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.
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Guardian columnist David Aaronovitch, who occasionally writes quite sensible things about Iraq and All That, has decided to resume normal service as Bullying Blairite Columnist, on the subject of compulsory ID cards.
The usual reasons in favour are trotted out. He says they are convenient. No doubt they are in many cases. So, for that matter, would be carrying a tattoo on one’s forehead with an ID number and message, saying, ‘State Licensed Guardianista’ or whatever.
I can quite see how, in a minimal or even anarcho-capitalist private ‘state’, how citizens could freely choose to have ID cards carrying all kinds of info. Then again, they might not choose to do so. I find it a great bore to point out to collectivists of various hues that if X is such a grand idea then it should not be necessary to compel citizens to have X. Take banks, for instance. I see no reason why, in a truly liberal order, banks could not give clients incentives to carry photo-ID credit cards to cut fraud and hence cut charges to their customers. Indeed such transactions would be quite normal and no-one would have grounds to complain given sufficient consumer freedom.
Then, perhaps realising that the usual reasons for compulsory ID cards amount to little more than making life easy for the police and the security authorities, Aaronovitch comes to his guiding motive: “What is convenient or aesthetic for the individual is not, unfailingly, what is good for society.”
That is true. It’s one reason I always rather liked Mrs Thatcher’s misquoted remark about there being no such thing as society. ‘Society’ may indeed in some sense be better off if Pc Plod and his colleagues knew of my wherabouts 24 hours a day. ‘Society’ can take a hike, thankyou very much.
So when Liberty (one of those annoying civil liberties groups, ed) talks of ID cards turning people into “suspects not citizens”, I am bound to ask whether Liberty has any concept of the duties – as opposed to the rights – of citizenship.
Well, those folk over at Liberty can no doubt answer Aaronovitch’s question for themselves. But I think we ought to feel grateful to him for framing the question so bluntly. He is right. Social democrat statists like him think that the entity he calls ‘society’ is somehow possessed of some claim on the citizens who compose it. For him, carrying an ID card is a badge of collective solidarity and hence non-ownership of such a thing demonstrates one’s anti-social (heaven forbid) character.
One thing is for sure. No one is ever likely to be in danger of thinking Aaronovitch believes in personal liberty. The next time I read one of his more sensible pieces about the Middle East, I will bear that in mind.
The latest social engineering proposals from the government are out on University education.
If I wanted my son to get into Britain’s ruling class, this is what I would now have to do, according to these plans. First, I would get him into the most expensive private school I could possibly afford. Then at sixteen I would have an arranged divorce with my wife, and I would move with him to the worst sink estate I could possibly imagine. Somewhere grim and remote would do the trick, perhaps the Belle Vue South estate in Carlisle?
And now comes the tricky bit. Once ensconced in Carlisle, we would track down the very worst comprehensive school or sixth form college in North Cumbria, and bung him right in there on the register. But what we wouldn’t do, of course, is actually send him there, oh no. → Continue reading: An admission of failures
The senior political commentator and Guardian newspaper columnist Hugo Young died at home last night, aged 64, after a long illness.
I used to worship Mr Young’s Mount Olympus of a column, many years ago, turning to it even before the daily Steve Bell cartoon, and have retained a soft spot for him to this day. I suppose that may have been because one dark evening Mr Young had to endure the lefty ravings of some drunken young student from Sheffield University, at some Guardian/NUS bash or other, as this young acolyte tried to suck out some of the greatness from the Great Man of the Left. But being from Sheffield himself, Mr Young tolerated this intoxicated idiot for quite some time, before breaking away to escape into the night.
That conversation taught me two things. One was to try to listen, and the other was to try to think. Hugo Young may have been one of our main political opponents, but he was also one of our best political opponents because he thought about what it was he wanted to say, before he then said it. He was also one of the few men on the Guardian unafraid of calling any situation how he saw it. For example, he recently said of David Blunkett:
At the apex of anti-liberalism, bragging his contempt, sits the most dangerous home secretary this country has ever known.
Well said, sir. The Left is seriously weakened by Hugo Young’s departure from this mortal coil, and shall not see his like again.
And although this post may seem strange, I felt compelled to write it. For although Hugo Young was a Titan standing in our way, from initial stirrings raised in that long ago conversation I must thank him for helping me to escape from the clutches of this self-same Left, and especially from men like David Blunkett. Hugo Young truly was a Great Man. May his soul Rest in Peace.
In an attempt to marshal my thoughts and arguments on the subject I’ve added some pages to my web site:
UK Compulsory National Identity Cards – The Case Against
Hopefully this’ll be of some use to those opposing Big Blunkett. There’s a load more that could be added (for example I haven’t even mentioned the problems with biometrics) but at least it’s a start.
The humbling of the WTO not only worsens economic prospects for the developing countries (as well as for the rest of the world) but also shifts the balance of global political power from poor to rich – perhaps decisively, and who knows for how many years. That is what the developing countries’ champions are so busy celebrating.
– The Economist
In a recent Boeing and USAF test, a B2 bomber dropped 80 bombs in 22 seconds… and hit 80 different targets. They call it revolutionary. I call it awesome to the point of being scary.
Perhaps in a future war we’ll only need two very large bombers. One as a backup for maintenance downtime… and the other to make a single war-ending zig-zag pass over enemy territory.
