UK. Here is the section about entitlement cards, the New Labour pseudonym for identity cards. (Well, the Tories seem to be pushing them also…):
TH: What about entitlement cards?
BH: The home secretary is quite keen that the government proceeds down this route, and that’s because there’s only so much you can do towards certain kinds of issues – like illegal working, to some extent illegal immigration itself – towards knowing who’s going in and out of the country at any one time. The decision has got to be made by cabinet, which will be when we’ve actually published the results of the consultation, which we’re still considering. Cabinet will make a decision, and that will probably be by the end of the summer. But we’ve yet to publish our consultation results, and we hope to do that as soon as possible.
Social individualists of the world unite!
You have nothing to lose but your chains
and a whole world to win!
Although intended as a humorous meme-hack, the statement is also quite clearly true. The irony is that for individuals to preserve their individuality, they must unite with others to fight the collectivist political pressures that would deny that we are moral free agents and make us so much less than we are: to fight involuntary collectivism we must voluntarily act collectively.
And so that is why I set up Samizdata.net and lured others to dive into the blogosphere with me head first.
It was my attempt to give a platform to shout out to the world for like-minded individuals who rejected the intrusive force backed collectivist view of the world. We are not really trying to ‘convert’ people, though that would be nice, rather we are trying to change people’s meta-context and let the ideology take care of itself. That is our ‘mission statement’ if you like.
A meta-context is a person’s frames of reference through which they interpret the world around them. It is not an ideology or a political ‘ism’ or even a philosophy… it is ‘just’ a series of axioms and ‘givens’ that colour and flavour how you think about things and come to understand them via a set of critical or emotional preferences and underlying assumptions. We all have a personal meta-context.
For example, it is one of the reasons that although I have written many articles on Samizdata.net about the issue of private ownership of firearms in the USA, I very rarely discuss the Second Amendment. Why? Because an individualist meta-context does not have rights as something which are dependent on The State.
The Second Amendment of the US Bill of Rights is a legal artifice, but it is not the source or reason that people should be able to own weapons as a matter not of privilege but by right. In fact, no state and its laws is the source of any right whatsoever: rights are objectively yours to begin with and are not given to you by anyone. Thus I will never argue an American has the right to own a gun because ‘it says so in the Second Amendment’ because they would have a right to do so even if it said nothing of the sort.
Yet that is not to say I think the Second Amendment is a bad idea, just that it is nothing more than a useful profane tool to secure an objective right, not a source of rights. To me as an individualist, I see do not see the state as central to my life or quite frankly to civil society… as I am not a fully convinced anarchist I do see some role for limited government in securing the rights of individuals, but just as an adjunct to far more important the networks that are primarily social rather than political.
And so if we are trying to change people’s meta-context to include more individualist and less collectivist frames of reference, then it behoves us to use phrases which assist in this process rather than those which are loaded with ‘trigger words’ that may well get our views unhelpfully pigeonholed in places that does not really reflect where we are coming from. Now I certainly regard myself as a libertarian of the minarchist flavour… what is sometimes called a ‘Classical Liberal’. However the term ‘libertarian’ is increasingly loaded with meanings that generate more heat than light, and thus I have started using the term ‘social individualist’ rather than ‘libertarian in Samizdata.net’s introduction in the sidebar. We have not changed… certainly I have not… and I intend to continue arguing that the term ‘libertarian’ can only be used correctly to describe people who promote the individual liberty to chose how you interact with the world via social interaction rather than force backed political interaction. Just as Living Marxism changed its name to Spiked in order to shed the ‘baggage’ of the term ‘Marxism’ without actually changing a thing ideologically, we started life as ‘Libertarian Samizdata’ back in our early days on-line and then just became Samizdata.net in order to better reach beyond the worthy true believers. We are no longer Libertarian Samizdata but our thinking is really no different to when we started.
Yet if the term ‘libertarian’ gets in the way of what we are trying to do, it is time to start de-emphasising it. I am still a member of the executive committee of the London based Libertarian Alliance and I still regard myself as a pukka libertarian. But a more accurate description of my views than just the broad church of ‘libertarianism’ would be that I reject collectivist views of the world as utterly falsified, but at the same time I do not regard individuals as atomised objects existing in splendid isolation. Unless you live alone in a log cabin in the middle of Canada subsisting on nuts and moose meat, you are an individual within a social environment: a civil society. And it is the extent to which you can freely act within civil society as an individual pursuing self-defined ends by right, without political coercion or permission, that is the measure of whether you are free or not.
