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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There is an interesting discussion point in the Telegraph called Should we be looking for a new England?.
And my answer would be yes. Ideally I would have liked to preseve much of the old England but I fear that is no longer a realistic option. I used to support the idea of an unwritten constitution because of the importance of unenumerated rights, but the Major and Blair years have shown that Britain’s unwritten constitution was not worth the paper it was not written on. We have been disarmed, we have had our rights to free speech greatly curtailed, our rights to trial by a jury of our peers abridged, our underpinning civil society regulated out of existence in area after area, our right to property vastly infringed upon.
In short, there can be no pretence whatsoever that The System has worked to protect us from our political masters. The British system survived for a long time because enough people wanted it to survive. As most are now willing to allow themselves to be herded and bought off with their own money, the system is now little more than populist authoritarianism.
Yes, we very badly need a new England.
(Kindly spare us any jokes about New England.)
As every right-thinking person instinctively knows, one is not allowed to refer to the British National Party without such reference being accompanied by frenzied denunciations. As if the mere act of acknowledging the existence of that organisation is sufficient to brand the speaker with a mark of depravity that has to be warded off in advance.
I have decided to scratch my name off the cast list of that particular pantomime. The show has been running for far too long, everyone knows the script by heart and it all sounds to terribly, suffocatingly tedious and, if this article in the Times is any indication at all, then I am not the only person to have lost patience with the same old, same old.
What I find so interesting about the article is not so much in what is being said but in the manner in which it is being said. Gone is the fear and loathing, gone is the high moral indictment, gone are the blistering accusations. Instead, the rising popularity of the BNP (and its leader, Nick Griffin) is examined with a tone which is temperate, measured and, in some places, bordering on the sympathetic. That remarkable change of tone is, of itself, significant:
About 70 people are packed into a back room of the Golden Lion pub, with not a skinhead or pair of Doc Martens in sight and more tweeds than T-shirts. They are male and female, young and old, working class and middle class, ex-Labour and ex-Tory, several of them Daily Telegraph readers. They are mostly solid Yorkshire folk who have watched immigrants transform areas in which they grew up and believe – rightly or wrongly – that their way of life is under threat. They are bewildered more than hate-filled. They are fearful more than fear-inspiring, and feel gagged by political correctness. They do not come from sink estates. They are stakeholders, people with something to lose.
Throwing their lot in with the BNP may not be the wisest course of action but it would be a gross mistake to dismiss these people as knuckle-dragging bigots. They are unlikely to think of themselves in those terms. Indeed, they are people whose national character (or a part of it, at least) was forged in the fight against national socialism and while I might question the course of their political migration, I cannot find it in myself to blame them for their clear disenchantment with the status quo. → Continue reading: Weimar Britain
There is a class of drugs called ‘cognitive enhancers’ that could potentially raise the intelligence, skills and productivity of users. Pharmocological enhancement is an anticipated bonus of the information revolution, and has been welcomed by many in the transhumanist community. These issues are now cognitive blips on the unenhanced specialist offices that civil services establish to monitor that horrible outcome of progress known as the Future.
When governments begin to understand that people could use a new set of drugs for improvement, they grasp for an improper P word, Prohibition. Their Puritanical wish to maintain a level playing field between themselves and the Populace demands that these substances be controlled, classified, prescribed, monitored and hopefully banned. Enhancement is a dirty word, but if these drugs have to be accepted, then they will make sure that we will use them on their terms:
Foresight, a Government think-tank, believes that “cognitive enhancers” could be “as common as coffee” within a couple of decades to help a person think faster, relax and sleep more efficiently….
The Department of Health has become so concerned about these drugs that it has asked the Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS) to assess the potential impact of the substances, some of which are licensed in Britain to treat narcolepsy or acute tiredness.
They are already being bought illegally over the internet in the US by people who think they will enhance their performance in the classroom and in the office.
Government attention in these drugs is unwelcome, since the report of Foresight or the Academy of Medical Sciences speculate about social problems as an excuse for regulation. One argument raised is that the pharmaceutical industry could abandon research into mental health and switch to ‘cognitive enhancers’ because of greater demand.
All of the evidence indicates that civil servants, politicians, and public sector professionals would not benefit from ‘cognitive enhancers’, since their increased intelligence would be expressed in greater fiscal and regulatory complexity. These classes should be prohibited from employing cognitive enhancement.
While watching a rather silly movie about volcanoes, starring Pierce Brosnan, I idly surfed the Web to see how many examples there have been of tectonic movements in the United Kingdom.
