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I know how the Duke of Wellington (attrib.) felt. The problem for a rational civil liberties campaigner is often not that you do not know who your friends are, but that you do – and that you worry whether, given what they actually think, they will be let out for the day and not talking to buttercups when you need their help.
Here is a breathtaking non-sequitur in the comments of the Guardian Comment is Free:
I think ID cards would be fine … but I think they should be introduced after the constitutional reform that guarantees safeguards, PR and no monarchy.
The comment is however appended to a piece of splendid news. The entirely sane Mark Thomas has managed to persuade the Metropolitan police to delete him from the National DNA Database.
To date, we have been fortunate.
I say that because, given the consistently submissive nature of the British public, we have been blessed (yes, I do mean blessed) with a ruling political class that has been, relatively speaking, both modest in its ambitions and cautious in its actions. If they only realised how much more they could get away with we would, by now, be living in a hell on earth. This is why I say that we, so far, been very lucky.
But luck always runs out and I think ours is about to do just that:
Anyone departing the UK by land, sea or air will have their trip recorded and stored on a database for a decade.
Passengers leaving every international sea port, station or airport will have to supply detailed personal information as well as their travel plans. So-called “booze cruisers” who cross the Channel for a couple of hours to stock up on wine, beer and cigarettes will be subject to the rules.
In addition, weekend sailors and sea fishermen will be caught by the system if they plan to travel to another country – or face the possibility of criminal prosecution.
The owners of light aircraft will also be brought under the system, known as e-borders, which will eventually track 250 million journeys annually.
Even swimmers attempting to cross the Channel and their support teams will be subject to the rules which will require the provision of travellers’ personal information such as passport and credit card details, home and email addresses and exact travel plans.
Another database for the sake of it? Well, possibly. But I think we all know that it will not stop there. This is, of course, a prelude and a ‘softening up’ process for the eventual introduction of a requirement for exit visas (Soviet style).
So, a word of advice to any of my compatriots who are planning to emigrate abroad: settle your plans as soon as practicable and make your move within the next 5 years. After that, you may well find that your escape routes have been walled off.
Britain is to cut the speed limit from 60 mph to 50 mph on most roads to ‘save lives’. Does anyone seriously believe this is not in fact to raise more revenue from speeding tickets?
The solution is obvious. Break the law and smash the cameras. And when they replace them, smash them again. And again. And again. And again.
We are way way way past the point where words are enough. If you actually expect to make a difference, you better get used to the idea that this sort of ‘direct action’ is the only thing that will make any impact at all on the powers-that-be. Don’t believe me? Well do you think radical muslims in the UK and elsewhere could have eroded deeply entrenched ‘givens’ on free speech if their objections to any public criticism of their religion were not backed with explicit or implicit threats of actually real world violence? No, I do not like it either but that is where we now find ourselves, so get use to it. Be willing to pick up that brick and actually throw it or you are irrelevent. Push has come to shove.
Following on directly from some of the things Johnathan says immediately below this, here is visual proof that surveillance cameras are not quite the innocent gadgets that some tell us:
The bloke who sent this in to Idiot Toys found it “somewhere on Amazon”, so we may never know where this scary camera is, who it is snooping on, and what its future plans might be.
Caption anyone?
Clive Davis, who blogs at the Spectator’s Coffee House site these days, reckons the concerns that civil libertarians have about CCTVs all over the UK are “over-hyped”. Well maybe they are but it seems that Mr Davis does rather miss the point slightly. CCTV may not, of themselves, be a threat to civil liberties in the same way as some of other vast collection of laws now on the statute books in the UK, but they are not harmless in this respect, either. True, society has always had its snoops, its “nosey parkers” – as we Brits used to say – and curtain-twitching neighbours. Sometimes such vigilant folk performed a kind of public service, even if unintended, by creating a social network in which certain kinds of delinquent behaviour could be spotted and dealt with. But clearly there are costs to this in that innocent people can find their actions being picked on by the hyper-vigilant. On a more practical level, the obsession with surveillance can crowd out resources better devoted to deterring crime in other ways.
In fairness to Mr Davis, I am sure that readers can come up with any numbers of contenders for laws that are far worse than CCTV. My personal favourite is the Civil Contingencies Act, which confers on government a whopping collection of powers to use in emergencies; this act received virtually no serious press coverage in the MSM whatsoever. But CCTV, and the sheer number of them in the UK, is all of a piece of a move by this country towards a Big Brother state. Yes, if one wants to be nit-picky about it, one could argue that CCTVs in privately-owned shopping malls, for example, are not intrusive since a person is not forced to go into such places, whereas cameras in public streets for which the public has a right of access are intrusive. Also, there is the sheer, practical issue of information overload: there comes a point where there are so many cameras that it is hard to know if the police can physically track all of their photos all the time. So maybe panic is unjustified.
