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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Whenever someone says that “things were better/worse in my day, or back in the year Zog”, it is always good to ask for specifics. And over at the Volokh Conspiracy blog, which focuses on legal issues, they ask this:
“….–can you think of other things (along the lines of marriage and indentured servitude) where things used to be for sale (expressly or implicitly) and today they are not?”
Some of the comments are hilarious. One guy points out that you cannot pay to watch dwarf tossing any more, at least not legally. I guess not.
I was tempted to make this, by Peter Mandelson, today’s SQotD, but I might be misunderstood as agreeing with it. As it is, of course, I share the glee that Guido (to whom thanks) feels about it.
Mandelson:
The bigger question is how the domestic media market can be made economic and subject to any form of regulation in an era when, a click away, there is access to information that respects no national boundaries and the laws of no single national parliament or the basic standards of conventional journalism. It is hard to see how some of the best-known sources of quality English-language journalism – the Times, New York Times, the Guardian spring to mind – will ever make money again. We come to grips with the fact that the internet is giving public access to uncorroborated, undigested and unmediated news, all in the name of free speech, is becoming one of the defining issues of the 21st century.
Indeed it is.
And I love the idea of “information that respects no national boundaries”. In the old days information used to be far more respectful.
The world has become a pretty grim place of late. This Mandy moan cheered me up no end.
“Perhaps the most annoying thing about Julian Assange (yes, I know it’s a long list) is that he is in danger of giving the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) a good name. Maybe my memory is failing, but I don’t recall any of his supporters being critical of the EU’s fast-track extradition system when it was being debated 10 years ago.”
Philip Johnston, in today’s Daily Telegraph. It is an interesting point to make. Leaving aside Assange for a minute (there’s no need to hurry), the power of extradition creates an interesting point for those concerned about liberty and the importance of due process of law. Some extradition agreements between states might be acceptable if, for example, an offence for which a person is to be extradited to country B from A is recognised as a criminal offence in both nations. However, with the EU Arrest Warrant, you can be extradited into a country from another where the offence in question is not recognised in the place where the person happens to be staying at a particular point in time.
As we have seen with recent controversy about the UK’s extradition agreement with the United States, a person can be moved to the US – and vice versa – without a prima facie establishment of guilt having to be shown in the country where the person is being transferred from. Given the plea-bargaining lottery that the US adopts in certain cases, for example, this seems to involve serious abuse of due process.
These points need to be aired because, amid all the other issues kicked up by the Assange affair (the alleged sex crimes, the activities of Wikileaks, potential damage to military forces in the field, etc) the specifics of extradition principles can be obscured. Unlike some more isolationist types, I don’t have a problem with treaties between states to shift suspected criminals around to see that justice is done, provided there is a reciprocal recognition of the rules of procedure. For instance, there is simply no way that a country such as the UK should have such an arrangement with a state enforcing shariah law, say, or with a country such as Russia, which is a police state, or for that matter, Ecuador.
The conviction of Paul Chambers for making an obvious joke on Twitter about blowing an airport sky high has been quashed in the High Court.
So someone in the justice system has a brain cell to call his own. Pity the case had to get as far as the Lord Chief Justice, the aptly named Lord Judge in the job he was born for, before that person was found.
Tell you what is “clearly menacing”, though, if the future of liberty in this country means anything to you at all. The airport security manager who finked on Chambers to the police, the police who arrested him, the Crown Prosecution Service lawyers who prosecuted him, the magistrate who first convicted him, and Judge Jacqueline Davis who refused his initial appeal all still have their heads attached to their necks.
I jest.
Probably.
Even “knobhead” makes six appearances.
– Matt Scott, reporting on the judgment in the John Terry racism trial for the Telegraph. This trial holds the distinction of making everyone involved, from the accused, to the accuser, to the sport’s governing body, up to the politicians who came up with the law, look very stupid indeed.
In a Twitter discussion my interlocutor suggested that mobile phone companies were behaving like a cartel when it came to data roaming charges. I am not sure about that but in any case such arrangements are less stable in a free market than otherwise, because barriers to new entrants would be lower.
