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]

Republicans for limiting trade and restricting choice

Thank goodness we have the Republicans to protect people from themselves and limit international on-line commerce.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to restrict Internet gambling, a move Republicans hope will boost their popularity before the November election. By a vote of 317 to 93, politicians approved a controversial bill that tries to eliminate many forms of online gambling by targeting Internet service providers and financial intermediaries, namely banks and credit card companies that process payments to offshore Web sites.

Net gambling “is a scourge on our society,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican who’s tried for the better part of a decade to enact legislation that combats Net gambling.

‘Our’ society? Bob Goodlatte should really get out of the coercion business and follow his natural career as a barista and leave the series of social interactions we call ‘society’ to its members, rather than using force to distort it.

Now can someone remind me why the Elephants are supposed to be trusted with imperfect edifice of American capitalism and civil liberty but the wicked ol’ Donkeys cannot? A pox of both parties I say but at least the Democrats were on the right side of this issue.

My prediction: People who want to gamble on-line will start registering with trusted on-line off-shore providers, who will change a forwarder URL of their sites every few days and notify their clients of the new URL via or-mail or SMS in order to get around ISP blocking for those unable to use proxies and other ways to confuse the ISP where you are really going. Payment will be between the client and a series of disposable off-the-shelf companies in Panama or Grand Cayman which shut down, only to be replaced by a new company, as soon as the US credit card companies identify them as receiving money from gambling.

The US state can make it harder but if people want to wager their own money, they will always find a way. If i was a betting man (i.e. statistically challenged, which I am not), I would put my money on the Feds getting their arses kicked when they try to shut the off-shore sites down (particularly as they are legal in the countries they operate in and can take clients from the rest of the world without much difficulty).

Can anyone say “Drug War”?

Another proud moment for socialised medicine

It seems there is a shortage of certain drugs in Britain’s National Health Service.

Joe Fortescue from Alfreton, Derbyshire wants the government to provide more diamorphine, which has been in short supply since 2004. He said his 49-year-old ex-wife from Nottingham was screaming in pain in the days before her death because it was not available.

Horrendous. We are not talking about sophisticated and costly cutting edge drugs here, just a strong painkiller. As someone personally currently gobbling none-too-effective codeine painkillers every four hours after a close encounter with the NHS yesterday, dare I say I ‘feel the pain’ of those relying on the NHS in their time of need.

Perhaps the ex-husband of the hapless woman who died in agony for want of the correct drugs should have just scored some himself, available to anyone driving slowly with their windows open in the crappier parts of most large British towns and cities. Diamorphine is essentially just heroin after all and needless to say the ‘free market’ in heroin has no difficulty supplying public demand. Only the state could be inept enough to be unable to find heroin for a dying woman.

Truly the state is not your friend.

The horror in India – waiting for the ‘Bush’ angle

It now looks like the death toll in the sickening atrocity in Bombay will probably top two hundred innocent civilians, with hundred more injured, many of them horribly maimed. But then as any Indian could have told you years ago, evil horrors like this perpetrated by Islamist psychopaths do not just happen in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

So tell me, how long before the good folks at Democratic Underground find some way to blame BushMacHitler for this? This is a truly ghastly attack and we all know that America-centric buffoons infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome cannot even conceive of something bad happening which does not somehow involve the United States.

I invite the commentariat to find the articles somehow blaming the US administration for this. You know it is going to happen.

Is this the end-game for Blair?

More here on the arrest of Labour head fund-raiser Lord Levy over allegations about tapping up folk for party donations in return for peerages. (See Alex’s post immediately below this one). First question: is this really the silver bullet that might finish off Blair? He has shown incredible resilience in the face of a huge dollop of scandals since 1997: Bernie Ecclestone affair, Mandelson’s various transgressions, a delinquent and violent deputy Prime Minister; Cherie Blair’s interesting spending habits, David Blunkett’s abuse of office and manifest failings, the sheer uselessness of his successor, Charles Clarke; the suicide of government scientist David Kelley and the whole spin-doctoring of arguments about WMDs in Iraq. In less than 10 years, the Labour government has established a record for venality, corruption and rank incompetence that it took the Tories 18 years to acquire. Quite some achievement, of sorts. Of course, although its economic record is not quite as splendid as some would claim, the relatively-good performance of the economy under Gordon Brown has kept the government of the day in reasonably good shape.