It turns out there have been quite a few, albeit not on the catastrophic scale recorded in the US west coast, or Japan, Greece, Turkey and Iran. But even in little ol Blighty, the earth has moved. The British Geological Survey website is worth a look. I was taken aback to see that there was even a minor tremor in Norfolk. Yes, Norfolk, home of turkeys, mustard and birthplace of Lord Nelson.
I was struck by this interesting spin appearing in a BBC news report (not the BBC’s fault, they just printed what the spokesman said):
The Commons public accounts committee, headed by Edward Leigh MP, said urgent action was needed to ensure an adequate service was provided.
Its report said the electronic patient clinical record, central to the project, was already two years late.
But the government said the MPs’ report was based on out-of-date information.
Does this mean the system is less late than it was, and that time flows backwards in the NHS? No. Not even the current administration would try to sell that.
Has it been completed in the meantime? No. Limited trials begin in Bolton sometime soon (so Lancastrians in particular should attempt to opt-out while they can).
Does it mean there will be more up-to-date information presented by the government to prove the committee wrong? No. The government resists providing information about ongoing projects as much as it can, even to the public accounts committee. Giving out detailed evidence voluntarily (let alone in a checkable form) is unknown.
What it means is the government wishes you wouldn’t pay attention to the committee report at all, and wants you to believe it is of no value. Since the committee relies entirely on material presented by the government, simply saying it is wrong presents some problems. That might be taken as admitting government numbers are unreliable. But by saying “out-of-date”, it implies some fault in the committee without specifying quite what. You are invited to believe its conclusions are not valid and discount everything it says on that basis.
The other day I pulled a couple of quotations from this book, which I mostly liked although it has some annoying parts too. What got me wondering is why so-called US “liberal” academics are capable of writing penetrating and thoughtful pieces on certain areas of life but also clearly dumb as stumps on economics. Take this passage from Professor Hanley on page 72 and 73 of the book, where he defends racial quotas in universities:
“Suppose that a white male applicant loses out on a college place to a black male applicant, even though his SAT score was higher… I think the sense of unfairness here springs instead from the intuition that since the white student didn’t do anything wrong, and since his score was higher, he deserves the place ahead of the black student.”
“To which I say, bullcrap.”
This professor has a nice line in reasoned argument. Let’s go on.
“This is once again simply ignoring structural discrimination, if it’s not just plainly racist.”
Define “structural discrimination”, Professor. What is it? How can a person be discriminated against where no actual conscious human being has decided that Fred is going to get a fairer deal in a college admission than John? Structurual discrimination is a sort of catch-all expression that in fact simply says that over a long period of time, certain racial groups have underperformed in certain ways and that there might be factors that should be corrected. But for how long does the impact of this “structural discrimination” last? 10 years? 20? 100? What sort of empirical evidence does Prof. Hanley think will be needed to show that this is over and we can revert to the idea of treating people equally before the law, like those fuddy-duddies such as James Madison said should be the case? The Professor does not say, although he swears a lot and thinks that people who disagree with him are idiots. I guess he is so struck by his own moral grandeur that he cannot imagine anyone decent disagreeing. What a jerk.
He goes on:
“If we’re granting that the white student is a beneficiary of structural discrimination, then we can’t say that he is more deserving (of a college place). Desert is a matter of what you’ve done with what you’ve got. We have no prior reason to think that the white applicant has done more – so we have no reason to think that he has been unfairly done by.”
So presumably the honest thing for such a professor would be to give up the pretence of holding SAT or other education tests at all. Why not say this: “White folk are beneficiaries of former discrimination in their favour, even if the folk today are not to be blamed for what their ancestors did. As a result, no matter whether the white college applicant is a clever, conscientious person, he or she should be wiling to let people from racial groups we think are the victims of ancestral discrimination take first place in the queue. And if you disagree with that judgement, then you are an evil person and quite possibly a Republican.”
I take back what I said about this book and its author a day or so ago. He is not as smart or as funny as he first appeared (well, we all make mistakes). He is, in fact, a thug with a fancy academic title. Sadly, there are a lot of them.
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The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy
– Fred L. Smith
Unlike some free marketeers, I do not have a visceral loathing of trade unions, although I can understand why some people do dislike them. With very large businesses, such as say, ICI or GM, it probably saves a lot of time and bother to negotiate pay and conditions through a union and its representatives.
