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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A Carnegie Mellon study suggests that shoppers are willing to pay more if they are re-assured about privacy. The premium mentioned is about $0.60 (30p) on goods worth $15 (£7). This is good news. Privacy is one of the ‘goods’ with benefit distributed over time and like security you wish you had it most only when you discover you have none. Usually not in circumstances of your choosing. The heartening point about the report is that before many studies were showing that despite peoples fears about what happens to their data, they continued to surrender it in exchange for low prices.
Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Lab at Carnegie Mellon and lead author on the study:
Our suspicion was that people care about their privacy, but that it’s often difficult for them to get information about a website’s privacy policies.
So if users are happy to pay a bit extra for re-assurances that privacy of their information is respected, perhaps they would be equally willing to use tools that give them control and ownership over that data. Of course, there are issues with that, especially with the current state of online security and lack of more flexible and selective privacy. However, there are people already looking into this so I might start holding my breath. 🙂
cross-posted from Media Influencer
The Home Office [Bureau of State Security for overseas readers] would be ludicrous in its crudity, if it did not present such a threat to liberty. Bids for more arbitrary power are always, but always, acompanied by a scare story.
Today’s example:
Reid proposes register for terror offenders
John Reid will today propose setting up a terrorist offenders register as part of a series of long-term counter-terror measures.
The proposal, based on similar lines to the existing sex offenders register, is one of a series of ideas that the Home Secretary will suggest should be part of the country’s antiterror defences.
One idea being studied by Mr Reid would be to allow the register to operate retrospectively, making an estimated 40 people convicted under terror laws since 2001 liable for immediate listing.
The Home Secretary will say that police should be allowed to continue questioning terror suspects after they have been charged.
He will also outline a plan to allow judges to impose a harsher sentence on people with links to terrorism who are convicted under the criminal law.
This would apply in particular to people convicted of credit card fraud who have links to terrorism.
Another measure would give police the power forcibly to enter the home of a terror suspect held under a control order.
But the pamphlet, to be published today, will not include firm proposals to extend beyond 28 days the length of time that police can hold terror suspects.
Is juxtaposed with:
Security checks on petrol tankers in London
Security spot checks are being carried out on petrol and chemical tankers, cement mixers and other vehicles that could be used by suicide bombers.
Police are monitoring lorries on key routes into London amid concerns that terrorists might copy tactics which have been deployed to deadly effect by insurgents in Iraq. […]
But Scotland Yard stressed today that there was no specific intelligence to suggest that any kind of lorry bomb attack was imminent. [….]
“A counter-terrorism element has been added to the routine work of checking vehicles carrying dangerous goods,” said a police spokeswoman.
The first story is filed by the Times’ home affairs editor. The second by an interesting chap called Sean O’Neill, co-author of The Suicide Factory a highly sensational account of Abu Hamza’s career at Finsbury Park mosque. According to his agent’s website:
“Sean O’Neill joined The Times in 2004 after working for the Daily Telegraph for twelve years. He has covered the Matrix Churchill affair and the Scott Inquiry into arms to Iraq, the Soham murders and the trial of Ian Huntley, and has reported extensively from Northern Ireland. Since 2001 he has focused largely on the al-Qaeda terrorist threat in the UK.”
Mr O’Neill has something of a speciality in reporting the suspicions of the authorities. He clearly has very good police and intelligence contacts, and can make a livid story out of a change in a police checklist. But the inclination of such unofficial official contacts will be to feed such tidbits to the press to suit themselves, knowing an energetic journalist will make much of them.
Alice Thomson has writen an interesting article called Be a ‘bad’ parent and let your children out in which she decries the enervating risk-averse trends in which parents, with the encouragement of our political masters, try to supervise and regulate every aspect of their children’s lives.
The comments are also quite interesting. One of them , calling herself ‘Mum’, bristles at the suggestion Thomson makes:
People who don’t have children are always telling those of us who do what we are doing wrong. I also had a free and easy childhood, but got flashed at, followed home twice and had numerous near misses at being run over. I don’t let my child play out, although she has the run of the garden where she can make camps, climb trees and do all the usual outside things, and usually has a number of friends out there with her.