But for how much longer can even this part of the Blair record be relied upon? Yesterday, the Bank of England warned in one of its regular publications that there remain significant risks in the UK financial system, particularly concerning the amount of debt and consumer borrowing there is. Our public finances are slipping deeper into the red despite what has been a relatively decent run of economic growth, so goodness knows how bad those finances could get if there were to be a serious slowdown, or some shock to the financial system.

As a side note, it would be churlish not to praise indefatigible digger-up of news about the Levy saga, blogger Guido Fawkes. If I were the publisher of Private Eye magazine, I would be worried about the competition. Guido has been all over this story for weeks.

Secret Agent

Mr Phelps:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore an ultra-secret North Korean missile launch facility located several kilometers inland from a section of due south facing coastline not far from the Chinese border. There is a small town about 1-2km south of the pad, directly under the most probable launch trajectory. A mad ruler is thought to be building nuclear capable ICBM’s at this site. We do not believe their technological level makes them capable of success at the task at present, so we recommend you do not use the town as a base of operations.

Find the various facilities and report back to us. Should you be captured or your computer be eaten by starving North Korean peasants, Samizdata will disavow all knowledge of your existence.

Your targets may be found near N40°51’17” E129°39’58” via http://maps.google.co.uk/ at the 50 meter per 2.5 centimeter scale.

Good luck and good hunting.

Who?

My thanks to Jonathan Schwarz over at Slate for pointing out that various Islamic terrorist organisations including Hamas and Al Qaeda include of all things Rotary Clubs amongst their lists of anti-Islamic organisations that they believe are waging crusades on them. From the Hamas charter, for instance

…you can see [the enemies] making consistent efforts by way of publicity and movies, curriculi of education and culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like. All of them are nests of saboteurs and sabotage.

My first thought is to almost wish it were true: if my local Rotary club was in fact on organisation of saboteurs fighting the Jihadis, I might almost want to join. It sounds quite exciting. My second thought, however, is I think the sort of uneasy thought that Group Captain Mandrake gets in Dr Strangelove when Gen. Ripper explains to him that he has just launched a nuclear attack on Moscow to fight fluoridation of drinking water. In this war one occasionally feels that the enemy does not need to be fought so much as it needs to be medicated, and this is one of those times.

Then again, I suppose this makes no more or less sense than blaming the Jews.

Perception and prejudice

One of the science fiction predictions, that has not yet come to pass, is the ability to categorise individuals by measuring certain thoughts or actions, with implications for individual freedom and status. That time may have drawn slightly closer. A forthcoming study, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuro-imaging responses to Extreme Outgroups” published in “Psychological Science”, the Journal for the Association of Psychological Science, claims that prejudicial states can be measured through the imaging of the brain.

Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) brain imaging determined if the students accurately chose the correct emotion illustrated by the picture (according to pretest results in which a different group of students determined the emotion that best fit each photograph). The MPFC is only activated when a person thinks about him- or her-self or another human. When viewing a picture representing disgust, however, no significant MPFC brain activity was recorded, showing that students did not perceive members of social out-groups as human. The area was only activated when viewing photographs that elicited pride, envy, and pity. (However, other brain regions – the amygdala and insula – were activated when viewing photographs of “disgusting” people and nonhuman objects.)

Emotions themselves were not responsible for generating this brain activity. Rather, it was the actual image viewed that produced a response.

One article does not count as evidence that people viewed as “disgusting” are subjected to a process of dehumanisation, reinforced by social interaction. It is an interesting example of how neuroimaging can inform our understanding of the entanglement between emotion, perception and prejudice, although the study only reveals the complexities of this area. By implication, one must keep the broadest definition of humanity.

