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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… but if you think that means the idea of banning smoking in the UK has been condemned, you would be wrong. The headline appeared in the Telegraph above the article reporting that plans to restrict areas for smokers in pubs were denounced as inadequate last night by campaigners pressing for a ban.
The anti-smoking campaigners denounced the agreement of more than 20,000 pubs in Britain to introduce restrictions on smoking to make around 80 per cent of bar space tobacco-free within five years. Smokers in these outlets would be restricted to specified areas or rooms.
The ‘anti-choice extremists’ for the smoking ban, apparently encouraged by evidence suggesting that a big drop in tobacco sales in Ireland due the prohibition on smoking in pubs, are pushing for more. Deborah Arnott, director of Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), said:
This is a last desperate throw of the dice by the biggest players in the pub trade. They spin their plans as a smoke-free initiative, but they are nothing of the kind.
They will still leave their non-smoking customers gasping and leave more than half the country’s pubs unaffected.
I must be missing something, I did not notice any spin for a smoke-free initiative. It is a question of choice, not an imposition of a health-fascist measure.
Rob Hayward of the British Beer and Pub Association, which brokered the deal, argued with sensible points:
Clearly with the number of non-smokers on the increase companies want to reflect that in the way they run their pubs. We want to see better choice for non-smokers. At the same time we believe in freedom of choice and a policy that will still allow smokers to enjoy a night out with their friends in the pub.
Indeed. I do not like cigarette smoke in pubs, bars and restaurants although I am partial to a good cigar. But I do like the right of owners to let customers do in them what they wish on their premises. And it seems that even a government survey cannot produce better than 20 percent support for a total ban.
Surveys nothwithstanding, the ban in Ireland caused a 15 per cent drop in trade. A similar loss of business in Britain would lead to the closure of 5,000 pubs. And that’s got to be a bad thing.
Hate crime. What it is exactly? Opinions vary but in essence it means that a given crime, such as assault, murder or defamation, will be treated more seriously if the perpetrator is judged to be motivated by certain politically disfavoured prejudices.
It means that if someone smashes a bottle in your face because you are black (or catholic or muslim or homosexual), rather than because they want to steal your wallet or because they caught you in flagrante delicto with their girlfriend, then that is more serious. The actual substance of the crime is not what makes it a ‘hate’ crime, just the motivation to commit it against a member of a designated group of people based on their race (which in reality means ‘certain races’), religions (meaning ‘certain religions’) or sexual orientations (meaning ‘homosexuals’), that then becomes a hate crime… crimes against philanderers, drunks, football supporters, loud mouths etc. are not hate crimes.
You may hate supporters of Celtic Football Club but if you bash one of them over the head with a two by four, that is not a ‘hate crime’, it is just assault and perhaps GBH. Unless of course the Celtic supporter in question happens to be a nominal Catholic but you are a nominal Protestant.
It is a criminal act which attracts extra sanction because of what the perpetrator was thinking at the time. In short, a ‘hate crime’ is a ‘thought crime’, albeit one usually only applied to thoughts held by certain politically disfavoured classifications of people.
Do you really trust something as corrupt and fallible as a political process to create laws not on demonstrable facts (who hit who with the two by four) but on what people think? Sure, motivation matters: for example being put in fear of your life can justify violence in self-defence, even (sometimes) in Britain. But to legislate that certain groups are more sacrosanct than others is collectivism at its most intellectually pernicious because it denies the individual basis of rights and assigns value on the basis of group membership. We all know where that can end up.
If you think laws should be based on crimes against individuals regardless of what race/religion or sexual orientation they have, then you might want to go over to the Hansard Society on-line consultation on Hate Crime in Northern Ireland and tell them that group rights are not a form of human rights, they are their antithesis.
Only if you say things that are favoured in Islington, it would seem.
Some odious Jamaican singer rejoicing in the name of Beenie Man could be charged under British law with incitement to violence because of the anti-homosexual lyrics of his songs.
I am all for the annoying Peter Tatchell trying (with some success) to cause ‘Beenie Man’ and his ilk financial difficulties by getting sponsorship deals cancelled as a result of their hate-mongering: that is civil society in action and an altogether good thing… but unless ‘Bennie Man’ actually starts taking up his bazooka for real, the state has no business suppressing free speech by force.
The essential civil liberties called ‘freedom of expression’ are rather more important that the actual substance of some idiotic reggae song. Has the culture of liberty really decayed so far that this sort of overarching state control can be tolerated? Freedom of expression for the politically favoured or the mainstream are the easy bits… it is when some detestable half-wit homophobic prat like ‘Beenie Man’ opens his noisome trap that you discover what the real state of civil liberties in a country is.
Pathetic. It is just a song and the state has no business banning songs.