Additionally, I have long regarded socialism as the most ironic use of language in the history of mankind, given that it means to replace social interaction with entirely political interaction. It is time to reclaim the word social and reject the newspeak inversion of it into meaninglessness.
And it is addressing those issues that make this a social individualist weblog.
With the assistance of several notable bloggers, namely Perry de Havilland and Dissident Frogman, I have set up a protest blog collective called White Rose. The original impetus came from an article about imminent introduction of identity cards in Britain which scared the hell out of me, and so I decided it is time to rally the Anglosphere behind resistance to the accelerating destruction of personal liberty in the UK.
White Rose will point a finger at the British government’s measures eroding personal freedom. All the time. With as many people helping as possible. It is not an exclusively libertarian project and we welcome regular contributions, from bloggers and non-bloggers alike, across the political spectrum. The only requirement is a refusal to tolerate the draconian nature of the state’s reach over the individual.
The format is that of a one-stop-shop for news, analysis, ideas, concepts and arguments, information and contacts related to privacy and civil liberties. The focus will be on the situation in the UK but any contributors who can point at similar cases and experiences in their countries will form an essential input in the debate. The objective is to discuss alternative solutions and halt the drive for security undermining personal freedom and privacy.
To read the White Rose argument about why the debate should not be framed around the trade-off between freedom and security, please go here.
If you want to find out how to become a White Rose contributor, please go here.
Welcome to White Rose, a protest blog collective which looks at the issue of personal freedom and privacy and their erosion in the UK.
Why another blog when Samizdata.net has been increasingly drawing attention to the undermining of individual freedom and privacy? The reason is in the differing objectives. Samizdata.net is about meta-context and changing the way people view their world.
White Rose is about bringing together people from across the political spectrum to oppose invasive government, with specific focus on civil liberties. Its aim is to stimulate debate, offer practical ways to oppose and resist measures that deny personal liberty and encourage practical alternatives to problems that do not abridge individual’s freedom.
During the last year and a half I have become more aware, and more concerned with the stealthy New Labour transformation of the country that I have come to respect and admire. Many qualities of venerable British institutions have been ‘reformed’ out of recognition and, in my opinion, certainly not for the better.
Another disturbing factor is the lack of awareness by the British public of the fundamental changes that their country has been undergoing and the dire consequences these will have on their lives and personal freedom.
Some of the changes originate within the successive governments’ toxic mixture of discredited ideologies and spineless disregard for truth and reality. New Labour, however, has perfected the ‘virtual reality politics’ where facts are spinned until they fit their world-view and policies. Other tectonic changes to the fabric of British society are coming from the EU and reinforced by the government’s drive to let EU engulf the UK.
There are worthy organisations such as Privacy International, Liberty, Statewatch and others, who have been campaigning for the protection of civil liberties and fighting the good fight on a daily basis. We bow to their expertise and presence in the mainstream media and do not intend to duplicate their labours. Nevertheless, we would like to offer them a higher soapbox on which to stand in the blogosphere.
Having been an editor and contributor to Samizdata.net for some time, I have experienced first hand the scope and power of the blogosphere. By power, I mean the blogosphere’s ability to spread ideas, concepts and generate debate. In Samizdataspeak – its meme distribution potential. Recently there have been examples of bloggers reaching into the ‘real world’ but however gratifying this may be, I would not want to base my expectations of White Rose’s success on them.
The idea is to harness the interest of those individuals in the blogosphere (both bloggers and their audiences) who are concerned about erosion of civil liberties by the state. Our objective, ambitious though it may be, is to create a platform and a resource that may eventually extend its reach well beyond the blogosphere.
The motivation is to rally the Anglo part of the blogosphere to chronicle what is happening in the UK and help us make our voices heard. Again, why did we not choose to do this on Samizdata.net? Because it has a particular character and personality, with clearly stated opinions, which may not be palatable to everyone. In fact, we know they are not. However, in this battle we need people from across the political spectrum who oppose the state’s heavy handed imposition on individual freedom. Please join us here on White Rose.
Contributing bloggers can either post here exclusively or cross-post, linking back to original articles on their blogs. That means you can blog as normal and there is no the dilemma of posting either to White Rose or your own blog… you can do both. If things go well, the extra exposure from White Rose could be considerable… The objective is to extend White Rose’s contributors’ reach beyond the blogosphere into the mainstream debate.