Well ‘Mum’, I do not have any children either but I am very happy you were not my ‘Mum. Moreover I, like everyone else, am fully qualified to have on opinion on how children should be raised because believe it or not, I and everyone else was once a child.
I agree totally with Alice Thomson and think it is time people stopped indulging their neurotic need to control everything and just let children grow up without panoptic supervision.
In the early 1980s, American telecommunications company AT&T commissioned management consultancy McKinsey to conduct some research into the newly invented mobile phone. How large was the market for these new devices likely to be? In a report that now makes hilariously funny reading, McKinsey predicted that there would be a world market for about 900,000 of these devices*. This led to AT&T initially not investing in the new technology. In 1994 they entered the business by buying the mobile phone business created by Craig McCaw, and after an assortment of forwards, reverse, and sideways takeovers this business lives on as AT&T Mobility today.
It is possible to compare this number with the actual size of the world market for mobile phones – there are now around three billion active mobile phones in the world. That is straight and to the point. However, other kinds of comparison perhaps better illustrate just how wrong the prediction was. For instance the number of phones that McKinsey predicted would make up the world market is almost exactly the same number of phones that Britons accidentally dropped in the toilet in 2006
(* For the sake of honesty, I do have to point out that McKinsey actually did make that prediction of 900,000 as the size of the market “for the year 2000”. Yes, they did pretty much choose a year randomly and they were predicting 900,000 on a “that’s pretty much everyone who will want one” basis, but it must none the less be mentioned. In any event, there were about half a billion mobile phones in the world by 2000, so they were still out by a touch)
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favour of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
– H. L. Mencken
It is not often I read the Independent but even that haven of fluorescent idiocy seems to be on the right side of the need to face down Vladimir Putin’s increasingly sinister regime. There is a very interesting open letter by journalist Yelena Tregubova on the importance of not pretending that everything in Russia is just fine and dandy.
Of course over the last few days Putin has made the task of those shouting warning about the dangers posed by Russia a great deal easier, what with him threatening to target nuclear weapons at Europe again and pretty much announcing that he is about to appropriate BP’s investments in Russia.
Clearly Putin needs to be taken down a peg or two because if there are no consequences for his theft of foreign investments in Russia and the murders of opponents to his regime both at home and overseas, all we can look forward to is ever more destabilising antics coming out of the Kremlin.
“Blair calls for homegrown Imams”
A quiet revolution is taking place in this green and pleasant land. In allotments and smallholdings all over the country the age-honoured and customary rows of marrows and ornamental cabbages are rapidly being replaced by a new and exotic species.
Spurred on by a combination of Tony Blair’s exhortations and the availability of generous government grants, farmers and market gardeners from Penzance to Perthshire are nurturing the first green shoots of what they hope will be a bumper crop of Muslim clerics.
Competition between growers is already hotting up as early adopters of the new fashion vie with each other for horticultural prestige. At the 78th Annual Chipping Sodbury Country Fair, Mrs. Gladys Whinge of Tetbury won First Prize for her record-breaking 254lb Imam which she calls ‘Yusuf’.
“The important thing is to use plenty of steaming, fresh horse manure”, said Mrs. Whinge “so I read the Guardian to him every day”.
The retail markets is already gearing up for what they hoping will be a huge demand for the homegrown Imams in 2008 with supermarket chain Waitrose leading the way by announcing that locally-produced Imams will be sold under their new ‘Koranic’ range.
The new logo for the 2012 London Olympics has been unveiled and it has produced howls of outrage. Yet I beg to differ. I think it is perfect.
What does it look like to you? To me it is obvious: a collapsing structure of some sort, perhaps a building at the moment of demolition. The sense of downwards motion towards the bottom of the page is palpable.
