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]
|
The PM has a new gimmick. We are invited to petition him via the interweb thingy.
Now I think it interesting in itself that a Prime Minister should so wrap himself in the purple to invite petitions, as if he were sovereign and we the petty subjects whose wishes he might deign to consider. But the content of the petitions themselves is getting quite weird.
Leading the pack is a petition to repeal the Hunting With Dogs Act 2004. But there is also one to “ignore the petition to repeal the hunting act 2004” and another (which no-one has signed) to “to ban the signing of petitions asking to repeal the hunting act 2004”.
Some are gloriously vague (“change renting laws in UK”); some insanely specific, requiring arcane knowledge and an odd personality to understand, let alone support. (E.g. We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to require A-G energy-efficiency ratings to make explicit the A+ and A++ categories (and any future, higher categories), so that consumers are aware that energy efficiencies greater than ‘A’ can be achieved with products so rated.”) Some are both vague and specialised at the same time. Some founded on malapropism. There are numerous semi-duplications, where individuals who might agree with an earlier, simpler, better-supported proposal, have added their own refinements, not caring that it may be a distraction from the main cause.
In short, all the faults of that fetish of radicals, participatory democracy, are on display. As are pretty much all the green-ink political obsessions.
My favourite: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to replace the national anthem with ‘Gold’ by Spandau Ballet” – I urge you to support it. But there is something to give joy to everyone.
It’s the danger of tidy-minded people…
– Andrew Marr, in an extempore line, almost thrown away, to close an item on the surveillance state on the BBC’s radio talk-show Start the Week.
I think Marr pins it down precisely. Oppressive regimes are frequently driven by a desire for order, seen as conformity to explicit rules. The most insidious, most universally oppressive castes, don’t seek order because they want to be obeyed. They seek order for its own sake. They want the security of rules for everything, and recording everything.
A brigadier general (retired) writes to The Times:
Last week, a security scanner at the Waterloo Eurostar terminal detected a credit-card-sized toolkit in my overnight case as I set out for Paris on business. …
Read the whole thing. It is not long.
I am reminded that we are only a fortnight since St Crispin’s day.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day and live t’old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors
And say, “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars
And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.
What did you do in the “War on Terror,” Daddy?
NO2ID has demonstrated how it is possible to clone the Home Office’s wonderful new ePassport while it is still in the post, without taking it out of the envelope.
The Home Office is unconcerned: with classic disingenuity its spokesman told The Guardian, which carried the first part of an unfolding story:
By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport. What use would my biometric image be to you? And even if you had the information, you would still have to counterfeit the new passport – and it has lots of new security features. If you were a criminal, you might as well just steal a passport.
But of course the Home Office does not care. If there is a conflict between your personal security and official convenience in logging the details of passports at borders – which is what it means by ‘improving the security of passports’ (note plural) – then there was never any doubt which would win.
An Anonymous Coward on slashdot pinned it down:
The basic problem isn’t the algorithm they choose. It’s that their goal is incompatible with security.
They wish to establish a world where all people can be instantly identified, correlated with commercial profiles, and tracked wherever they travel.
How can this be done “securely”? It cannot.
Thank you, Admiral Poindexter.
If you cannot state a proposition clearly and unambiguously, you do not understand it.
– Milton Friedman
When I write, self-comfortingly, that Britain is a very irreligious country indeed (for all its other vices), many of our more conservative readers are not at all comforted and don’t wish to believe it. Now comes some very impressive support for my view, from a proper poll conducted on behalf of a Christian think tank.
“42% think faith is as evil as smallpox” is the stunning headline from UKPollingReport.
Terror ‘priority’ if Brown is PM
– BBC
Never a truer word. He wants us to be afraid. I for one am going to cooperate on that one point.
On the other hand there are countries where the law is changed in order to prosecute the ordinary activities of those whom the government chooses to classify as criminals because it is politically convenient to do so. Should there be no evidence on which a jury will convict, the law can be changed till the public enemy is punished, you can punish them anyway even if they are acquitted, or you can always keep juries, burden of proof and testing of evidence out of it altogether in selected cases.
The traditional test in designing the criminal law in western legal systems – common law or civil law – was to ask, “What mischief does the law address?” or “What harm to persons, property, or society as a whole, does it seek to prevent or punish?” Libertarians might be troubled by the unlimited scope of “society as a whole”, but universalism – the treatment of all persons the same in the same circumstances, and framing the law on general principle rather than special cases – was once deemed fundamental to the rule of law. Indeed there is a common law maxim: hard cases make bad law, that warns that attempts to extract jurisprudence from the merits of the parties involved result in dangerous incoherence and uncertainty (the career of the late Lord Denning is replete with example) .