White Rose editors are God and God moves in mysterious ways. We welcome erudite and interesting contributions but would like to avoid rants, sweeping generalisations and unfounded statements. Please help us to make a good case against the government’s attempts to strengthen its hold over the civil society.
Contact: email Gabriel Syme at gabriel at samizdata dot net or Perry at pdeh at samizdata dot net.
ZDNet has an update on the ID card situation.
The Home Office has disclosed that 4,856 people sent emails via Stand’s Web site that opposed the introduction of entitlement cards, but the final result of the consultation hasn’t yet been revealed. The government is still refusing to disclose the result of its public consultation on the introduction of entitlement cards, even though the process closed over five months ago, it has emerged.
The government has said that entitlement cards, which would include an individual’s personal details and possibly also biometric data, will help to prevent identity fraud and illegal workers. They are likely to cost upwards of £1.5bn to introduce — most of which would go to technology companies. Opponents, though, claim that they will actually work as ID cards.
Civil liberty groups Stand and Privacy International’s efforts resulted in almost 6,000 people taking part in the consultation through the organisations’ specially created Web site and phone lines.
Statements made by government ministers since the consultation closed had implied that these 6,000 responses might be bundled together into a single petition and not treated as individual views.
From the Radio Times (paper only) of 14-20 June 2003, on the subject of the BBC4 TV programme “High Rise Dreams”, shown on Thursday June 19th:
Time Shift looks back at how a group of idealistic architects changed the face of council housing in Britain, inspired by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier and new materials, only to be thwarted by financial restraints, poor craftsmanship and Margaret Thatcher’s private ownership creed.
In the Radio Times of 21-28 June 2003, on the subject of the repeat showing on BBC4 TV of the same programme on Sunday June 22nd:
In the first of three programmes on architecture, Time Shift looks at how idealistic architects changed the face of council housing in Britain, only then to be thwarted.
Well that removes the obvious political bias, but I’m afraid that if the idea was to make this puff less wrong-headed, it scarcely begins to deal with the deeper problems of it.
The implication, still being assiduously pushed on the quiet by the more blinkered sort of dinosaur partisan for the Modern Movement in architecture, is that the failures of the Modern Movement were all externally imposed, by penny pinching bureaucrats and by horrid, politically motivated politicians like the hated Margaret Thatcher, and that if only more money had been made available and they’d been allowed to get on with what they were doing unimpeded by their mindless enemies, all would have been well.
A logical (if not moral) equivalent would be if the Radio Times were to talk about how a group of idealistic Nazis tried to improve the world, inspired by the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, but about how they were thwarted (a) because not enough resources were devoted to doing Nazism, and (b) because Nazism’s opponents decided, for who-knows-what wrongheaded and arbitrary reasons, to barge in there and put a stop to it. With more money and less silly opposition from ideologically motivated enemies, all could – and would – have been well. (I dare say there are still a few old Nazis around who think this.)
The truth is that if (even) more money had been made available than was, the devastation cause by the Modern Movement in architecture in Britain would have been even more devastating.
The Modern Movement was animated by numerous seriously bad ideas (and by just sufficient good ones to make all the bad ones catch on seriously). It would require an entire specialist blog to do full justice to all these errors. I’ll end this post by alluding to just two such ideas, among dozens.
The Modern Movement is shot through with the idea that to put up an “experimentally designed” block of flats and immediately to invite actual people to live in it is a clever rather than a deeply stupid thing to do. Experimental-equals-good is the equation they swallowed whole. This is rubbish. Many experiments are excellent, as experiments. But what they mostly tell you, the way his numerous failed lightbulbs told Thomas Edison, is what not to do. Imagine if Edison had gone straight to production with his first idea of what a lightbulb might be. That was sixties housing in Britain. No wonder so much of it had to be dynamited.
The idea of a “vertical street”, also made much of by certain Britain’s Modern Movement architects, is also rubbish. Streets have to be at least a bit horizontal or they don’t work. Think square wheel.
I’ve chosen those two notions in particular because they were emphasised in the programme itself, the general tone of which was decidedly different from the puffs in the Radio Times.
I think I’ve found the culprit.