Breathtaking. I mean what truly magnificent symbolism. The entire Olympic endeavour has been a massive looting spree with already grotesque cost over-runs (and it is only 2007), so surely something that conjures up images of collapse and disaster is really on the money… and speaking of money, at £400,000 (just under $800,000 USD) for the logo, it perfectly sums up the whole ‘Olympic Experience’ for London taxpayers.
No, if ever there was ‘truth in advertising’, this is it. Well done Lord Coe, I salute you.
Which Western country will be the first to become an Islamic state?
to·tal·i·tar·i·an
–adjective
1. of or pertaining to a centralized government that does not tolerate parties of differing opinion and that exercises dictatorial control over many aspects of life.
2. exercising control over the freedom, will, or thought of others; authoritarian; autocratic.
–noun.
3. an adherent of totalitarianism.
Random House Unabridged Dictionary
But are those really the best definitions of totalitarian?
When someone uses the term ‘totalitarian’, we think of Stalin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany or Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Mao’s China. Those were indisputably totalitarian states. We think of gulags and killing fields. We think of secret police and surveillance.
Yet I would argue that all those things can just as satisfactorily described as ‘tyranny’ of whatever political completion. The thing that makes a place ‘totalitarian’ is not the nastiness of it or even the repressiveness of it, but the totality of state control. The real defining characteristic of totalitarian seems obvious from the word itself.
And what is a total state? It is a state in which there is no civil society, just politically derived rules by which people may interact. And I would argue the key to that is removing the right to free association, usually on grounds of ‘fairness’ or ‘diversity’ and by declaring private property to be ‘public’.
Britain has no gulags, no killing fields, it has a relatively free press (though less so than it was), it has no internal passports (though they are working on that with ID cards and panoptic surveillance)… but every year we take more and more steps towards the destruction of a voluntary civil society of free interaction and its replacement with a state in which no aspect of life is not politically regulated. This is often described as making things ‘more democratic’… and in that the supporters of the total state are not being disingenuous, for democracy is just a type of politics after all.
We are headed for a different kind of totalitarianism than that of Stalin or Hitler or Mao, but a total state really is what a great many people have in mind for us all. They seek a sort of ‘smiley face fascism’ in which all interactions are regulated in the name of preventing sexism, promoting health, and defending the environment. The excuses will not invoke the Glory of the Nation or the Proletariat or the Volk or the King or the Flag or any of those old fashioned tools for tyrants, but rather it will be “for our own good”, “for the Planet”, “for the whales”, “for the children”, “for the disabled” or “for equality”.
But if they get their way it will be quite, quite totalitarian.
Freedom is not feeling like an outcast in the face of mainstream consensus.
– Adriana Lukas at the Apeldoorn conference in the Hague
There is an excellent article in the Telegraph by Charles Moore called What if Israelis had abducted BBC man?, addressing the morally demented attitude amongst the tranzi media and government set.
But just suppose that some fanatical Jews had grabbed Mr Johnston and forced him to spout their message, abusing his own country as he did so. What would the world have said?
There would have been none of the caution which has characterised the response of the BBC and of the Government since Mr Johnston was abducted on March 12. The Israeli government would immediately have been condemned for its readiness to harbour terrorists or its failure to track them down. Loud would have been the denunciations of the extremist doctrines of Zionism which had given rise to this vile act. The world isolation of Israel, if it failed to get Mr Johnston freed, would have been complete.
If Mr Johnston had been forced to broadcast saying, for example, that Israel was entitled to all the territories held since the Six-Day War, and calling on the release of all Israeli soldiers held by Arab powers in return for his own release, his words would have been scorned. The cause of Israel in the world would have been irreparably damaged by thus torturing him on television. No one would have been shy of saying so.
But of course in real life it is Arabs holding Mr Johnston, and so everyone treads on tip-toe. Bridget Kendall of the BBC opined that Mr Johnston had been “asked” to say what he said in his video. Asked! If it were merely an “ask”, why did he not say no?
Whatever one thinks of Israel’s policies on various issues, the nauseating double standards so consistently in play by so many ‘news’ organisations are something that need to be pointed out often and unapologetically. Charles Moore is to be commended for his article. Read the whole thing.
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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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