So long as they do not try to form monopolies and freeze non-union members out of a company via a ‘closed shop’ or expect to be free of the ordinary tort liabilities of the Common Law, I think unions are often beneficial. They can provide services to their members like insurance or other benefits, help members with specific disputes, and occasionally their strikes for better pay and conditions do in fact help workers in vulnerable situations, such as where there are few other sources of work and an employer has a de-facto monopoly negotiation power – although such cases are pretty rare and do not last long in a properly free and efficient market place.
There is debate on whether employers really do have a structural upper hand in negotiating pay with employees and whether unions do anything useful to ‘correct’ that supposed imbalance. The economist W. Hutt was a notable skeptic on how much of an advantage employers actually have, if at all. Anyway, even if there is not a significant structural imbalance between the negotiating freedom of labour and employers, unions can smooth the pay negotiation path at times.
So there you have it. A member of the Samizdata writing crew, that band of capitalist oppressors, says that unions can be a force for good.
And then, as Stephen Pollard notes, the NUJ reminds us of why so many folk dislike unions and their antics. Sigh.
Considering how good squatters have it in England and Wales, I find it hard to take the faux-incredulousness in the British press about people who organize themselves on MySpace before going into unoccupied homes and destroying them for the fun of it. The law of the land has such little regard for property rights that it should come as a shock to no one that these teenagers do not, either.
This quote is from a year ago, January.
Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. “I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.”
And this editorial was written last August.
We must give due criticism to the University for its decisions that put students in greater danger than was necessary. By that I am not so much referring to the decision to allow morning classes to take place, but rather the decades-old policy that prohibits students, faculty and staff from legally carrying firearms on campus. This ban even goes so far as to include those who have valid Concealed Handgun Permits.
For those of you who have not heard yet, 32 people died at Virginia Tech today.
Here was Virginia Tech’s solution to a mass killer on campus.
Steven Baker of Blogspotting writes about his experience of casino backstage:
They have banks and banks of TV screens looking at the tables and the traffic of people. They have fixed cameras over every table, and tracking cameras operating within what look like black cantaloupe-sized half domes on the ceilings.
They zoom on one woman’s behaviour:
Then he saw it. She had her cards, a black jack, and with one quick movement she upped her bet by adding another $5 chip. We watched again and again in slow motion.
This is still fine by me. The casino is private property, in a business where some people are highly motivated to cheat. It is what happened afterwards that I find interesting.
They decided she was no pro. Still, they sent a security person to talk to her as she was leaving the table. We watched. She was surprised, confused, then grave. Then he said something that put her at ease. She relaxed, smiled, joked, and then went along her tipsy way.
I share Steven’s unease and his realisation that these casinos are giving us a preview of life in the coming age of surveillance.
Increasingly our movements and gestures, online and off, will be open to scrutiny by companies and governments alike. It will be up to them to decide what to crack down on, what to let pass. In making these decisions, they’ll be weighing not only our innocence or guilt, but also our happiness as customers, our ability to stir up a fuss, the cost of the public perception that they’re snoops. The upshot: We won’t have much privacy, but crafty governments and companies will give us the illusion we do.
In other words, technology in an environment that has not evolved to match it, i.e. does not have respect for the individual as a fundamental principle, eventually leads to a dystopia. In a society without openness and individual autonomy, technology amplifies and entrenches the power of the centralised system, however benign the original intention. I am reminded of The Difference Engine, a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The story is set in Victorian times, in a society with all the pathologies of an authoritarian system, i.e. one lacking proper checks and balances. It is taken to the point of grotesqueness and shown as ultimately fragile – its strength rests on the technology to the exclusion of individual freedom. Innovation is institutionalised, variety killed, leading to vulnerability to outside innovation and to inherent flaws within the system.
The difference between the impact of technology online and offline could not be more stark. Offline we have the modern Panopticon, surveillance cameras of increasing sophistication and intrusiveness. Online we still have the ability to protect ourselves or can find those who can help us do so rather than have our ‘protection’ imposed by a centralised institution. Yes, the internet is an anarchy and a sewer – as Ben Laurie who ought to know describes it :). But it is also a space where new ways of doing things can emerge and more importantly where individuals can flourish without depending on organisational resources. Offline we are defenceless against somebody building the aforementioned Panopticon, online there are ways to design against it.
So simply put, I would rather have the anarchy and the sewer with individual sovereignty than a Big Brother in whatever disguise.
cross-posted from Media Influencer
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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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