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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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It’s all about tax-cameras In addition to being miserable, it seems that the British (or a few of them anyways) are also getting a bit uppity:
“Police have issued a nationwide alert after discovering a deadly explosive device attached to a speed camera.”
No-one has yet claimed responsibility but I think it is safe to pretty much rule out the Islamofascists.
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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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Terrible shame and all, isn’t it? How will we cope without speed cameras? ^_^
You Brits should just do what we Yanks did when they installed cameras that issued speeding tickets. Some enterprising people removed their license plates, wore masks, and sped past the cameras repeatedly. After processing multiple useless rolls of film, the gorvernment realized that the cameras weren’t cost effective.
Just paint the camera lenses until they get the message.
“deadly”? How can it be deadly if nobody dies? isn’t that kinda implicit in saying “deadly”?
It could also have been anything from a firework to a claymore mine – they like to keep the public uninformed and scared – the more they can hype it up the more the cotton wool brigade will rally to “ban” whatever they can.
Unfortunately the cameras are now digital, some with wireless links back to a central processing centre – so wasting film is no longer an option.
I suspect people are going to go to jail for a longer term for defacing speed cameras than bumping off little old ladies for their pensions, after all a crime against the many is more vicious than a crime against one.
And if you believe that you are definitely in the wrong place.
Since the police struggle to recover stolen cars ( unless they are burnt out ) why don’t I steal your car and you steal mine? Then we can drive around unhindered by gatsos. 🙂
I think the evil Mollusc might actually be on to something rather splendid here!
These are clearly revenue generation devices. As Patrick Bedard illustartes in the September and December issues of Car and Driver, TPTB have no concern with safety.
I am considering posing a lawsuit in California against traffic enforcement cameras (both speed and red-light). As revenue generation devices in violation of Prop. 218, which requires a two-thirds supermajority plebiscite to levy new taxes.
‘Speed’ cameras are meant to enforce the prevailing speed limit. That being the case, what’s the objection to them? Why not object to the imposition of that speed limit?
on what grounds?
If A_t is asking me on what grounds I would object to a speed limit, I’d say that I could only argue that it’s not necessary in a particular area because there’d be no excessively increased danger posed by an increased limit.
But, given that a limit *is* in place, we should either obey the current law or be prepared to pay a fine.
A lot of people treat it as a gamble, and weigh the probability of a fine against the obvious benefits of arriving at their destination fractionally earlier.
For instance, I used to do an irregular, short-notice, late-night run from Lincoln to the Netherlands and I was quite prepared to be caught by the cameras en-route if it meant I could, say, catch an earlier train through the Chunnel. It was just a part of the total price I paid for wanting to do the journey that quickly.
OTOH, if I bust a 30mph limit driving through the middle of town, then there’s no likelhood of me shaving more than a handful of seconds of my total journey time and so the costs outweigh any benefits.
Brian: I would very mush recommend you look at this NCPA article:
Speed limits are about revenue generation and social engineering, nothing more.
Kevin: I don’t care whether they’re revenue generating operations or not. The fact of the matter is that they are there to enforce the legal speed limit.
If people don’t want to contribute to what they perceive as the bulging coffers of the local cop-shop’s beer-fund, then the answer is simple — don’t break the speed limit.
::pause::
I’m puzzled by the attitude here. Is anyone *seriously* saying that it’s a Good Thing(tm) to furtively trash speed cameras?
Some others have said this far better than I, Brian:
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood pf patriots and tyrants” — Thomas Jefferson
“Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” — Frederick Douglass
your quotes are all very well, but the freedom to travel at speeds greater than those deemed safe is hardly that valuable a one.
If this type of action is permissible, and morally justifiable, I’ll be off to start a campaign allowing me to throw bricks through the windscreens of drivers who inconvenience me by stopping on pedestrian crossings, ignoring red lights, or speeding down my residential street.
Brian Johnson had it down about right… this isn’t a big issue about liberty.
I agree with A_T. The speed camera issue is not a big issue for liberty in the way that the government’s assault on our Common Law is (double jepoardy, presumption of innocence, trial by jury, habeas corpus, the whole nine yards). But although it is right to keep a sense of proportion, I do think speed cameras can be seen as a symptom of a government attitude towards the policing of citizens that ought to bug libertarians. It all adds up to fear of living in a surveillance state.
Even on the surveillance front, I’m far more worried by the ubiquitous and ever-spreading CCTV cameras; they’ll record you whether you’re breaking the law or not, & as far as I understand it, are not proven to keep crime down. At least speed cameras a) only take your photo if you actually break the law, and b) appear to dissuade people from speeding.