Yes, said my interlocutor, look how well a free market works for Barclays, Enron and privatised rail companies.
If that is what people think free markets look like then no wonder we are having a hard time winning arguments. It is not just a semantic problem where capitalism has been incorrectly defined, though that is part of it. People really believe that rail companies are free to do what they please, and so are banks. There is some doublethink going on because the same people will talk about the failure of regulators.
It might be useful to point to examples of truly free markets. This is quite difficult as almost everything is subject to some regulatory interference. I like to think that we are not starving mainly because of free markets in food production and distribution, but there are all sorts of EU food subsidies and it can be argued that large supermarket companies have an advantage when it comes to planning permission.
I can think of examples from industries that I am familiar with. Consumer electronics are, as far as I can tell, almost completely free from regulation except for some safety and, lately, power consumption requirements. The rapid advances that have resulted are plain to see. The same is true of the semiconductor industry. Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and Nvidia are achieving ever more performance and making ever smaller transistors, and governments have very little to say about it, thankfully.
I can also think of services like web hosting and cloud computing which have very low barriers to entry and the result is a vast choice of very low cost products for consumers. All this is very nice because we can point to the freedom and the competition and the lack of monopolies, cartels and other unpleasantness, and all the wondrous things that have resulted and would not result if bureaucrats were present to make sure everyone behaved themselves.
There has to more that is free than the tech industry, though. What am I missing?
North Wales Police have issued a (probably illegal) “dispersal order” banning unaccompanied teenagers from Bangor in the evenings. They say it is not a blanket ban. The words of the order say it is.
Ellie May O’Hagan opposes it because it makes teenagers feel bad, and because it would have made her feel bad when she was a teenager:
For the 13-year-old me, a curfew would have meant more isolation, more casting adrift, a stronger sense that the town in which I lived didn’t really care about my place in it. I might have felt frustrated that a lack of youth services forced me on to the street, and then that my presence there automatically made me deviant. Then I might have decided not to care about a city that didn’t care about me.
Keith Towler, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales opposes it because it makes people have bad feelings towards teenagers:
“It demonises under 16s, isolates them from their communities, alienates them from police and spreads the misconception all young people are troublemakers.”
There is talk of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission opposing it because it is discrimination. At least they won’t have far to toddle. The EHRC has an office in Bangor.
I am glad all these worthies and unworthies oppose the curfew. It needs opposing. But it saddens me that nobody opposes it on the grounds of how dare they. How dare they stop people who have committed no crime from walking or standing in the public street? In the case of a shopping centre or a nightclub I vehemently support the right of the proprietors to exclude whomsoever they wish. I also support, if more cautiously, the right of small areas to set local rules and covenants as to whether alcohol is permitted, rules about noise and similar constraints. But North Wales Police have exactly as much a right to expel teenagers from a public space as North Wales teenagers have a right to expel the police.
There is a lot of conflicting opinion being fired at the US Supreme Court’s ruling(PDF) on “Obamacare”. It is certainly a curious ruling both on first and subsequent reads. I think the opinions in the decision make a great deal of, perhaps complete, sense when viewed in the terms of ‘doing a Marbury v Madison‘. That was a decision written by Chief Justice Marshall in 1803. From that decision, Marshall is regarded as the founder of the Supreme Court and the Judicial branch as it came to be understood and accepted in the balance of powers.
In this article, I am not addressing the merits of the Affordable Care Act, I am speaking to the Constitutional elements at work in the decision.
Roberts declares his view of judicial legislating in one succinct sentence. “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” Notice he said “political” choices. If something can be allowable under the Constitution, then a restrained Court goes out of its way to accommodate it to the Constitution. If something is Constitutionally permissible, then whether or not to do it is entirely within the sphere of politics, not Constitutional law. We will never find perfect masters and expecting the Supreme Court to attempt that role is contrary to limited government. Roberts appears to be channeling Mencken with this declaration. → Continue reading: A good day for limited government
No, I don’t mean the US Supreme Court. The lads were doing their best. If they got a bit obsessed on the question of whether Obamacare was constitutional rather than whether it was a bad idea, you can’t really blame them. Obsessing on constitutionality is what they are paid for.