This article from the Washington Post, on the application of the little known Data Quality Act to hobble the regulatory leviathan, is full of unintentional insights. The Data Quality Act is, well, let the Post tell it, and let the insights begin!
The Data Quality Act — written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate — is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable.
The first insight is, of course, the clonking great pro-government, pro-regulation bias that the Post brings to this story. Note the disparaging terms applied to this piece of legislation, which has a genesis and a pedigree that is totally ordinary – most legislation is the product of interested parties, and most finds its way onto the books via massive omnibus bills that no one reads. However, these routine facts of Washington life are given ominous prominence only when the media outlet is opposed to whatever was done. The rest of the story is riddled with similar bias – in the Post’s world, regulation is always good, always to protect the people, never fails a cost-benefit test, always supported by the preponderance of the scientific evidence, etc.
The next set of unintentional insights comes to us when the relatively innocuous purpose of the Act collides with the prerogatives of the regulatory state.
But many consumers, conservationists and worker advocates say the act is inherently biased in favor of industry. By demanding that government use only data that have achieved a rare level of certainty, these critics maintain, the act dismisses scientific information that in the past would have triggered tighter regulation.
First, of course, note who the Post asks for their opinion. Of equal interest is the rather revealing admission that, in the past, regulation was apparently handed down on the basis of information that was, how to put this, of less than adequate quality. Declining to regulate because the data isn’t there is, of course, a Bad Thing.
These final comments surely need no elaboration.
“It’s a tool to clobber every effort to regulate,” said Rena Steinzor, a professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Maryland. “In my view, it amounts to censorship and harassment.”
. . . .
Yet Steinzor, the Maryland environmental lawyer, and other critics complain that the OMB’s involvement politicizes the process. The expertise of the handful of scientists hired by Graham, they say, cannot match that of the thousands of experts on agency staffs.
One of the conceits of the press here in the US is that the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” somehow grants them special status and immunities from laws that we plebes have to comply with. Not too surprisingly, the establishment media sees itself as the “Fourth Estate,” Americanized as the fourth branch of government (after the legislative, executive, and judicial branches) entitled to its own kind of sovereign immunity.
They are wrong. If the freedom to publish is restricted only to a certain limited or identifiable class, then it isn’t really a freedom at all, but is a privilege.
One of the more common expressions of the misconception that they belong to a special privileged class is the belief among journalists that they are entitled to defy court orders. Specifically, they believe that the First Amendment somehow guarantees them an immunity against having to identify their sources.
One of the micro-scandals plaguing the Bush administration has been the entirely hoked-up l’affaire Plame. In a nutshell, when former ambassador and Saudi shill Joseph Wilson began lying in public about his fact-finding mission to Africa regarding Saddamite nuclear ambitions, someone in the Bush administration may or may not have “leaked” the fact that his wife works for the CIA and got him the gig. This was scandalous because his wife may or may not have been an “undercover” op, so that leaking her identity may or may not have been against the law. Valerie Plame was so concerned about being outed that she and her husband arranged for a nice photo spread in Vanity Fair.
The scandal was hoked up because the press knew from the get-go who leaked Valerie Plame’s name and identity, but nonetheless went on a rampage about a coverup and the need for a grand jury to investigate the White House for this dreadful breach of national security. In effect, the Washington press was demanding a grand jury to discover what they already knew. This bluff has been called – the grand jury quite logically subpoenaed the testimony of two reporters who had fingered the White House for the leak.
Newly-released court orders show U.S. District Court Chief Judge Thomas F. Hogan two weeks ago ordered Matt Cooper of Time magazine and Tim Russert of NBC to appear before a grand jury and tell whether they knew that White House sources provided the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to the media.
Cooper still refused to answer questions after Hogan’s July 20 order, and on Aug. 6 Hogan held him in contempt of court and ordered that he go to jail. Cooper has been released on bond pending his emergency appeal to a federal appeals court. Hogan has ordered that Time pay a $1,000 fine for each day Cooper does not appear before the grand jury.
A timely reminder that freedom for all is not a privilege for the few.
Some time in June I was contacted by the production company responsible for making a radio programme called ‘Straw Poll’ for BBC Radio 4. They asked me to join the panel for a forthcoming debate on the proposition that ‘We Should Not Legislate Against Obesity’.
I agreed.
The format of the show is a panel which consists of four speakers, two of whom are in favour of the proposition and two of whom are against. The debate is thrashed out for about 30 minutes or so before the studio audience is given a chance to put questions to the panellists. The studio audience then vote on the proposition.