But I think Clive’s sang froid on this occasion is just as mistaken as screaming hysteria. We have moved decisively towards a police state in recent years and on some measures, are already in one. CCTVs are part of this state of affairs. Trying to pretend otherwise is not very credible. I am not entirely sure why Mr Davis wants to take the line he does.
As an aside, Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, who is a man not to get hysterical about anything, is fairly scathing about the recent British love affair with CCTV in his book, The Rotten State of Britain. It looks like a good read and I will review it later.
All those folk who voted for The Community Organiser in the hope that he would lift some of the allegedly more questionable measures enacted by the previous administration to deal with terrorism are likely to be disappointed, at least if this report is accurate.
Shutting down Gitmo is just a stunt if all that happens is that terror suspects and other folk rounded up in the Middle East etc are locked up indefinitely in a different place. If people like Andrew Sullivan, who have hammered the institution of Gitmo, try to make excuses for this by arguing that such detention is somehow “different”, they deserve to be treated with contempt.
Bishop Hill comes up with a list of the legislation that an incoming UK government should get rid of to restore some of the civil liberties lost over the past decade or so. As he accepts, this is probably only scratching the surface of the issue, but still. The sheer quanity of the legislation that has been brought in, and its scope, is pretty startling even to a grizzled veteran of chronicling such outrages.
Maybe the simple solution is to repeal all the acts in one go.
I just picked this out as a potential SQOTD:
Political professionals have little time for activist true believers and their pesky principles. Freedom of speech is one of those fundamental principles in a free democracy. It requires that you especially defend the rights of those with whom you disagree. Guido has gone to the trouble of watching the Fitna video, it contains no call to violence, in fact it condemns violence.
In the past and at great cost diplomatically, a Conservative government defended Salman Rushdie’s freedom of speech. It is therefore profoundly disappointing that the Tories have chosen to be officially agnostic about Geert Wilders. The decontamination strategy has turned into moral cowardice.
However, follow that last link and you will learn that the Conservative Party, in the person of Chris Grayling, may be retreating, a bit, from its former public position of craven retreat, so the Conservative bit of this story is not over yet. Yes, ban Wilders, says Grayling, but ban lots of others also. The Conservatives may well split on this, and I for one do not give a damn.
Two further quick thoughts:
First, I find all this elaborate condemnation of Geert Wilders by the Right-On tendency rather nauseating. We abominate what he says, but free speech is sacred and therefore he should be allowed in rather than being given the oxygen of publicity, but if he has broken the law then, blah blah blah, he should not be allowed in. This seemed to be the default position on Question Time last night, which I semi-watched. Usually there is only one but in these kind of weasel statements, but in this case there have often been two buts, with the second but being the but that craps all over everything before it, including whatever less ignoble turds emerged from the first but. But according to Guido, Wilders has not broken the law. And what Wilders says is that Islam is a huge problem because it preaches violence to those who do not submit to it. Which it does. Read the Koran, like this guy did. It is a vile piece of writing. People who grumble and splutter about statements like that are either Muslims or cowards or both. They just do not want to have to think about it because if this is true, which it is, it is all just too depressing.
Second: democracy. What we are witnessing here is democracy, not some perversion of it. If enough voters threaten violence, then the state will cave in, and nothing like fifty percent is required. Half a percent threatening to dig up pavements or set fire to things is more than enough, provided another five or ten percent, sprinkled around all those marginal or potentially marginal constituencies, are willing to back, defend, not condemn, such threats with their votes. Votes, in other words, are violence. I fondly remember an ancient black and white movie telling of how, towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the plebs of Britain got votes. A key moment was when a brick came crashing through the window of a room where some political toffs were discussing it all. Either we get this organised, they told each other, in other words either we have more democracy, or the bricks will keep on coming. I am still for democracy, for the usual Churchill reason of it being better than the alternatives, but it is messy.
Personally, I am grateful to Geert Wilders, and even a little bit grateful to whichever coven of scumbag politicians it was who banned him from coming here. Some life has consequently been breathed into an argument which, while being just as important as ever, looked like it was becoming, what with all these Credit Crunch dramas, a bit passé.