I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that “a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras”. These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:
- A person who has unpopular political beliefs of left or right that might lose them their job or promotion.
- A person who is homosexual but their family does not know.
- A teenage girl secretly visiting her boyfriend. He is of a different race to her family, and they have forbidden her to see him.
- A man who is seeking to change his job needs to attend interviews with other companies. He doesn’t want his present employer to know for fear that if the interviews don’t work out he might end up worse off than before, having lost the confidence of his boss.
- A woman scouting out places to go to get away from her violent partner.
- Someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous or drugs rehabilitation sessions.
- Someone going to church, synagogue or mosque who fears the scorn of their secular friends, colleagues or family.
- Someone attending classes of religious instruction prior to converting to another religion who fears the vengeance of their family if their apostasy becomes known.
- A son or daughter visiting an estranged parent without the knowledge of the parent they live with.
- An ex-criminal seeking to go straight who must meet his probation officer or register with the police.
- An adulterer. (I think adultery is very wrong, but I don’t want the government involved in exposing it – besides the intrinsic nastiness of state intervention in such matters, you can bet they would expose the adulteries of their opponents and pass over the adulteries of their friends.)
That example takes us to a more general point: there are so many laws that nearly all of us are breaking some of them all the time. This fact gives local and national authorities enormous scope for quiet blackmail. You think it’s unlikely that they would be so wicked? Well, the blackmailers themselves might scarcely see it as blackmail. Imagine this scenario: they get to know that X, an irritating serial complainer, writer of letters to the editor, and general thorn in the side of several local councillors, is attending an adult education class for more than the number of hours permitted to an unemployed person who is meant to be actively seeking work. How satisfactory to take action against this pest! Meanwhile Y, who sat next to X in the class and is equally unemployed and equally breaking the rules (or equally unaware of them), is ignored because he is not a troublemaker.
It’s one thing to promise not to pass on data to other organisations, and it’s another thing again not to pass on data to other organisations:
JetBlue Airways passengers, more than a million of them, have been unsuspecting guinea pigs in a Defense Department contractor’s experiment in mining commercial databases to assess the risk of a person turning out to be a terrorist. The airline admits it violated its own privacy policy when it acceded to the Pentagon’s request to give passenger records to Torch Concepts, a private technology business that was ostensibly creating a program to enhance security at military bases.
That’s paragraph one of a New York Times story today. This is the final para:
This misstep only feeds legitimate consumer fears that companies and governments are too quick to use private data in unauthorized ways. It is worrisome, in this regard, that the Homeland Security Department has already backtracked from its original vow to use its passenger-profiling program only to fight terrorism. There is now talk of turning it into an all-purpose law-enforcement tool. For its part, in addition to ascertaining what actually took place, Congress may also need to consider new legal protections for consumers’ privacy.
Mission creep, in other words.
That lonely, marginalised, oppressed siren voice in the wilderness John Pilger has managed to escape from the daggers of the vicious McCarthyite witch-hunt that has cowed so many into a silence that has prevented them from speaking the truth about America and the war in Iraq.
This brave, determined peace-campaigner has finally succeeded in casting off the shackles of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that has, hitherto, so ruthlessly crushed his dissent with a one-hour television special screened earlier tonight on ITV1, Britain’s most popular TV channel. There is no link here, mostly because I couldn’t be bothered to go and look for one.
Neither could I actually be bothered to watch the programme. I have been exposed to enough of Pilger’s toxic, manipulative propoganda to know in advance exactly the kind of things he was going to be whining about. In fact, I think I can even summarise them:
Bush. Warmongers. Neo-Conservatives. Oil. Conspiracy. World domination. Capitalism. Globalisation. Unfair trade. Bush. Oil. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. CIA. Mossad. Inequality. Poverty. Despair. Hopelessness. Arms trade. Environment. Sharon. Zionist thugs. Oppression. Cruelty. Palestinians. Bush. Oil. Blair. NATO. Poodles. American bullying. Human rights. Amnesty International. Unilateral. Nuremburg trials. Nazis. Aggression. Bush regime. Conquer the world. Crush dissent. United Nations is our only hope.
And those were the good bits!
I really don’t know how all these so-called ‘civil libertarians’ can possibly live with themselves. Don’t they care about the children?
Children are frightened of speeding traffic and want more measures to make roads safer, a survey has suggested.
Three-quarters of children questioned said they wanted more speed cameras.
About 70% thought drivers should go slower near their school, with almost as many wanting drivers to slow down near their house.
Half of the 1,500 children surveyed wanted safer places to cross the road.
The findings of the survey of children aged 7-14 in city schools by road safety charity Brake were released to coincide with the annual Road Safety Week.
A good friend of mine who has been professionaly engaged in market research has provided me with chapter and verse on just how ludicrously easy it is to get the answers that the researcher wants. Quadruple the easiness when the views being solicited are those of children.
A ‘road safety charity’?
I have just heard a reporter on the BBC ‘Newsnight’ show describe the European Common Agricultural Policy as an expensive ‘boondoggle’.
I cannot recall ever having heard that term used in the mainstream British press before. Is that a first?
David Sucher has news of a conference, and reckons that White Rose ought to be monitoring what was being talked about.
Says David:
“Ubiquitous Computing” means “computing technology that migrates beyond our desktops onto our hands, heads and clothing, and becomes increasingly embedded in a wide variety of other objects, such as walls, cars and appliances.”
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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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