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.
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A man who has been acquitted of rape, after a retrial, (spot the insinuation) has made subject to an ‘interim sexual risk order’ by Magistrates in York.
It requires the man disclose any planned sexual activity to the police or face up to five years in prison.
The order – which was drawn up by magistrates in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, and extended in York – reads: “You must disclose the details of any female including her name, address and date of birth.
“You must do this at least 24 hours prior to any sexual activity taking place.”
A further court hearing in May will decide whether the interim order should be made into a full order, which has a minimum duration of two years and can last indefinitely. Sexual risk orders were introduced in England and Wales in March last year and can be applied to any individual who the police believe poses a risk of sexual harm, even if they have never been convicted of a crime. They are civil orders imposed by magistrates at the request of police.
This is an interim order, pending a full hearing, and the court’s power is wide:
(3)The court may, if it considers it just to do so, make an interim sexual risk order, prohibiting the defendant from doing anything described in the order.
The Full Monty, as it were, is below in section 122A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, with a broad discretion for the order to be made. So now this chap must manage his affairs so that he pops down the police station, queues at the desk with the people reporting lost wallets etc. and then reports the details of his intended ‘conquest’ at least 24 hours before he gets frisky, sexual ‘activity’ not just intercourse, is covered. It is not clear what Plod will do in the meantime, but I expect that the lady concerned may face some questioning.
Well George Orwell’s Anti-Sex League appears to be taking shape here. Can anyone remember this being discussed by candidates at any General Election? Did the Stasi even dream of doing this sort of thing?
Sexual risk orders (England and Wales)
122A Sexual risk orders: applications, grounds and effect
(1) A chief officer of police or the Director General of the National Crime Agency (“the Director General”) may by complaint to a magistrates’ court apply for an order under this section (a “sexual risk order”) in respect of a person (“the defendant”) if it appears to the chief officer or the Director General that the following condition is met.
(2) The condition is that the defendant has, whether before or after the commencement of this Part, done an act of a sexual nature as a result of which there is reasonable cause to believe that it is necessary for a sexual risk order to be made.
(3)A chief officer of police may make an application under subsection (1) only in respect of a person—
(a)who resides in the chief officer’s police area, or
(b)who the chief officer believes is in that area or is intending to come to it.
(4)An application under subsection (1) may be made to any magistrates’ court acting for a local justice area that includes—
(a)any part of a relevant police area, or
(b)any place where it is alleged that the person acted in a way mentioned in subsection (2).
Update: The man in question is now facing a charge.
‘No prospect of relationship’
“I had more freedom in prison,” he said.
“I’m in a state of shock, I cannot believe this is how the justice system works.”
He said there was “no prospect” of a relationship at the moment.
He said: “Can you imagine, 24 hours before sex? Come on.
He gave the example of chatting to a woman and saying: “There’s a nice French restaurant I’d like to take you to, but first the police are just going to come around for a little chat.”
“Knock, knock, knock, this is the police, (Mr X) is subject to a sexual risk order and is considered to be potentially dangerous… then they leave.”
Andrew Rawnsley has joined the crowd round the cadaver at the pollsters’ post mortem for the May 2015 General Election:
“Now if only I had followed my own advice about opinion polls…”
At 10pm on 7 May last year, Martin Boon, the head of the polling company ICM, spoke for his entire industry in a two word tweet: “Oh, shit.”
There follows some discussion of what went wrong, and then it gets to the part that really interests me:
It might even be paradoxically true that by forecasting a hung parliament, the polls helped to produce a Tory majority government. I think there is something in this, but the trouble with the hypothesis is that it is just a hypothesis. Since we can’t rerun the election with accurate polling, it can’t be proved.
That hasn’t stopped some voices from responding to the polling failure by demanding a ban on their publication in the days before an election. That is a rotten idea. It would be anti-democratic, unfair and it wouldn’t work anyway. In a free society, it should not be illegal to collect opinions and publish the results. Another objection to a ban is that it would be partial. A privileged minority, commercial interests and the political parties themselves would still conduct and have access to private polls. In any case, a ban looks highly impractical because it could not prevent websites abroad from publishing polls.