Class still matters in Britain

“We continue to “mind the gap”. The subject has not lost its power to provoke and wound and illuminate. We still talk quite a bit about it in various ways: journalistic-facetious, or pretend-anthropological, or even old-fashioned snobbish. But that does not mean that we are at all comfortable with the subject. On the contrary, we are often decidedly uneasy when it is brought up, and we do not care for it when the question of class is described as “Britain’s dirty little secret”. We tend to be especially resentful when the Americans or the French describe Britain as uniquely class-divided.” (page 105)

“We are often told that deference has disappeared from modern Britain. Yet the adulation of the rich and famous is surely as fulsome as ever. In hotels, restaurants and aircraft – the sites of modern luxury – the new upper crust is fawned on as egregiously as old money in its Edwardian heyday. All that has changed is that the composition of the upper class has changed, as it has done roughly once a century since the Norman Conquest…..what has almost disappeared is deference towards the lower classes. Throughout the two world wars and the decades following both of them, the lower classes were widely revered for their courage in battle and their stoicism in peace. Values such as solidarity, thrift, cleanliness and self-discipline were regularly identified as characteristic of them. That is no longer the case.” (page 107)

Mind the Gap, by Ferdinand Mount 2003. Definitely food for thought, and despite the title, is not a plea for some sort of mushy egalitarianism. I thought about this book while reading the comment threads here bemoaning the rise of the middle class football fan as some supposed frightful imposition on a working man’s game. We still bother about class, it seems.

Samizdata quotes of the day

Terrorism is an extreme form of political communication. You want to be sure that, in your response, you don’t end up amplifying the messages that terrorists are trying to convey.

and,

We just have to live with risk. We can’t be completely secure, and we will never be completely secure.

Not some supercilious liberal flâneur and dilletante security-skeptic – such as yours truly – but Sir Richard Dearlove, formerly C, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

The NatWest bankers controversy

In case anyone missed it, here is a fine article summing up what I think is the truth behind the case of the three NatWest bankers who are to be extradited to the United States on charges related to the collapse of Enron. The author, business writer Jeff Randall, fingers what he sees as the reason why the banks have been so coy about defending their employees from the U.S. legal authorities.

Unlike Stephen Pollard, who huffs and puffs about how this controversy is largely a matter of anti-Americanism, I do not like the smell of this case at all. I think Pollard’s argument – which has its merits – misses the point of how one-sided the operation of U.S. extradition powers are. These men are not regarded by the British authorities of being guilty of any offence. The U.S. authorities appear not – to the best of my knowledge – to have given even the semblance of a prima facie case justifying the extradition of this trio. And yet as the article points out, while the U.S. can use these powers – supposedly justified by the War on Terror – Britain has no corresponding right to extradite alleged U.S. wrongdoers (powers associated with terrorism have a habit of branching out).

As with the British blogger Clive Davis, I am a pro-American who also thinks the U.S. authorities sometimes do a lousy job at treating what they should regard as their close allies. Okay, I can hear the comments coming that even if they did a great job, it would make no difference. I am not so sure. While I agree with Stephen Pollard that U.S. authorities are arguably right to get nasty on financial wrongdoings and are often tougher than we Brits, this use of extradition powers looks a step too far. It does not strike me as smart diplomacy or right law, and I hope, perhaps naively, that the British government shows rather more backbone on this case than hitherto.

Here is more on the story, and more here.

UPDATE: And of course let’s not forget the continuing outrage of the EU arrest warrant. I should have mentioned this fact earlier, in case our American readers think I am picking on them.

Disenchanted with the ‘Beautiful Game’

In order to get ‘into’ a sport, it usually helps to have grown up with it. I grew up with shooting, sailing and rugby in so far as those where the things I took to during my (mostly) English school days. Although I also served time doing part of my education in the USA, American Football, Baseball and Basketball never really appealed… not that I really have anything against those games, I just do not ‘relate’ to them myself. Strangely, the only times I have ever played soccer was in the USA as that seemed a more understandable sport to me, perhaps for the simple reason that although it was never a school sport in my neck of the woods in the UK, the ambient presence of ‘footie’ is hard to escape in England.

