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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From last Friday’s Guardian:
Charles Clarke, the education secretary, is fighting for a short bill in the Queen’s speech next month which would give every child an identity number and allow local authorities in England to share information about any suspicion of neglect or abuse in the family.
The bill would be the first instalment of the government’s plans to reform child protection after a public inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbié.
Which nicely illustrates the connection between state “protection” and state numbering of its human possessions.
What is objectionable, I think, is the idea that all children, the overwhelming majority of whom are not suspected of being abused, will nevertheless get numbered. Is that really necessary?
Plus, you can’t help wondering if, after a brief interval while we all get used to this process, children who have got their numbers will start not to shed them, even when they’ve stopped being children. After all, it isn’t only children who need protecting, is it?
Natalie Solent has some striking gun-control analysis from Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, Here’s a bit of the bit she quotes:
There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that. Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate.
Vimes wondered if he’d sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he’d dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense. It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers – say, three per citizen.
Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing’ and it was this: criminals don’t obey the law. It’s more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. …
Natalie concludes her comments thus:
I suppose Pratchett might say that Vimes’ opinons are not his own, but, even so, Vimes is not just a one-off hero but a much loved character who stars in several books: this shows at the very least that Britain’s best selling living novelist sees where we’re coming from.
I guess it’s a case of read the whole thing.
Independent TV news has just reported that Tony Blair has been admitted to hospital with a suspected heart irregularity.
No updates yet.
The ambitions of the political classes are danger enough but let no-one underestimate the threat posed by the therapy culture:
New York City taxpayers are probably going to be liable not only for the physical injuries inflicted in Wednesday’s Staten Island Ferry crash — which include ten deaths and about 60 injuries resulting in hospitalization, some of them horrific — but also for damages potentially payable to all of the unhurt passengers, widely estimated to number 1,500. A “federal maritime doctrine allows all those who were in the face of danger and who suffered emotional distress to file for compensation, even if they were not physically injured”. Among likely claims, according to Columbia law dean David Leebron, are those from “passengers who claim to now have a fear of ferries that affects their ability to commute and earn a living”.
Damn, I’m thinking of making a claim myself. So what if I actually live in London? So what if I was 3000 miles away when the tragedy occured? I saw it on the news, didn’t I? As a result I have been emotionally scarred, my life has been ruined, I can’t sleep at nights, I keep getting flashbacks and…yadda, yadda, yadda.
Of course, the therapy culture wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t so well incentivised with rewards.
These must surely be salad days for our Labour government. Free of any concerns about an effective opposition, they can roll up their sleeves, spit on their hands and get down to some really serious looting:
Gordon Brown is considering imposing capital gains tax on the sale of all houses in an attempt to plug the widening gulf between his spending plans and public finances.
The Telegraph has learnt that Treasury officials have held confidential discussions with private sector tax consultants on extending the levy to domestic properties.
The reform would mean homeowners facing a tax of up to 40 per cent on any profits made from the sale of their home, which for many people is their principal asset. The levy would, however, raise £11 billion a year, equivalent to 4p on the basic rate of income tax, according to government figures.
I think some clarification is required because the opening paragraph is not entirely correct. Currently a tax of 40% is charged on all capital gains which includes the capital gain made on the sale of property or land. However, one’s principal dwelling home has always been exempt from this charge. Now HMG is proposing to abolish this exemption (although the effect is the same as imposing the tax on ordinary homeowners).
The Chancellor has already indicated, however, that he believes that homeowners are “lightly taxed” and is looking for additional methods to control the buoyant housing market.
‘Lightly taxed’?!! The guy has got some nerve. And it’s abject drivel that this is about controlling the ‘bouyant housing market. This has been on the cards for a while. Gordon Brown has already plundered private pension funds and I knew that it was only a matter of time before he turned his avarice on the last stores of privately owned wealth. There was no way he could leave all that booty untouched with a ballooning public sector into which money must be shovelled like coal into a roaring furnace.
It’s a no-brainer for the government. A general election is still as much as three years away and they are going to win it handsomely anyway. In the meantime they can placate their opponents on the left and reward their supporters in the state sector.
The way things are now, there is nothing to stop the state from growing until the bones of the last taxpayer have been picked clean and left to bleach in the sun.
There may be a sub-text or an agenda here (and it is the Guardian after all) but I am loss to readily identify one. Hence, it is hard to judge just how much credence to give a story like this. In its favour, it is consistent with other news emanating from China:
According to government officials, the amount of economic activity in China soared to RMB7.9 trillion (£570bn) in the first nine months of the year, putting China on course to achieve a growth rate of 8.5% for 2003 – the fastest in more than five years.
If the country can maintain this pace it will overtake Britain and France to become the world’s fourth biggest economy well before the end of 2005.
Chinese government officials? The Guardian? Oooh, my ‘Source-Warning’ indicator is blinking furiously. Still, it would not and should not be surprising that a country which has ditched socialism should outperform two countries that are still wedded to it.
I think this is a fascinating site, specialising in before-and-after plastic surgery star photos, which I found via one of my regular favourites, b3ta.com. “Crap plastic surgery”, they call it, but I say that there’s a bit more to all this than just the chance to jeer at silly celebs with fat lips and boobs that go in an out from one year to the next. As always, where the celebs go now, millions more will follow.