He writes good sense, but it does not stop many, many of the commenters to Mr Rawnsley’s article demanding that polls be banned in the run-up to an election. Many of these want polls banned simply because they think it would help the Labour party. Amusingly, a lot of the same commenters who now say that the pollsters conspired to exaggerate the chance of a Labour victory in order to frighten Conservative voters off their sofas were saying before the election that the pollsters were conspiring to exaggerate the chance of a Conservative victory in order to demoralize Labour supporters. And now they refuse to believe the recent polls that say Jeremy Corbyn is widely considered unfit to be prime minister.
The group above overlaps with those who want to ban opinion polls because fantasizing about banning things is one of their few pleasures in life, but there are also some calls for polls to be banned from people who do not give the impression of being quite such control freaks.
These less visibly freakish commenters often want a ban on polls specifically because – get this – voters might change their intentions if they know more about what other voters are likely to do. If you think about it, this is a very weird argument. For one thing, under this argument the case for a ban (such as it is) becomes stronger the more consistently accurate polling becomes. For another, the people making it generally rail against the voters for not bothering to inform themselves, but in this matter they demand that the voters be forbidden to inform themselves. Why that particular exception? Why should voters be encouraged to consider the effect their vote will have by looking at the party manifestos, or by using the results of the previous election to decide how best to place their vote tactically, but be forbidden to consider what their fellow voters are planning to do? If the protest vote I am considering making against Party X turns out to be rather more likely to propel the dreadful Candidate Y into the seat than I had previously thought, I want to know about it.
Why “triply”?
– This:
Pastor who said Islam was ‘doctrine spawned in hell’ is cleared by court
A born-again Christian pastor who denounced Islam as “heathen”, “satanic” and a “doctrine spawned in hell” has been cleared after a three-day trial in a verdict that upheld the right to offend under the principle of freedom of expression.
– this:
The National Secular Society said the verdict was a “welcome reassertion of the fundamental right to freedom of expression”.
Campaigns manager Stephen Evans said the society strongly disagreed with the tone and content of McConnell’s comments, but added: “At a time when freedom of speech is being curtailed and put at risk in any number of ways, this is a much needed statement from the judge that free speech will be defended and that Islam is not off-limits.”
– and this:
An Islamic academic spoke in support of McConnell outside the court on the grounds of freedom of expression. Muhammad al-Hussaini, a senior research fellow in Islamic studies at the Westminster Institute, said: “Against the flaming backdrop of torched Christian churches, bloody executions and massacres of faith minorities in the Middle East and elsewhere, it is … a matter of utmost concern that, in this country, we discharge our common duty steadfastly to defend the freedom of citizens to discuss, debate and critique religious ideas and beliefs – restricting only speech which incites to physical violence against others.
“Moreover, in a free and democratic society we enter into severe peril when we start to confuse what we perhaps ought or ought not to say, with what in law we are allowed to, or not allowed to say.”
In an article called “The greens and the fascists” Bishop Hill linked to this paper by Trygve Lavik, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen:
“Climate change denial, freedom of speech and global justice”.
Bishop Hill did not use the word “fascist” inappropriately when he described Professor Lavik’s views as “unmistakably fascist”. Here is the abstract of the paper (emphasis added):
In this paper I claim that there are moral reasons for making climate denialism illegal. First I define climate denialism, and then I discuss its impact on society and its reception in the media. I build my philosophical arguments mainly on John Stuart Mill and Thomas M. Scanlon. According to Mill’s utilitarian justification of free speech, even untrue opinions are valuable in society’s pursuit of more truth. Consequently one might think that Mill’s philosophy would justify climate denialists’ right to free speech. A major section of the paper argues against that view. The main arguments are: Climate denialism is not beneficial because its main goal is to produce doubt, and not truth. Climate denialism is not sincerely meant, which is a necessary condition for Mill to accept utterances. Climate denialists bring harm, by blocking necessary action on climate change. Primarily they harm future generations and people in developing countries. Hence the case can be made in terms of global justice: Would future generations and people in developing countries support my claim? I think so, or so I argue. My argument from global justice is built on Scanlon’s distinction between the interests of participants, the interests of audiences, and the interests of bystanders. The climate denialists have participant interests “in being able to call something to the attention of a wide audience”. Audience interests consist of “having access to expressions that we wish to hear or read, and even in being exposed to some degree to expressions we have not chosen”. Future generations and people in poor countries are bystanders to the climate debate. If the debate postpones necessary actions, it is the bystanders who must pay the price. I argue that bystanders’ costs outweigh participants’ and audiences’ interests, and that this is an argument for a statutory ban on climate denialism.