The programme was recorded last July 19th at a Central London location. My opponents were two doctors representing Orwellian-sounding NGO’s whose names I have not forgotten because I never bothered committing them to memory in the first place. On my side was a very polished and very professional PR spokesman for the food industry. → Continue reading: Taking the fight to the enemy
The British government is advocating the vaccination of children against particular behaviours using the forthcoming array of pharmacotherapy vaccines. These would innoculate children against a host of behaviours that the government defines as anti-social: drinking, smoking, drugs, blogging and so on.
The article explains that “Doctors would immunize children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection” and that the program would operate in a way similar to the “current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme.” Further the authors reveal that “such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.”
Developments like this are monitored by the Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, whose response was clear:
Richard Glen Boire, a legal scholar at the CCLE, believes that vaccinating children with “anti-drug” drugs would be “alarming and unlawful, and would signal the first time that neuropharmaceuticals were overtly used to enforce government policy.”
Aside from the human rights concerns, the UK plan raises serious health questions regarding the long-term effects of these drugs on the complex neurochemistry of the brain.
The CCLE warns that advances in the neurosciences will challenge the ability of individuals to maintain their cognitive freedom. Governments will redefine mental health to use drugs and other neurotechnologies in order to police and channel people’s behaviours.
(My thanks to Alex Ramonsky of the Entelechy Institute for alerting me to this issue). Crossposted to White Rose.
This is one scary, scary animation… It may seem exaggerating and a bit on the cheesy (or sprout submarine combo) side but it is certainly my impression that things are moving in that direction.
via Dan Gillmore and cross-posted from White Rose
Today is the deadline for the Home Office consultation period on ID cards bill. Phil Booth of Infinite Ideas Machine and No2ID campaign draws our attention to the fact that there are still a few hours left…
Just in case you need any inspiration he has published the full text of his e-mail submission to the Home Office consultation on ID cards.
He also points his readers to Spy Blog’s excellent annotated blog of the Draft Bill, Mark Simpkins’ equally excellent blog of the entire consultation document. For those with some time on their hands he recommends reading Stand.org.uk’s submission [219KB MS Word document].
Please do send something (even if it’s just a simple ‘I am against the proposed scheme and legislation’ type mail) to identitycards@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk, making sure the words ‘consultation response’ appear in the Subject line.
Thanks.
Cross-posted from White Rose.
Blogger and friend Russell E. Whitaker links to and quotes from an article citing the increasingly intrusive, impertinent and downright rude questions which compilers of the U.S. national census deem is fit to ask citizens of Jefferson’s Republic once every ten years.
It is scarcely better in Britain, as far as I can tell. Oh well, I do recall with amusement reading somewhere that in response to questions about matters of religious belief, a number of folk now give their answer as ‘Jedi’. Even funnier, it is now a recognised category. I wonder if I ought to go through my collection of science fiction novels and come up with a new category or two.
I have a problem with Rowan Atkinson. He only has to open his mouth to set me off laughing. Bob.
Maybe we should start taking him seriously. Every few years Mr Blunkett takes it into his head to publicly demonstrate that he is not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican, by making a new law against incitement to religious hatred and Mr Atkinson stands up to argue against him. This is what happened in 2001 and that is what happened again the other day in the pages of the Times, and on Radio 4’s Today programme where I heard him, waiting for a joke that never came.
The joke is indeed a long time coming. Freedom of speech in this country did not merely arise during a period of violent religious divisions but because those divisions were insurmountable by any means other than allowing liberty for all.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the Beeb’s latest gaseous emanation regarding global warming.
Now, I am no climate scientist, but I harbor a suspicion that maybe, just maybe, one factor impacting on the Earth’s climate just might be – now, I’m just throwing this out – the sun. I find discussion of the sun’s impact on global weather to be oddly absent from the reams of paper speculating on how minute variations in various gases here on earth may affect climate, rather like speculating on how adjusting the air pressure in your tires a few ounces might affect fuel efficiency without ever considering the, well, fuel you are putting in the tank.
I have noted the occasional article exploring the correlation between temperature variations and solar activity, and so I read this with interest:
Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star’s activity in the past.
They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth’s climate became steadily warmer.
However, the scientists made sure that the reigning anti-materialist orthodoxy of those providing their grants was not called into question by these merely scientific observations, scurrying to observe:
This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning, they argue.
and
This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun’s latest attempt to warm the Earth.
The notion that non-human forces might occasionally affect the Earth’s weather can not quite be denied:
Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer.
The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer.
but of course if this truth were recognized then it would quite knock the props out from under the latest rush to regulate under the banner of Kyoto and global warming. Even when evidence of the obvious – that the sun’s output is what really controls global temperature, and that global temperature swings regardless of human activity – is presented, it must be spun so that human agency, and thus the need for regulation, is paramount.
Laugh or cry? I can not quite decide.
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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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