One of my absolute favourites, Meg Ryan, as is pointed out at the site itself, has been made to look like Susan Dey (of LA Law fame). I adore both these ladies, but even so, what Ryan has done to herself is to me off-putting. She’s just not Meg Ryan any more, which I suppose it the whole idea. Presumably Meg Ryan was fed-up with making dark, serious, scary, explosive movies, packed with implausible action and profound human wickedness, and everyone saying “We preferred you in When Harry Met Sally“, so she decided to smash up her original face and change herself into something else.
When I first saw the MR “trout pout” on the cover of a trashy made-up-news-mag, I thought, ugh!! But maybe the magazines had photoshop-enhanced it. According to this it’s not too bad.
However, according to this, she’s turned herself into Molly Ringwald.
What Britain’s TV equivalent of Meg Ryan, Leslie Ash, has had done to herself is, however, truly scary. Google google. See what I mean.
What makes the Ryan and Ash lipo-enhancements so unnerving is that we’ve got used to these ladies with their regular faces. So when you see them now, you can’t forget that that isn’t the real shape of their faces and they’ve got bits of their bums in there. That’s not good.
And would you believe: Al Pacino? He seems to have said: “Make me look more like Dustin Hoffman!”
On the face of it this is all down-market tittle-tattle of the trailer-trashiest sort, of interest to the kind of lunatics who (like me) enjoy all the mad rubbish that b3ta links to, but to nobody else. But as so often with b3ta there’s deadly serious stuff in among the photoshopped squirrels with eagle-heads and pictures of weird people with huge eyes for no reason. It’s clear that something very profound is going on with our culture here. We have entered the age of the artificial body.
What’s going on? It starts with the obvious, which is that people who now want to change their bodies now can change their bodies.
It reminds me a bit of what Alice Bachini was blogging about yesterday, which got a lot of admiring attention. That posting was about a person changing their entire voice and become a different person, without necessarily meaning to. With plastic surgery, you change your entire look, and become a different person while very much meaning to, in much the same way that Meg Ryan seems to want to be a different sort of actress.
The strangest transformation of all which I found at Awful Plastic Surgery is that the charming Marie Osmond has had herself re-engineered into the monstrous Ruby Wax. Why would anyone want to make that transition? The answer is probably: she didn’t. Plastic surgery is still only a bet that it will turn out better than before rather than worse. (Ask Leslie Ash!) But already it’s a bet that millions are placing.
Personally I think it is all most undignified, like changing your name because you don’t like the one you’ve got.
The Guardian reports that the Conservatives have drawn up detailed plans to defeat some of the worst parts of Big Blunkett’s discredited Criminal “Justice” Bill.
In particular the Tory peers plan to prevent Blunkett from removing the right to trial by jury in certain cases and allowing gossip to be accepted as evidence.
Since the government doesn’t have an automatic majority in the Lords they will have to compromise, risk losing the entire Bill or invoke the rarely used Parliament Act.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe
Glenn Reynolds pointed out an interesting discussion over at Heretical Ideas: are Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics moral?
I started off writing a comment of my own but it rapidly grew to the point at which it really ‘wanted’ to be a Samizdata article in its own right. I feel I have some standing to speak on this topic because I actually have the creds. In short, Dr. Herbert Simon, the father of AI, was my grad school mentor and I’ve worked for the CMU Robotics Institute as a member of the research staff.
→ Continue reading: I, Puma Arm
Courtesy of one of the great Middle Men of the Internet, Dave Barry, comes this gripping story:
Bordeaux, France – A French magistrate caught masturbating during a court session was locked up on Thursday and put under investigation, justice officials in the south-western city of Bordeaux said.
The head judge of the city’s appeals court said “a penal inquiry ordered by the prosecutor of the republic is currently being carried out by the police” while a request for a psychiatric evaluation of the magistrate, who was not named, had been made.
He said the justice ministry had also been asked to temporarily suspend the magistrate while the matter was looked into.
According to La Charente Libre, a local newspaper who had a reporter in court at the time of the alleged offence, the magistrate had discreetly lifted up his ceremonial robe while a lawyer was presenting final arguments, undid his pants and “engaged in gestures that left nothing to the imagination”. Sapa-AFP
Which, said a later commenter chez Barry, is how justice gets to be blind.
Each passing day seems to herald a further deterioration in the state of the British Conservative Party. [From the UK Times]
THE Conservatives have had to raise £4 million in emergency loans to keep the party afloat until the end of the year after suffering a huge drop in income from wealthy donors.
Many of its biggest benefactors are understood to have become disillusioned with the party’s direction under Iain Duncan Smith, while others are dismayed by the feuding over the leadership.
So, they are languishing in the opinion polls, their leader is seen as ineffective by most of his own Party and most of the public; he is also under a Parliamentary investigation for alleged impropriety; the Party is shot through with factional in-fighting and now their financial backers are beginning to walk away from them.
If the entire Party succumbed to an outbreak of leprosy it could hardly make matters any worse.
Internet.com reports that UK retailer Marks and Spencer (M&S) is to begin trials of RFID tagging at item level.
Clothes in M&S stores will be tagged with RFID chips. These each contain a unique ID and can be read by a nearby scanner without the consumer being aware of it. Thus your underwear might be broadcasting your location.
To be fair to M&S they did show an unusual degree of social responsibility concerning these trials. They consulted with CASPIAN and as a result the tags will be obvious and will not be scanned at checkouts.
Welcome as these factors are, this trial is still another step on the dangerous road towards making RFID ubiquitous. Not all companies will share M&S’s ethical stance, therefore RFID tagging at item level must be opposed outright.
Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe. Thanks to shanti941 for the pointer.
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