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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This popped up yesterday on the Libertarian Alliance Forum, courtesy of Libertarian Alliance Director Chris Tame. Is it for real, or are we in paranoid fantasy territory? Either way, all White Rosers should know the story, about which, until this, I knew nothing.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 7, 2003
CASPIAN asks, “How can we trust these people with our personal data?”
CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) says anyone can download revealing documents labeled “confidential” from the home page of the MIT Auto-ID Center web site in two mouse clicks.
The Auto-ID Center is the organization entrusted with developing a global Internet infrastructure for radio frequency identification (RFID). Their plans are to tag all the objects manufactured on the planet with RFID chips and track them via the Internet.
Privacy advocates are alarmed about the Center’s plans because RFID technology could enable businesses to collect an unprecedented amount of information about consumers’ possessions and physical movements. They point out that consumers might not even know they’re being surveilled since tiny RFID chips can be embedded in plastic, sewn into the seams of garments, or otherwise hidden.
“How can we trust these people with securing sensitive consumer information if they can’t even secure their own web site?” asks CASPIAN Founder and Director Katherine Albrecht. → Continue reading: Is this for real?
F is for Frogman… Dissident Frogman… he is here… in London!
We know who he is… and you don’t.
I’ve been reading the discussion about Brian’s post on a possible USAF suborbital spaceplane project. It seems to me much of the discussion is overblown and ungrounded in reality. This is the expected next generation of military aircraft. An acquaintance of mine, Mitchell Burnside Clapp, championed a military space plane project named “Black Horse” a decade ago when he was a USAF officer. I have some of his papers on my islandone web site. Mitchell has been involved with commercial space ventures since he left the military.
This is not an ICBM or an ICBM derivative we are talking about. That is a non-starter for practical vehicles, whether for the warfighter or the commuter. It will be an aeroplane with a rocket engine. If it is a descendant of Mitchell’s design studies it will use in-flight refueling to top off the tanks. This reduces the weight of landing gear. They will only need to support a partially fueled craft. Once such a craft drops away from the tanker, it lights up and goes suborbital. It is not that much different operationally from the SR-71, it just goes a bit faster and higher.
Perhaps the USAF will buy from some of my other friends. There are some in the Mojave desert who would be more than happy to scale up to their suborbital design (XCOR). Brian has indicated this is a DARPA initiative, so contracts to companies like XCOR are a very real possibility. DARPA likes small groups with new ideas and has very little red tape or strings attached to their funding. I know. I’ve worked on DARPA projects myself.
This could be the real start of the commercial space launch industry. Greg Maryniak of the X-Prize organization has at various time spoken on this point. The early days of aviation were done privately and their products were then purchased by government. So airplanes are, in the minds of the person on the street, a commercial product. Rockets were built by and for government projects. Apollo made space travel a “government product” in the common mind. It was a false start and it has delayed space travel by decades. It sent us down a dead end road of manned artillery rockets and giant white winged elephants.
We are about to see a total conceptual change. People like those at X-Prize are changing the mind set. There are a dozen or more small companies building suborbital aerospace planes and ships. At least one (Rutan) will fly by the end of the year (target is mid-December on Wright Brothers first flight anniversary); several more will probably fly in the following 2 years. We are about to go back in time and start the space program over. This time we’ll do it the way the Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss and others did it. Privately but with the odd military or mail contract to keep body and soul together.
Suborbital aircraft are no revolution in aerial warfare. They bring no completely new capability to the USAF. It is advantageous to the aircrews. I am sure they will very much appreciate flight times of 1.5 hours instead of fourteen and up. As to those on the recieving end… I don’t much think they care what time the bomber took off and how long it flew before sending them off to Valhalla.
Where it may well be revolutionary is in US basing policy. It won’t change things over night. In a couple decades closure of US overseas air bases may be a viable policy option. That’s a salutory effect from where I sit.
We already are seeing the start of a retrenchment of US global forces. I suggested this outcome some months ago. We are moving large numbers of our forces out of Europe; we have moved out of Saudi Arabia; US troops are being pulled back from the truce line in North Korea. I can’t see us maintaining a high profile in Turkey any more. Even worse than being unreliable, they have had been working to assasinate leaders and destabilize the Kurdish areas of Iraq. Turkish black ops guys on such missions have been captured by US forces at least twice. We will be stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time, but it will not be comparable to the fifty year deployments in Germany and South Korea.
You may argue whether the US government intends this trajectory. Nonetheless, we are on it. The time will come when we can force a return to a “Fortress America” defense posture. There is no other possible path that will make it politically feasible for us to militarily disengage from the world. If we can defend ourselves against any attacker from anywhere on the globe and do so quickly from our own shores, we can satisfy worries of the most paranoid Hawk.
At the same time we will decrease our target profile amongst the nutcases of the world.