There’s a good piece in today’s Sunday Telegraph about the British government’s unceasing determination to introduce ID cards. This time it was yet another “consultation procedure”, the purpose of which was to demonstrate overwhelming public support for the idea:
But the Home Office had not counted on nine enterprising young people who work in the IT sector and who, in their spare time, run an unfunded website that encourages their peers to take part in such national debates. They posted a form on their site – www.stand.org.uk. This was not a petition, just a mechanism for readers to participate in the consultation procedure. They were gratified that more than 5,000 people used their service, of whom 4,856 were against the scheme.
The Home Office initially dismissed these responses, and stuck to the claim of overwhelming public support for ID cards. That all changed this week, when the Home Office Minister Beverley Hughes belatedly acknowledged in the Commons the existence of Stand’s response. Thus, the overwhelming public support has vanished, and, by the only measure that has been taken, ID cards can be deemed unpopular.
One of the many things this episode illustrates is the great power of quite small groups, whenever any politician claims that there is “overwhelming” support for anything. You can prove that wrong just by opening your mouths and mouthing off, and if they’re wrong about that, what else are they wrong about?
“Unanimous” support, which often takes the form of some ass in a suit saying that “nobody is saying” what you then proceed to say and prove that you’ve been saying for years, can be even more easily punctured.
I note with disappointment (but not surprise) that the ‘global warming’ hoax is still proving useful to cash-strapped governments everywhere:
New Zealand’s farmers have criticised a proposed tax on the flatulence emitted by their sheep and cattle.
The move is part of the Wellington government’s action to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Scientists estimate that methane emitted by farm animals is responsible for more than half of the country’s greenhouse gases.
To be known as the Federal Advanced Rural Tariff, it surely has to rank as among the most secure of long-term revenue raisers. Contrast this to the UK where draconian petroleum taxes are justified by HMG’s creepy ‘behaviour modification’ rubric. The argument goes that taxing people out of their cars and onto public transport is a good thing because it ‘saves the planet’ (stop laughing). Of course, if we ever did stop using our cars so much, the paladins in Whitehall would have a collective coniption fit.
However, short of turning them all into cheeseburgers, there is no way to persuade cattle to stop passing wind, so a different bonus has to be invented:
The money is be used to fund research on agricultural emissions.
Read: “Job creation scheme for the political classes”. Further proof that the Kyoto Protocol really was a lot of hot air.
Still, there is a political upside to this. Next time some veggie enviro-mentalist hisses at you for tucking into a steak, you can always respond by telling them that you’re helping to reduce global warming.
A small piece of art history from Jim of Jim’s Journal, commenting on this:
About twenty years ago – Binghamton University in upstate New York – a paved plaza between the main library building and the computer center building – an installation of assorted works of “modern art” sculpture is scattered about this plaza as part of some arts festival. There is an empty cement base near the entrance to the computer center, apparently the sculpture that is supposed to be there has not yet arrived. There is a construction project at another part of the campus, at least half a mile away.
During the night some unknown group of pranksters hijacked a huge section of concrete tube – perhaps six feet in diameter and eight feet in length – and somehow transported it to that empty base. Hundreds of people passed it every hour as students went from class to class. Most ignored it, just as they ignored the other sculptures, but many paused to glance at it, even to stop and study it, discuss it. Everyone assumed it was another example of modern art. (I must confess that I fell for the trick; to me it didn’t look any stranger than any of the other “works of art” on display.)
Several days passed before the organizers of the art exhibit realized what had happened. The temporary work of art was returned to its intended use at the construction site and campus security was ordered to investigate. The arts community was in an uproar. The perpetrator of this crime against society must be tracked down and punished!
I don’t know if campus security took this seriously or not. (I think that they probably just enjoyed a good laugh over the matter.) The culprits were never caught.
Jim
Anticipation is growing… Angel of Darkness, the latest instalment of Tomb Raider is about to hit the streets, Deus Ex: Invisible War is coming soon, Doom III is snarling its way towards us and the most anticipated of them all, Half Life 2 will soon be on the shelves.
After the disappointment of the by-the-numbers Unreal 2, the bug-fest of the otherwise promising Devastation, the even buggier CFS 3 and that mixture of complete genius and forehead-to-keyboard annoyance that is Splinter Cell, I think on balance it will end up a fulfilling year for hardcore gamers.
One of the things the (relative) failure of Unreal 2 suggests to me is that for single player games, great graphics and effects are just not enough anymore… those are more or less expected now. For a game to really rock a gamer’s world these days, there needs to be betters quality plots and an engaging story (which is what made Half Life and Deus Ex such durable successes and in so doing, raised the bar).
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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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