The court that is pre-eminent among the “many, many things in this so-termed civilization of ours which would be mightily improved by a once over lightly of the Hiroshima treatment”, as Robert Heinlein once put it, is Doncaster Crown Court, particularly when presided over by Judge Jacqueline Davies. It was she (styled ‘Her honour Judge Jacqueline Davies'”) who in November 2010 found against Paul Chambers in his appeal against conviction for “menace” for jokingly saying on Twitter that he was going to blow up an airport if it did not reopen quickly enough after being closed by snow. He did not say this to anyone at the airport, I remind you, he said it to the internet friend he was flying to meet. Then some security loser decided to reenact the story about the old woman who rings up the police to say her neighbour is standing naked at his window. If you recall, the cop asks sympathetically whether she is very shaken up. “Dreadfullly,” she says, “I was so shocked when I saw it, I nearly fell right off the stepladder.” Only this time the police thought the joke would end better with an arrest.
Supported by, among many others, the comedians Stephen Fry and Al Murray – good for them – Paul Chambers has appealed again and a High Court hearing was held yesterday. Judgement has been reserved for a later date. Now it is our turn on this side of the pond to get tense about a judicial decision affecting liberty.
Just warning you guys….
You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m going to be sure. From orbit.
If you visit, for example, the Financial Times website, you will be presented with a pop-up box warning you about cookies. This is becoming more common and is a result of the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, also known as the e-Privacy Directive, also known as the cookie law, which took effect on 26th May.
Since no-one understands the law and has to rely on vague guidance that gets updated without really clarifying anything, web designers who have heard of the law will likely rely on the annoying pop-up box for some time and it will become boilerplate which is instinctively dismissed by users. Luckily most web designers seemingly have not heard of the law or are otherwise ignoring it, probably because they have real work to get on with.
Dave Evans of the Information Commissioner’s Office writes:
We’ve stressed that there’s no ‘one size fits all approach’. We think that organisations themselves are best placed to develop their own solutions.
Freely co-operating organisations did solve the problem years ago, when they invented web browsers with cookie settings. This legislation solves nothing at the cost of confusing, worrying and irritating people.
A short while ago, I defended the freedom of people to say nasty, or stupid, things on sensitive subjects, so long as they don’t do so on my private property or against the rules set by owners of said. (The property point is one of the distinctive libertarian ways of framing the issue. You don’t have a right to paint slogans on my house or demand I pay for your blog fees). It is, I suppose, a sign of the times in which we live that toleration for speech that you don’t happen to agree with is now seen, in some quarters at any rate, as a “right-wing” issue. It should not be. Anyway, I was reminded of this point when I read this article about a stand taken by David Davis, the senior UK Conservative MP.
A blogger called Archbishop Cranmer is being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority after ten people complained about an advertisment on his blog that tried to get people to sign a petition against gay marriage. Says he:
His Grace is further minded to respond that he has neither fear of nor hatred for the gay and lesbian community, though he is a little pissed off with 10 of them. They could easily have emailed His Grace with their complaint, and we could all have had a jolly good chinwag about the whole thing. Instead, they called in the Gestapo to censor the assertion that marriage is a life-long union between one man and one woman, in accordance with the teaching of the Established Church, the beliefs of its Supreme Governor, and the law of the land.
I like this because it cuts through nearly all of the information hiding abstractions like ‘Advertising Standards Authority’, ‘investigation’ and ‘complaint’.
What is really happening is that A does not like what B is saying and rather than respond with words they have asked C to threaten B with violence. Note that Archbishop Cranmer can not simply ignore the ASA: there are requirements and deadlines imposed upon him. Notice also how notions of ‘complaining to an authority’ who will then ‘conduct an investigation’ make this appear more sanitary than it really is, to the point that I would have a hard time convincing A that violence is involved.
Since the ASA exists to respond to words with violence, its existence can not be justified. Advertising should not be regulated. One might worry that without regulated advertising we would be bombarded with lies, claims and counter-claims and that the world would become a more confusing place. I think instead that it would only reveal confusion that is already there.
H/T Tim Worstall.
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