Reading Johnathan’s piece on ‘the precautionary principle’ below, I was struck by the way both it and the comments fail to come to grip with the fact that people who support precaution simply do not share the attitudes and values that those arguments take for granted. Both sides are unintelligible to the other. All sides, in fact, because there are more than two.
I am thoroughly persuaded by the distinction made by cultural theorists between two sorts of precaution promoters, the heirarchists and the egalitarians. The interaction between those two types in a media democracy very well explains how we get to the regulation of virtual risk. Egalitarians expect difference and change to be threatening; heirarchists value order and system, and hate absence of rules. Regulation promises egalitarians safety, that is – the minimisation and control of change and choice – in return for granting heirarchists power and order. Collective nightmares and regulatory bedtime stories are both the stuff of news.
The people advocating the precautionary principle adopt it because it is a neat encapsualtion of the preconception that all change is danger, or because it is a procedural pretext for change to be subject to approval so that it not be permitted to disrupt social order. That is how it is a principle so completely incapable of application. It is not intended as an axiom of rational construction for policy but to legitimate an approach.
The commentator who compared it to Pascal’s Wager had it precisely wrong. It is an inversion of Pascal’s Wager, an anti-rational argument for refusing to make any bets.
The whole point of tolerance is to tolerate things you find repugnant. Tolerance does not mean acceptance however, so just because you tolerate something ignorant or repugnant, that does not mean you need to refrain from heartfelt criticism of it. However tolerance needs to be conditional: tolerance of intolerance is irrational when that the aim of that intolerance is to deny tolerance to you.
And so whilst I am ambivalent at best about bullfighting, and I did watched a few in my younger years, I found myself shouting “¡Olé!” after reading these remarks by an 11 year old matador Michelito Lagravere Peniche:
“The bullfighting opponents shouldn’t stick their nose in things they don’t like,” he said ahead of his record attempt. “No-one is forcing them to watch bullfights or to keep informed about them. It’s as if I told a boy who does motocross not to do it, it’s very bothersome.”
I would not mind if all bullfighting opponents did was to be vocal critics, but the moment they started to try and use the law to ban this ancient Mithraic sport, they crossed the line from being critics to being thugs.
Random link-chasing brought me here. “Leg-iron” writes:
I have a pack of tobacco with no hideous picture. Instead it has a phone number and the words:
Choose freedom. We’ll help you get help to stop smoking.
Freedom? Really? That would be nice. I don’t have the freedom to smoke in a bar, at a bus stop, bus station or on the open platform of a railway station.
There is more, please do read it. I should explain for foreign readers that British cigarette packets must by law bear an anti-smoking slogan such as “smoking kills” or “smoking causes impotence” and often, these days, a repulsive picture showing the bad consequences of smoking. I do not smoke so I do not often need to look at these pictures, but nothing about their appearance repels me as much as the fact that our laws force people to publish material designed to humiliate themselves. Truly, that does repel me. I neither like nor dislike cigarette manufacturers or those who work for them as a category, but when I imagine whichever bureaucrat thinks up these rotating slogans sneeringly transmitting the latest one to some servile flack in a cigarette company along with orders to start the print run – then I feel a faint echo of the shame someone living in Mao’s China must have felt at the sight of a wretch bearing a placard saying “I am an enemy of the people.”
I scrolled down Leg-iron’s blog and found another good post on the same topic: → Continue reading: “Choose freedom?” That would be nice.
A court in the Netherlands has ordered the prosecution of Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party, for daring to express his opinions. Wilders is the author of Fitna, a critical polemic against Islam.
The three judges said that they had weighed Mr Wilders’s “one-sided generalisations” against his right to free speech, and ruled that he had gone beyond the normal leeway granted to politicians.
“The Amsterdam appeals court has ordered the prosecution of member of parliament Geert Wilders for inciting hatred and discrimination, based on comments by him in various media on Muslims and their beliefs,” the court said in a statement.
“The court also considers appropriate criminal prosecution for insulting Muslim worshippers because of comparisons between Islam and Nazism made by Wilders,” it added.
This judgement completely destroys the myth of both Dutch civil liberties and the nation’s reputed tolerance for differences of opinion. It seems you can have a difference of opinion just as long as it is not inconvenient to the state for you to express it. Yet again, the Dutch state proves that when the going gets tough, the Dutch state has a backbone of rubber.
So here is Fitna for you to watch. And to the authoritarian thugs in their court in Amsterdam… up yours.
And as a little bonus…
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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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