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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One of the advantages of giving up smoking (10 days now, folks) is that you can defend the rights of other smokers from a higher strategic ground; nobody can accuse you of having a personal axe to grind.
But not having an axe leaves me with a free hand with which to take up cudgels against busybodies and their campaigns for increased state bullying:
“The survey was carried out on behalf of Cancer Research UK, Marie Curie Cancer Care, QUIT, ASH and No Smoking Day.
Officials said they hoped the survey would encourage ministers to take steps to ban smoking at work.”
My own view is that it is up to the owners of the business to decide upon the issue of smoking on the premises and what I find grating is not that these organisations disagree with me or even that they publicise their views on the matter. No, what I find questionable if whether ‘charities’ should be engaging in these kinds of campaigns.
Incidences of charities behaving as political lobbyists are far too frequent to be dismissed as symptoms of altruistic exuberance. In fact, whilst this is probably not true in the case of organisations like Cancer Research UK or Marie Curie, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the label ‘charity’ is, in some cases, used as a fig-leaf to mask a wholly political ambition. It provides an automatic authentication for the views they express and an insulation against criticism of either their opinions or motives.
I wish to make it clear that I am not against charities. In fact, I am very much in favour of charities as voluntary organisations which can and do provide real help to the distressed and the weak with far greater efficiency and humanity that any number of indifferent state bureaucracies. But I do think that the parameters of ‘charitable status’ are overdue for some scrutiny. Organisations that confine their activities to distributing hot soup to the destitute or arranging day-trips for orphans deserve the title and the advantages it brings. Organisations which exist merey to egg on Big Brother and advance an ideological agenda are lobbyists and should be treated as such.
I honestly fail to understand all the fuss over the Judicial decision not to incarcerate burglars. It is perfectly understandable in light of the fact that, in London, the burglars are not even going to be apprehended in the first place.
Burglaries in London are only going to be investigated if the crime is “deemed solvable”, according to new guidelines for the Metropolitan Police.
What they mean by ‘deemed solvable’ is if the investigating officer actually finds the felon climbing out of a householders window wearing a zorro-mask and holding a bag marked ‘swag’. Short of that, they can’t be bothered. A complaint to the police from a householder that a burglar has assaulted them may stir the sediment in their feet and, naturally, they will still whip themselves instantaneously into a frenzy of righteous froth should a burglar ever complain that a householder has assaulted him. After all we can’t have people getting away with that sort of thing, can we.
However, mass voluntary redundancy is not on the agenda just yet:
Crimes which will be given priority must come under four categories: serious crimes like murder and rape, major incidents, hate crime and incidents that are the priority of a particular borough.
‘Priority of a particular borough’ and ‘hate crimes’ are largely synonymous and is likely to lead to victims of burglary or theft fabricating an element of racist abuse in order to get their complaints taken seriously. Thus the incidence of ‘hate crime’ will dramatically rocket and prompt politicians to hastily enact even more anti-hate legislation.
Also, I wonder how long it will be until ‘low-profile’ (i.e. non-politically sensitive) murders and rapes are quietly dropped from the agenda?
Hopefully though, some sections of the public wll begin to appreciate that the police, like all other nationalised industries, are indifferent to their customers. Equally, they may begin to re-evaluate the assumed social contract which the state is now unilaterally shredding.
In the long term, this may be good news. Though not such good news, I fear, in the short term.
The excellent folks at Stand.org.uk, who describe themselves as “a group of volunteers who originally came together in 1998 in a vain attempt to fix the worst aspects of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act”, are mobilising efforts to oppose the imposition of ID cards in the UK. They enable you to contribute your comments to the ‘consultation’ process, which Downing Street is claiming shows Growing support for entitlement cards… We think you should go to Stand.org.uk website and let them show you how to tell the British government exactly how you feel about this. I did and left comments saying:
To put it bluntly, this is clear evidence, not that any more is needed, that the Labour government is as utterly inimical to civil liberties as the Tory party was. I shall never cooperate with what is clearly just a euphemism for a national ID card which will enhance the state’s ability to monitor and control its subjects. It is clear that any ‘voluntary’ system you offer up will just the thin end of the wedge for a mandatory system that will enable policemen to stop you on the street and demand “your papers”. I will never consent or cooperate with this.
Be polite but tell them what you think. Kudos to Stand.org.uk for their efforts to defend what is left of civil liberties in the United Kingdom.