Keywords: climate change denial, freedom of speech, global justice, utilitarianism, harm principle
Today I visited the Click & Collect counter at Debenhams, a department store. This is an arrangement whereby one orders goods using a web site then visits the premises to collect them. “Sorry about the wait,” said the clerk when I reached the front of the queue. Later she asked if I wanted a bag in which to carry my purchase. “You have to pay 5p.” I did not have any change, and withdrew from my wallet a pristine £20 note. The Click & Collect counter must not be set up for cash payments, as the clerk looked slightly panicked but decided her job was to make me wait some more: “Could you join the queue over there to pay?”
At the front of that queue I declared, “I am to pay for this bag.” The look of confusion that was the reply made me wonder if, perhaps, the intention all along had been for me to shrug and walk away without paying. “You want to pay for that bag?” Yes, I did. The cashier slid the £20 back towards me and muttered something that I took to mean, “get out of here.” I thanked her and left.
The UK’s 5p “bag charge” is not a Pigou tax to cover the externality of disposing of the bag. Neither is it to raise money for charity. It is explicitly designed to change people’s behaviour. “We expect to see a significant reduction in the use of single-use plastic carrier bags as a direct result of the charge”, says the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, while looking sternly over the top of its spectacles, one imagines.
More than that, people who insist on continuing to use plastic bags are to be made to feel awkward and deviant. Like smokers, we are to be de-normalised.
The mechanics of buying groceries are tedious. I would prefer the transaction to go gracefully with the minimum of conscious thought. I do not want to be made to consider such philosophical questions as, “do you want a bag for life? We have to charge 5p for the other ones. You don’t? Oh well, I will try to use the minimum number of bags to save you money. What’s that? You don’t care? You want me to use the number of bags appropriate for secure and efficient carrying of the volume, mass and tessellation properties of the items you have purchased? What a strange customer you are.” I feel that social disapprobation every time.
A while ago, at a supermarket, I paid by credit card for my items before realising the cashier had not bagged them. “Can I have a bag?” Then I fumbled around for change until the customer behind me in the queue insisted on paying for me. I left haunted by the idea that he thought I had arranged this situation on purpose. When it happened again at a newsagent the other day, I insisted on paying even though the cashier offered to waive the fee. Partly to assure everyone in the vicinity that I was not a skinflint and partly because, like a feeble imitation of an Ayn Rand hero, I want to force Them to confront what They have wrought. Next time, to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt, and to make more miserable the lives of future shoppers, I might point out that they should be careful about waiving the charge as there are DEFRA agents in our midst, carrying out secret shopping operations. Yes, I will fight back!
I will continue to use single-use plastic bags for as long as I am able. Not just because I am too disorganised to plan my shopping jaunts in advance and ensure that I set out with the correct number of re-usable bags, but also as a service to you, dear readers, that you may from the safety of your laptops observe the abuse and ostracisation of a misfit; that you may know the nature of the state.
I like these people:
Free speech campaigners have secretly evaded a student union ban on two speakers who were deemed to have broken rules on causing offence.
The speakers, Milo Yiannopoulos, a self-styled men’s rights activist, and Julie Bindel, a feminist writer, were originally due to address the University of Manchester’s free speech and secular society in October to debate tensions between feminism and free speech until the student union stopped them.
Student leaders said that Ms Bindel’s views on transgender people were “transphobic” and that Mr Yiannopoulos was a “professional misogynist” and “rape apologist”.
However, Manchester’s free speech society proved to be made of sterner stuff. Its members created a new association, used a lecture hall as a venue and publicised the event only on the morning that it was to take place.
– The Times, today.
Several aspects of this story lead me to wonder if I have slipped into a nicer timeline than the one I’ve been living in recently.
It was about students standing up for free speech against po-faced authoritarians. In 2015.
The university didn’t surrender. In 2015.