I do enjoy watching soccer and although the prospect of the World Cup did to some extent sweep me up, but the more matches I watched this time, the more this strange sinking feeling came over me. No doubt it is just me but there just seems to be something desperately unheroic about the game these days, at least at an international level. Perhaps the fact that every time I watched Italy, the eventual winners, play, they seemed to be taking more dives that Jacques Cousteau. I for one find athletes rolling around on the ground play-acting terrible injury when someone so much as brushes up against them such a pathetic and unmanly spectacle that perhaps the Italian team should replace their national flag by flying a petticoat from the nearest flagpole. Although Italy seem to be the worst offender in this regard, it does seem to be an increasingly widespread tactic (that said, anyone playing against Croatia need engage in no injury play-acting given that team’s ‘robust’ approach to the game).

Overall, I cannot help but feel that the whole thing was rather unedifying.

Is soccer the new squash?

A few hours ago (but still today – it now being the small hours of Monday morning) I finished watching the soccer World Cup Final, and a right old bore it was, I thought. Thank goodness my kitchen contains so many other amusements. I have to admit that the complaints of Americans who say that there is not enough scoring in soccer, and a deal too much despicable play acting, now strike me as thoroughly persuasive.

The more fraught and important the occasion, the duller soccer games now seem to be. It was very noticeable how much more entertaining the group games were in this tournament than the later games, when the seriously effective sides were the only ones left, and when all those exotic Africans and Americans and whatnot, with their “brought a breath of fresh air to the tournament” unpredictability, had all gone home. The more important the games got and the higher the stakes got, the more boring they became for the increasing numbers of disappointed neutrals. It did not help that the semi-finalists in this World Cup all came from European countries within a day’s drive of each other. As the end of the tournament neared, all the players still in it knew each other’s way of playing inside out, because all of them play for the same handful of big European clubs.

The television commentators did their best to explain that the Italians showed colossal resolve and determination and great defensive skill, and that they were “worthy winners”, blah blah blah. But the commentators could not disguise the mediocrity of the occasion, which ended, inevitably, with a penalty shoot-out. During this, one French bloke made a mistake, no Italian did, and that was that.

When I was a teenager at school, I used to play squash. If you are only as good as I am at squash, then squash is a great game. With a racket slightly smaller than a tennis racket, and a small black rubber ball, which you take it in turns to smack, against a wall with a net painted on it, so to speak, squash maximises the exercise you take, while making ball boys entirely superfluous, what with the ball always bouncing back towards you for you to pick it up and resume smacking it.

But squash has one huge drawback. The better you are at it, the duller it gets. The room-stroke-court in which it is played is made the right size to suit players like me. In it I can just about reach the ball much of the time, but am also quite often unable to reach it. For a player like me, against an opponent of a similar standard, it is possible for us both to play genuinely winning shots and to have a really good game, at the end of which the loser is able to say in all sincerity: well played mate.

But at the upper reaches of the game of squash, things are different. If you are a really good squash player, you can always reach the ball, no matter where your opponent hits it. At the supreme pinnacle of the game of squash, where the two best squash players in the world are to be observed through transparent walls bashing that little black rubber ball against one of the transparent walls, the idiots who assemble to watch this absurd spectacle might as well be watching paint dry for all the excitement that it involves. Each point, to be settled, demands a mistake by one or other of the players, and each point means sitting there and waiting for one of the two squash players in the world who are least likely to make a mistake, to make a mistake. And the loser of this hideously prolonged contest, when he does finally emerge, leaves it with the feeling that it was his failures, rather than the other chap’s excellence, which defeated him. Squash did appear briefly on British television, a few years ago. Not surprisingly, it soon departed.

Might soccer be heading that way too? → Continue reading: Is soccer the new squash?