The state is not your friend
Bill Clinton is the favourite candidate for the office of Chancellor of Oxford University. He is facing growing opposition from dons who fear that his election would endanger the reputation of the institution and the virtue of its undergraduates.
The arguments against his candidacy are many and varied:
- The former President of the United States would harm “the dignity of the office” as Mr Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes, including his affair with Monica Lewinsky, render him unsuitable for such a prestigious post
- His lies on oath about the Lewinsky affair and his decision to award presidential pardons to a number of well-connected criminals just before he left office in January 2001 should disqualify him from the role.
- Mr Clinton’s patchy academic record hasn’t been particularly distinguished in any field – he went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar in 1968 but failed to complete his degree and his extensive commitments in America.
Mark Almond, a fellow of Oriel College and a lecturer in 20th-century history, added that Mr Clinton would face “endless allegations of sexual scandal”.
“There’s bound to be trouble…We need a woman chancellor, not a womanising chancellor.”
As far as I know, the main argument for is Mr Clinton’s fundraising abilities. Since leaving office he has embarked on a series of lucrative foreign tours, giving lectures for a reputed £1,200 a minute. Oxford University being starved of state funds and facing transatlantic competition for its academics, grossly underpaid in the British academia, is desparate for more cash. And I suppose some dons are reasoning – if he brings more money, sod the dignity of the office or the potential damage it may do to the university’s image.
I can see how that happened – during my university days we came to appreciate the unique tutorial system at Oxford that the government has been threatening to scrap as it is five times more expensive per student than the usual seminar/lecture style of university education. Both Oxford and Cambridge are constantly under attack for their allegedly ‘elitist’ admissions policies and forced to fulfill quotas for students from ‘state’ schools.
I do have a problem with Clinton being the next Chancellor of Oxford University. I also want the university to raise enough funds to continue in its distinguished tradition, without the need to force change because of a lack of them. However, there must be better candidates for the post, both morally and academically more accomplished as well as able to attract sufficient funds for this ancient institution.
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.
– Winston Churchill
“You teach people that it’s wrong to care. You tell them that the right course of action is to “not get involved”. When they see a crime being committed, then if they try to stop it they may end up in prison, but there’s no punishment for looking the other direction and not seeing. And thus fewer people will get involved.”
– Steven Den Beste writing on what happens when you punish people for killing robbers. Emphasis added by me.
At the heart of almost all ‘redistributive’ statism lies the idea that it is perfectly okay to take money from one person, backed by the threat of state violence, in order to give it to other people deemed more worthy of that money. The ‘worthy’ people are those who have managed to make the political process work in their favour in some manner, such as students in Britain.
People like Will Straw, son of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, call education a ‘public good’ and thus sees that as ample justification for the National Union of Students demanding that students like himself have their education paid for by money taken from others… and yet is not the opening of a corner shop or supermarket a ‘public good’ as well? It offers not just needed products but also employment. Is not almost any lawful economic activity between two willing parties a ‘public good’ for much the same reason, as it generates wealth and satisfies needs?
Yet unlike education funded by theft, these other activities involve only consensual relationships and private capital allocated with private insights and information… If I buy a product or open a shop, it is because I think it is in my interests. However I am not going to use force to extort people into buying products at my shop or acquire things by violent robbery.
Although Will Straw may think it is in my interests for him to be educated, I happen to disagree. However he is quite prepared to have the state use force to compel me to provide for his education. Like most who feed at the public trough, he casually accepts the morality of the proxy violence of the state provided it benefits him.
There are some actual ‘public goods’ in the sense Will Straw uses the word, such as defence, the prevention of crime and perhaps discouraging communicable diseases, but those are really the only legitimate role of state… for the likes of Will Straw to think something like his personal education is something that compares to those true ‘public goods’ is strange thinking indeed, for it violates the true public good of the prevention of crime: he would have the state rob me for his benefit.
I quit about ten years ago. I was getting sick of it and Hillary was going to finance her health plan with taxes on cigs. I went cold turkey and being mad at Hillary helped me over the rough spots. Maybe you could think of all your money that will NOT be going to the government.
– Commenter ‘Spacer’ on how to motivate a libertarian to give up smoking
America is to award the Congressional Medal of Honour, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross, to a British Special Boat Service (formerly Special Boat Squadron) commando who led the rescue of a CIA officer from an Afghan prison revolt.
It will be the first time the medal has been awarded to a living foreigner. The Queen will have to give permission for the SBS soldier to wear it.