There really are some clots out there, nearly all of them collectivists, of one kind or another. You give them a debating point, they complain about the debating hall. You give them a nice hall, they complain about the expense of the hall. Whatever the point is, they avoid talking about this central issue, and stick to some peripheral soft target. They perhaps even convince themselves, after enough posts of gibberish, that they’ve won the debate, rather than had us laugh at them, in the very best style of Jeremy Paxman interviewing some New Labour ministerial half-wit. And then, when we do sometimes manage to press them to actually talk about the matter in hand, they start shouting, and screaming, as soon as they realise their childish threatening game is up.
But aside from these fun and games, what they’ve failed to realise, is that the reason most of us classical liberals are classical liberals, no matter what our starting position was — whether socialist, fascist, communist, Last Tory Boy, or whatever — is because we have been prepared to argue our case in a sensible calm fashion. This argumentative debate is often an internal one, too, arguing with ourselves, as well as an external one, arguing with others. → Continue reading: The unbearable lightness of clots
I said nothing because I wasn’t a panhandler. In Cincinnati, they are coming for the panhandlers through mandatory ID card registration. I’m not a terribly large fan of panhandlers, but is the solution tagging them and releasing them back into the wild?
I understand why it is necessary for people to register for drivers licenses. Driving is a privilege, not a right. But is panhandling? Surely I have the right to sit on a public street corner and, while not harassing anyone, say or do whatever I want. And certainly people have the right to give me money if they want to, so why is it that panhandlers need to register?
Cross posted from miniluv.
The Telegraph reports that Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the man in charge of drafting Europe’s first constitution, admitted yesterday that the much-trumpeted removal of the word “federal” from the text changed nothing and was merely a ruse to shield the British government from criticism. The former French president said the cosmetic change that did not affect the shape or character of the future EU or lessen the transfer of real power to Brussels.
I knew the word federal was ill-perceived by the British and a few others. I thought that it wasn’t worth creating a negative commotion, which could prevent them supporting something that otherwise they would have supported. So I rewrote my text, replacing intentionally the word federal with the word communautaire, which means exactly the same thing.
So much for the British government’s insistence that the EU constitution will not lead to a European superstate. Downing Street has hailed the removal of the word federal as its biggest triumph in the 18-month long drafting process. Giscard d’Estaing also moaned:
It’s a campaign by people who want to destroy Europe, which is something that’s very negative and counter-productive. But I was not convinced they were really influencing the British people.
The ‘patrician’ Frenchman is right about our desire to destroy Europe or at least the bit that insists on dragging Britain into it. Such efforts do appear to be if not counter-productive, certainly rather ineffective so far. However, if we could make him right about the influence on the British people…
I think they have been having a day of broody reflection over at the Daily Social Worker.
Peter Mandelson says:
Political projects that fail to renew themselves are soon swept away and deserve to be. That won’t be allowed to happen with New Labour. It is one reason why the progressive governance conference, which starts on Friday, comes at a crucial time for the international centre-left.
Meanwhile, Jeanette Winterson says:
How could we double spending on schools? We could start by abandoning the fetish of higher education, where armies of illiterate, innumerate kids are signed on to courses that are as useless as they are. Why are the kids useless? They haven’t been taught properly in school. Why haven’t they been taught properly in school? No money. So why do we insist on university targets when we aren’t able to educate all children at a basic level?
A far cry from all the smug triumphalism of the late 90’s, isn’t it. And is it just me or do I detect that these people are gripped by a mounting sense of panic? Perhaps even they have have realised that they have run out of ideas and that they need to clutch at something, anything before their entire project unravels.
Or maybe I am reading too much into it.
Although there was a debate a little while ago in the UK about the desirability (or otherwise) of state-funded political parties it did not generate a great deal of interest and quickly subsided.
However, and by default, the argument is now over because we find that we have a state-funded political party that evolved all by itself. This new party is called the BBC and it is currently engaged in a locked-horns, blood-spattered confrontation with the government over the Iraq war:
THE BBC last night defiantly reasserted its independence and impartiality last night as it insisted that it was right to broadcast claims that Downing Street had “sexed up” a dossier on Iraq’s weapons.
The corporation’s governors issued the strongly worded statement as No 10 urged the BBC not to prolong its extraordinary row with the Government by standing by “demonstrably untrue” allegations.
[From UK Times so no link.]
This is nothing but nothing but good. I am relishing every single second of this catfight; revelling in every bit of mutual recrimination and celebrating every reciprocal allegation of skulduggery and deceit. It is all so glorious.
The government will probably win out in the short term and force the BBC into a humiliating climbdown but that is just the start of the fun. If Blair and his chums knew anything about the true use of political power they would then proceed to shut down the BBC and sell off the broadcasting rights to someone like Rupert Murdoch (or, better still, Silvio Berlusconi). But, because they are the Labour Party, they won’t do that. Instead, they will leave it at that and the BBC, like wounded beast, will seek revenge by campaigning against the government from the left.