Better yet, it actually helped the good guys:
The university authorities themselves were part of the plot, agreeing to provide a lecture theatre as a venue for the rescheduled event and arranging for a large retinue of security staff.
More fun things to note include the fact that the process of nimbly outwitting the lumbering Students Union by adroit use of social media was obviously huge fun. These days if you want to build up a bank of happy memories of a rebellious youth to comfort you in your old age, you rebel against the Students Union. You could make a name for yourself that way. So could the Student Union apparatchiks make their names, as sour, whiny prematurely-withered prunes who couldn’t stop the music. No one will boast that they were part of Manchester Student Union in the good old days.
I have a personal grudge against Julie Bindel, and I could get irritated by Milo Yiannopoulos. Three cheers for them both for this.
Ars Technica says than in the UK “you may soon need a licence to take photos of that classic designer chair you bought”.
Changes to UK copyright law will soon mean that you may need to take out a licence to photograph classic designer objects even if you own them. That’s the result of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which extends the copyright of artistic objects like designer chairs from 25 years after they were first marketed to 70 years after the creator’s death. In most cases, that will be well over a hundred years after the object was designed. During that period, taking a photo of the item will often require a licence from the copyright owner regardless of who owns the particular object in question.
There are lots of exceptions hinted at here: what is a classic designer object and why will the photograph only require a license “often”? It also seems as if such copyright enforcement already exists and only the timing is changing. Perhaps in practice the effects of this change in the law will be minimal.
Nevertheless, it is wrong to meet with violence the non-violent act of photographing an inanimate object. It is also so unintuitive that people will be surprised by it. And it is so unenforceable that it will be applied selectively.
There is another possibility. A Star Wars fan recently had his Facebook account suspended for posting a photograph of a Star Wars toy.
One possibility is that at least someone at Disney was openminded about Carvalho’s thoughtful response, but the organization has a software-enabled copyright enforcement regime in place that they simply can’t stop.
Pattern recognition software means that previously unenforceable crazy laws and policies can now be uniformly enforced. I find this…interesting.
Thirteen members of a Loyalist marching band, the Young Conway Volunteers, have had their criminal convictions for ‘doing a provocative act likely to cause public disorder or a breach of the peace‘ quashed after the Public Prosecutor agreed not to oppose their appeals.
The non-offence occurred after the marching band found themselves marching in a circle outside St Patrick’s Church (Catholic) in north Belfast, whilst playing (allegedly aggravated by hostility) a tune alleged to have been ‘the Famine Song’ with the presumably catchy refrain ‘The famine’s over, why don’t you go home?‘, but what they said was the Beach Boys ‘Sloop John B‘ (reportedly an easy mistake to make, the basic tune is widely used). How this was proved at the original trial when they presumably were playing a tune on instruments and not singing was not made clear.
Although now acquitted, the band members agreed to be bound over to keep the peace for 2 years (not a conviction but a promise of good behaviour, breach of which could lead to a 7 day jail term).
Whilst this acquittal in the face of ‘hate legislation’ is certainly a good thing for liberty, I note the apologetic tone of the response of the Orange Lodge, which presumably has some connection to the band:
In a statement, The County Grand Orange Lodge of Belfast welcomed the successful appeal.
“We are glad that justice has finally been achieved for these band members who had been wrongly vilified by the media and nationalism,” it said.
“There never was an intent to cause offence.”
One might ask what on Earth were they marching for if not to ‘cause offence‘ (in the subjective sense) on 12th July by their celebration of the lifting of the siege of Londonderry? To say that there was ‘no intent to cause offence‘ appears to concede that offence was caused, rather than taken or even perhaps rejoiced in as an opportunity to throw the legal machinery of the State at the band.
Why not say that this legislation is oppressive, tyrannical and makes the law itself a politicised weapon, a sword, not a shield?
To me as an Englishman, the whole shebang seems utterly alien, the intolerance and fanaticism on both poles of the Ulster divide mark them as having more in common with each other than with insipid, fundamentally apolitical England. Whether or not that is a good thing for Northern Ireland, or for England, may in the long run be another matter.