The SBS senior NCO led a patrol of half-a-dozen SBS commandos who rescued a member of the CIA’s special activities section from the fort at Qala-i-Jangi near Mazar-i-Sharif, last November. The fort was holding 500 al-Qa’eda and Taliban prisoners, many of whom had not been searched and were still armed.
An exchange of fire developed into a full-scale revolt and two CIA officers who had been interrogating the prisoners were caught in the battle in which one was killed. The uprising went on for three days and the SBS commandos remained throughout, bringing down aerial fire to quell the revolt.
The battle was one of the most contentious episodes in the war last year with human rights groups raising concerns over air strikes against prisoners, some of them unarmed.
The eagerness of the Americans to recognise the courage of the NCO contrasts with suspicion within the regiment that two SAS soldiers being considered for VCs for an attack on the al-Qaeda cave complex will not get them.
Not by strength, by guile
In this age where ancient protections of Liberty are openly scoffed upon by the powers that be, it behooves us to proclaim loudly from the rooftops those rights they much prefer buried and forgotten. I wonder how many of you know it is a basic Right of an American Juror to judge not only on fact but on law as well? As this forum has a large libertarian readership, I wager it is far higher than in the general public – but still depressingly low.
Jury Nullification is an ancient right of law inherited from England. It is yet another of the many glorious innovations in the defense of liberty invented here and forsaken in the rush to fascism of the last hundred years. Jury trial, Double Jeopardy, Habeas Corpus and Innocence until Proven Guilty all seem destined to follow it into the Westminster tip.
These foundational protections are still fairly safe in America. It is also the case Jury Nullification is still valid law there. This is not a matter of strange interpretations. It is a dirty little secret which is not easily swept under the courthouse rug.
I’ve known a number of activists in the battle to pass Fully Informed Jury laws, so I’ve long been aware of the importance of this concept in American history. The ancestors of many black Americans owe their freedom to this not-so-arcane bit of legal history. Juries could not be found that would convict workers on the “Underground Railroad” which helped so many escape the degradation of being self portable property. In both English and American history, Jury Nullification has been a bulwark of Liberty. It does not matter who buys the legislature if the courts cannot find a Jury of Peers willing to go along – or be bullied into going along – with the scam.
This is why “The System” hates it so much. It lets you, the six-pack drinking slob on the street tell them the Law itself is unjust – and make it stick. It makes you, the citizen, the final arbiter of what is Just.
I bring this up tonight because I finally “got around to” reading a legal paper by Glenn Reynolds on the topic. It’s quite a good one and I think anyone interested in how the system used to work to protect liberty should read it.
Make sure everyone you know who might possibly be called for jury duty knows it as well, and knows if the Judge or Prosecutor threatens them… it is the Judge or Prosecutor who is breaking the law, not the Juror.
Real time speech translation, speech to text conversion, story summarization: all of these were “just around the corner” when I was a CMU grad student. I remember reading Dr. Raj Reddy’s proposal for a speech understanding system, what later became the Hearsay I project I believe. This was all going to happen in five years or so. By the time they developed Hearsay II his research group had a DEC PDP-10 (the cmub) pretty much to themselves. All the rest of us had to make do on the cmua.
That was in 1973.
So here we are, thirty years on, and it appears the real thing may really, finally be “five years in the future”. Some of the key elements are actually working under field conditions. It has always been inevitable we’d crack the speech understanding problem… eventually. It just took a couple years longer than we thought. [There were even more optimistic thoughts in the early 50’s, but that was computing before my time. Vacuum tube days. I think Fred Flintstone worked on the project.]
So here are a few very readable documents on the current state of military applications. The Phrasealator has been tested in Afghanistan by the guy who built it. The following are pdf documents. Right click and download.
- “An SBIR Success Story”, James Bass (script)
- “An SBIR Success Story”, James Bass (slides)
- “Human Language Technology TIDES/EARS/Babylon”, Charles Wayne (script)
- “Human Language Technology TIDES/EARS/Babylon”, Charles Wayne (slides) (large-ish)
PS: Note the military dune buggy at Kandahar Airport in James Bass’ slides. I want one!
When I hear the words “new push” I always think of a) the First World War, and b) the Soviet Union. It’s what people do when their systems aren’t working – apply more mindless force. So, no surprise to find that schools are being instructed to do more new pushes. Next they will be going over the top and introducing Five Year Plans.
– Alice Bachini (in her new blog Rational Parenting yesterday)
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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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