Meanwhile, we sit on the hill and watch the tigers fight in the valley.
Samizdata.net’s many spies have told us that these are being stockpiled in Iran for use during the coming ‘transitional times’.
After recovering from the revelries at the blogger bash, there was no better way to unwind than enjoy a trip down to Greenwich, east London, and wander around the superb clipper sailing ship in dry dock, the Cutty Sark.
This three-masted, square-rigged jewel of 19th century sailing technology was built to carry goods like Chinese tea, Australian wool and other products at high speed to London. The vessel that could moor up at the great port of London ahead of the competition would get the best prices for its produce. These great beasts of the high seas were sailed with the kind of white-knuckle speed and skill that would put a modern America’s Cup yacht race to shame. They often frequently would beat steam-driven vessels over comparable distances.
When we think about today’s rows about globalisation it is easy to assume that so many aspects of economic life are new. They are not. Our Victorian forbears already conducted trade on a vast scale. Ships such as the Cutty Sark commonly had cosmopolitan crews from countries across the world. There were very few regulations governing who could join up as a merchant seaman.
Of course, many aspects of life have improved since then. I dread to think what it must have been like to climb aloft the Cutty Sark’s mainmast in a gale to reef in a sail with the ship rolling about – and you can forget anything like safety harnesses. But these men enjoyed an enterprising life which at times makes yours truly almost feel quite jealous.
Commenting on David Blunkett’s proposal for a £40 compulsory ID card, Liberty spokesman Barry Hugill said:
The real beneficiary of such a policy will be the fraudsters who will make a fortune selling forged cards. There is no evidence that ID cards lead to a reduction in crime yet the Government is contemplating spending at least £1.5bn on the scheme.
This is a Government that cannot manage to pay tax credits, deliver passports or enforce child maintenance payments without catastrophic system failure. Does anyone seriously believe it could manage something as technologically complex as a national ID card?’
Liberty
A leaked memo revealed that David Blunkett is pushing the Cabinet to back national identity cards for everyone aged 16 and over, carrying biometric information, such as fingerprints, to allow police to confirm the holder’s identity. Under Mr Blunkett’s scheme, the card will cost £39 for most people between the ages of 17 and 75.
An opinion piece about the identity cards news in Telegraph is yet again explaining what is wrong with Blunkett’s argument. Basically, each of the claims made by the Home Secretary in support of his pet scheme is wrong.
- First, Mr Blunkett says that there is strong public support for the idea. In fact, the Home Office’s recent consultation exercise focused on the concept of an entitlement card, a very different prospect. (Also, according to this Out-law article, the goverment has admited that the public opposes the ID card scheme.)
- The Home Secretary goes on to argue ID cards will help fight crime. This is one of those assertions that is forever being made, but hardly ever substantiated… The public mood is said to have changed since September 11, 2001, but no one has explained – or even seriously tried to explain – how ID cards would have thwarted those bombers, many of whom died in possession of forged papers.
- Nor, by the way, are ID cards a solution to illegal immigration. The root of the asylum problem is not that we cannot find clandestine entrants, but that we never enforce their deportation.
- More faulty still is Mr Blunkett’s central proposition, as set out in a letter to his Cabinet colleagues: “The argument that identity cards will inhibit our freedom is wrong. We are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists.” In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes how a concept can be traduced if the words used to express it lose their meaning. The example he gives, uncannily, is the word “free”. Now here is Mr Blunkett using “freedom” to mean more state control.
- Any doubts as to the wisdom of the scheme must surely be removed by the Home Secretary’s final argument in its favour: that we are “out of kilter with Europe”. Indeed we are, thank heaven. Policemen in Britain are seen as citizens in uniform, not agents of the government.
The most worrying is Blunkett’s spin on the concept of freedom. In his view we are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists. This is vaguely based on the distinction between negative and positive liberty, which are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting – or the fact of acting – in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.
Blunkett and his New Labour chums are classic and rather unexceptional anti-liberals. (I use the term liberal in its original meaning, based on negative definition of liberty and claiming that in order to protect individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state.) In Blunkett’s mind, the pursuit of liberty (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) requires state intervention, which, by definition, is not contradictory with limitations on personal freedom. As a result, the protests of civil liberties groups do not make sense to him.
The concept of freedom as being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do is alien to him. According to Isaiah Berlin the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole – “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers.
I will not grant Blunkett’s social and political philosophy such level of ‘sophistication’. I will say that his are the simple and toxic insticts of a collectivist and a statist and that those protesting policies based on them will have their words muffled by the Big Blunkett.
Cross-posted from White Rose
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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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