Kevin,
By all means pursue the abolition of speed cameras. However, I’d prefer it if you did so by campaigning against them in your local newspaper or lobbying your gummint rep or whoever. That’s fine by me. If you put up a good case, I might even support you. 😉
However, if I saw someone attaching a suspicious device to a speed camera, I’d turn them in to the local fuzz without even the slightest twinge of guilt at infringing that person’s ‘rights’.
Tom,
re: Common Law erosions… Amen.
A_t,
re: CCTV. I’m still undecided on this one. How different are they from an army of net-curtain twitchers?
There’s an old dear across the road from me and *nothing* goes down our street but that she doesn’t know about it. Last year when some drunks smashed down 8 or 10 saplings along our street, it was the lady across the road who probably pointed the local plod at the offenders.
Hmmm… I’m still wondering how different that is from CCTV.
By all means, Brian. If you re-examine my first post, you will see that I intent to work within the system. That, however, does not mean I will condemn those that choose more radical approaches.
A salient point here that seems to have been lost on some is that speed limits are not about safety. Studies have repeatedly proven that drivers, left to their own devices, will drive at a reasonable speed for the circumstances. This goes to the very foundation of human nature. However, most speed limits in the US (and Britian too IIRC) are set at the 80th percentile of surveyed traffic flow, even with an artificially low speed limit in place. This means that the law assumes, at any given time, over twenty percent of drivers are acting irrationally. Sociologists have a term for this: wilding.
Kevin,
I’m a statistician by training, so my comments are biased[1] that way.
Y’see… I look at it as a weighing of expected risk vs expected benefit.
If most[2] drivers drive at a reasonable speed for the circumstances, then that means that some don’t.
Most of these ‘unreasonable’ drivers don’t cause any problems at all, but that means that some do.
It only takes one little girl with a head injury or a young lad with a broken back or a dead father of three and we can see that a small percentage of population can cause a disproportionate amount of harm.
So, I balance the potential misery caused by a speed-related accident against the benefit of someone being able to get to their destination a few minutes early.
For me, that’s no contest.
Footnotes
1. I shan’t define exactly _how_ biased. Too boring. 😉
2. I inserted ‘most’ into your statement because, without it, it seemed to me that the statement was plainly indefensible — and that was obviously not your intention.
(Must dash. It’s late and I’ve got a meal to prepare. I’ll be back later.)
My partner has just told me that the explosive material amounts to a booby-trap meant to go off when the camera is unloaded. Which means that it is someone’s job to unload a speed camera that may turn out to be a bomb, injuring, perhaps killing that individual, who may themselves carry any kind of opinion of speed cameras in general. Now: I work in a public place, occasionally having to enforce rules with which I personally disagree. I would object having my wellbeing endangered so that someone can make a point about DRIVING SPEED (for God’s sake, is this the big issue here?). I found this story amusing before the details were vouchsafed me. I hope I won’t be the only one to condemn it now.
Ah, Brian: But the true “problem” drivers; those out at the “3 sigma” point (since you’re a statistician 😉 } will remain there despite prohibitive laws.
Kevin: It’s pleasure to meet someone who speaks my language. ::chkl::
Yes, the problem drivers will always be there, but it’s those who cluster around the 3-sigma point (Hmmm… my keyboard seems to have difficulty typing the letter ‘o’. Odd.) which may be influenced by the presence f speed cams. If they’re kept at a sensible speed, that’s all to the good.
One off-the-wall thought: routine journeys can numb the mind. I used to have to take the same route to and from work across country lanes for about 3 years. Towards the end of that period, I sometimes found myself driving on ‘autopilot’ — arriving at a crossroads and thinking “Whoa! Where did the last 3 miles go!!?”
If there are points along your journey where you know you HAVE to watch your speed, it helps you maintain alertness. It keeps your mind on the job in hand.
Even today, when I’ll be powering up the A1 to Newark, I know that my mind will become more focussed when I see a “Speed Cameras ahead” sign. I’ll glance at the speedo, bring it back to 75-77 ish and start concentrating on the road further ahead. As I see the camera, (and you’d have to be asleep to miss them!) I’ll ease it back to cross the lines at just above 70.
As I peel off the main road and enter town, I know that there’s anther camera there and I’ll bring my speed smoothly down to match that one’s (30, I think) limit. Which is just as well, because there’s a bleedin’ horrendous bend just after it!
The cams are all at places where I *should* be watching my speed. On a long downhill stretch just before a dangerous crossroads, just befre a point where 2 busy roads merge, a place where pedestrians dart across the road to/from a local supermarket.
I treat speed cams as reminders to keep me alert.
And, as we all know, the world needs lerts. 😉