A fourth-year medical student at Leicester University, Mr Ravindu Thilakawardhana, has been deemed unfit to practice medicine by the University, after making comments on Facebook towards someone who had annoyed him, the Independent tells us. It appears that he will not be permitted to complete his degrees and graduate, quite a long way down the line too.
Ravindu Thilakawardhana, who was in his fourth year studying medicine at the University of Leicester, became furious when a fellow student posted explicit pictures of his friend onto the social networking site.
Mr Thilakawardhana retorted with a photo of the actor Liam Neeson accompanied by the words: “I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you,” the Leicester Mercury reports.
He later sent a private message to the student saying: “I don’t want to see you on a night out in Leicester, or in the UK.”
The student reported Mr Thilakawardhana to the medical school who reprimanded him, before deeming him “unfit to practice medicine”.
The matter is going to law, with Mr Thilakawardhana taking legal action in the hope of having his sanction overturned.
There has been no criminal conviction (not even a prosecution) of Mr Thilakawardhana over his action, and yet his career is effectively ruined, as things stand, because of an intemperate post. This has all the hallmarks of a grotesque reaction to me.
How many other medical students might be barred from the closed shop profession for expressing attitudes that render them ‘unfit to practice medicine’? How wide might this ‘catch-all’ classification extend? Has all common sense left the University? (Yes, I know, by definition…) Is this not tyrannical, with echoes of Dr Bonham?
What do you want?
Information.
Whose side are you on?
That would be telling. We want information… information… information.
You won’t get it.
By hook or by crook, we will.
– The Prisoner (intro written by George Markstein, as far as we know)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zalndXdxriI&w=420&h=315]
I came across an article titled The Public Sector: Standing In Our Way Until We Pay Up (browsing Catallaxy Files). Both are recommended reading. The article is written from an American perspective, but speaks of experiences both Americans and non-Americans would be familiar with. I have reproduced what I found to be the more thought-provoking parts of the article here:
…one popular theory of the state — one that is pretty well-supported by the historical evidence in the European context — is that this is where governments come from: protection rackets that survive for a long enough period of time that they take on a patina of legitimacy. At some point, Romulus-and-Remus stories are invented to explain that the local Mafiosi have not only historical roots but divine sanction.
The fundamental problem — the provision of services — never really goes away. It is even today a critical issue in places that are (or recently have been) ruled by crime syndicates such as the Taliban and Fatah. Hamas, especially, is known to put some real effort into the social-services front. There are some services that markets historically have not done a very good job of providing — these are called “public goods,” which is a specific term from political economy and not a synonym for “stuff the public thinks is desirable” — and their provision is the only real reason we have governments. Or, more precisely: Providing public goods is the only legitimate reason we have governments.
In reality, we have governments for lots of reasons, most of them illegitimate: That ancient instinct toward banditry is powerful, and the desire to make a living by simply commanding economic resources rather than earning them through trade or labor seems to be a fixed feature of a certain subset of human beings. Patronage and clientelism are very strong forces, too, and government can be used to create public-sector salaries or welfare benefits that are well in excess of the wages that political clients could expect to earn in honest work. In the United States, our swollen public-sector payrolls, particularly at the state and local level, are little more than a supplementary welfare state, providing a more dignified form of public dependency for relatively low-skilled and mainly unenterprising people.
(…)
When it comes to government, if you aren’t involved in the provision of actual public goods, you are involved in extortion. It may be legal. It may have the blessing of the mayor, the city council, and your union representative, but it’s still extortion. And you should be ashamed of yourself. If your only purpose is getting in the way until somebody hands you money, then you are part of a protection racket. And you might want to think about going into a more honorable line of work.
Prior to reading the article, I was familiar with the hypothesis that the origin of the modern state has its roots in criminal enterprise, yet it is always amusing attempting to reconcile this with the modern state’s increasingly matronly efforts to get its subjects to behave themselves. And it is certainly far from an implausible theory, when you consider how similar the objectives of a criminal enterprise and a state can be. The major difference is, of course, that the state functions within the law – hardly surprising since it is the major source of law – while criminal organisations operate outside of the law. But honestly, how could the activity of a crime gang that defeated a local rival in a turf war be described as anything other than a spot of localised gun control – in terms of ends, if perhaps not means?
→ Continue reading: The state has never been your friend. What about your friends (and others) who work for the state?
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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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