What should we call a jurisdiction where criminal liability is determined principally by the identity of ‘the criminal’ which is to say, whoever it is the authorities determine should be punished? Not lawless, because all these things are done under the colours of law, most legalistically. I think Tony Blair would call it ‘modern’. I think I would call it a ‘pyramid of bullies’.
[I]f they have got drug dealers living in the street, you know, love is not the answer to that I am afraid, evicting them from their houses and locking them up is the answer.
– The Right Honourable Tony Blair MP, at his monthly press conference yesterday (At least the cleaned-up transcript from No.10.).
Lobby correspondents are united in thinking the Prime Minister was belligerent and bad tempered about everything. Has he finally gone completely round the bend? The people he wants to evict and lock-up are implicitly those suspected of being Bad People. The rest of the conference made clear he is not interested in due process, civil liberties, all that old-fashioned nonsense.
Ordinary Britons struggling to get on with their lives are being menaced by a small number of bullies who do not care about the rights of their victims. These ‘Tsars’, as they are sometimes known, impose themselves and their lifestyle choices on others with an almost psychopathic disregard for other people’s viewpoints, and regardless of all attempts by police and others to maintain traditional values.
When the Government’s antisocial behaviour tsar was out on patrol with the police on a housing estate last week, she was amazed to find that the officer was handing out sweets rather than enforcing Asbos.
– according to The Independent on Sunday
“Family intervention projects – I really believe this is the approach that will work,” she said. “It ain’t cheap and it also isn’t easy. Basically it’s the end of the road.”
“The priority was to do families, because they have children, first. But we are working on doing something for chaotic adults where the same approach will be taken.”
Ms Casey added she was working with Whitehall to adapt the centres to cater for single people.
She said other measures to tackle anti-social behaviour included plans to extend parenting courses across the country, and powers for imposing compulsory parenting orders.
“If you are not going to take parenting help then we are going to make you take parenting help,” she said.
As the same interview is (puzzlingly) slightly differently reported by the BBC. Anyone would think that the Indy report did not sound tough enough, and was re-spun for presentation to the Beeb.
Following on the pubs being leant on to fingerprint their customers and take names and addresses, another egregious example of police and licensing authorities clubbing together to force a business to stop its paying customers behaving in ways officialdom does not approve of.
West Ham are under pressure from Newham Council and the Football Licensing Authority to limit persistent standing inside Upton Park, and several supporters have been banned from attending the next two home games at Upton Park for persistent standing.
Those who have been sent letters informing them of the action, will miss West Ham’s Premiership games against Blackburn and Arsenal on the next two Sundays.
– from VitalFootball.co.uk
“Persistent standing”? I am no soccer fan as I abhor the tribalism of team sports, and it is really, really, dull to watch – almost as dull as horse- or motor-racing. I would not know about this at all but for Duleep Allilrajah’s column on Sp!ked. But is not leaping up and down, along with shouting and singing as part of a crowd, a significant part of football supporting? And unlike cheering and community singing, standing or sitting has no effect on the world outside the stadium. What has it got to do with anyone but the club and its supporters?
Perhaps if I had taken more notice of soccer before now, I would have known of the existence ot the Football Licensing Authority, too. It is a public body created under Thatcher, for those tempted to idealise Britain before Blair. But we should all take notice of it now, because its imperial ambition is charted out on its website, a clear mission to tell everyone involved in doing or watching sport what to do:
In December 1998, following a major review, the Government announced that we would in due course become the Sports Ground Safety Authority. It presented legislation to this effect to Parliament but the 2001 General Election intervened. Ministers are committed to reintroducing it when they can find a place in the Parliamentary timetable.
One small mystery. Why should the Borough of Newham connive at undermining one of the poor borough’s richest sources of trade and employment? Could it be that the bureaucrats who seek such petty restrictions will get paid and pensioned from taxes raised in other places regardless of how blasted into feebleness the people in their care remain? Or are they just getting into practice to discipline the Olympics?
You don’t need identifiable personal information to understand trends and patterns, but British government data sharing focuses on pinpointing individuals. Some government departments are already planning to analyse public and private-sector databases for suspicious activity. The new Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is reviewing public and private-sector databases, to find data-matching opportunities that could highlight suspicious behaviour by individuals that implies they are involved in organised or financial crime. The SOCA consultation paper ‘New Powers Against Organised and Financial Crime’, says the public sector could share private-sector suspicions of fraud by joining CIFAS, the UK’s fraud-prevention service. It also proposes matching suspicious activity reports with data from Revenue & Customs, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Passport Office and Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) databases. This, it says, would be quite legal.
– from Share and share alike by Christine Evans-Pughe on IEE Networks. (Thanks to the great Chris Lightfoot for pointing out this piece.)
Naive foreigners with a belief in privacy and liberty may not understand that if in Britain you oppose state surveillance of just about everything, then you’ll be accused of wanting to protect people who torture and/or murder children. The article in passing explains how, if not why.
|
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.
|
