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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A press release from the Association of Chief Police Officers, not surprisingly, welcomes the latest police-state measures. But it seems they were taken by surprise, too:
Ref:21/07 January 17, 2007
ACPO COMMENT ON SERIOUS AND ORGANISATED CRIME BILL
ACPO spokesperson said:
�Tackling serious and organised crime is a serious issue to the police service. ACPO welcomes any measures that support us in our endeavours to combat this from of criminality�.
(Sic. Really – a direct cut-and-paste from here)
The unnamed (conceivably fictitious, since no-one is offered for interview) spokesmanperson – PC being the only correct thing about it – can only be referring to the Serious Crime Bill.
Can the Home Office not even get its news management right? A huge and complicated Bill is launched which will tear up important parts of common law, create major data-mining powers of an unprecedented nature, and create severe sanctions backed by imprisonment for people who have done nothing wrong at all if their conduct is deemed potentially helpful to criminals anywhere in the world. It was not drafted over the weekend.
It is a surprise the department failed to get a Chief Constable briefed and ready to stand up to say how wonderful it is in glorious detail, complete with scary illustrative anecdote – preferably involving paedophile terrorists. ACPO are left not knowing what the Bill is called. Or how to spell what they think it might be called. Still, they are so desperate to kiss the governmental arse that something supportive is rushed out, regardless that it is gibberish.
At some point current ACPO members will have sworn to uphold the law and keep the Queen’s peace. Is that not incompatible with being political lapdogs?
[Thanks to PJC Journal]
… on TV programmes he (quite sensibly) does not watch. Her Majesty’s Government was actually doing something about Big Brother. Granting him more arbitrary power. The Telegraph’s legal editor explains:
[The Serious Crime Bill] allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.
Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been “involved in serious crime” – anywhere in the world.
To be “involved”, you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.
And what is a serious criminal offence? Drug trafficking and money laundering, of course. But also fishing for trout with a line left unattended in the water. Depositing controlled waste without a licence. And anything else that a court considers to be sufficiently serious.
Read the whole thing here. The Bill itself is here. Observers of government will notice that it is, unusually for important legislation, being introduced in the Lords. I would welcome any theories why.
I don’t do not know if the sainted editors will tolerate the colloquial English – the Samizdata style-guide proscribes contractions – but I couldn’t could not. So I won’t will not.*
A.C. Grayling pithly outlines the absolutism behind Tony Blair’s total information awareness scheme on The Guardian Unlimited. Do read it. I know a few of our readers refuse ever to move out of the safety of right-thinking reading, but they are missing comfort as well as understanding when they seek to avoid mental pollution from the liberal left.
* [editor’s note: does that answer your question, Guy?] 
If water were not so obviously essential, I wonder if it would now be even allowed:
If you drink too much water, eventually the kidneys will not be able to work fast enough to remove sufficient amounts from the body, so the blood becomes more dilute with low salt concentrations.
“If you drink too much water it lowers the concentration of salt in your blood so that it is lower than the concentration of salt in cells,” says Professor Robert Forrest, a consultant in clinical chemistry and forensic toxicology at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield.
Professor Forrest continues:
“When the brain swells, it is inside a bony box so has nowhere to go,” he says. “The pressure increases in the skull and you may get a headache. As the brain is squeezed it compresses vital regions regulating functions such as breathing.”
Eventually these functions will be impaired and you are likely to stop breathing and die. Warning signs included confusion and headaches.
No sniggering. This is exactly what happened to a Californian lady after she had taken part in a water drinking contest (a sport which should obviously be banned forthwith).
A government task force is clearly needed to keep a constant eye on the water threat. Once that happens, health warnings on water bottles are only a matter of time. “Water can seriously damage your kidneys”, and so on. “Big Water” will be accused of peddling scaremongering stories about the alleged need for water, and the alleged benefits of water, and even nonsense about how, if you don’t regularly wash with it, that might be a danger to your health.
Some time ago, I recall someone translating “water” into “hydrogen oxide” or “oxygen di-hydride” or some such thing, and listing all the dangers of this profoundly dangerous fluid, such as the definite danger of contracting cancer if you drank, say, forty gallons of the stuff at one sitting, and quite a few safety nazis fell for it. Well, now such anti-water campaigners have some hard evidence to work with.
Am I still going to be regarded as a wild-eyed loony by quite so many members of the general public after this?
Probably. Note the delicate way in which one big file on everything in your life – a British Dang An – is justified by a lacrymose anecdote about a family having to have dozens of contacts with government agencies after someone died. Who makes them do that in the first place?
The Executive Committee of the Exeter University Evangelical Christian Union has today (5JAN) issued proceedings in the High Court seeking a Judicial Review of the decision to suspend the Christian Union from the Guild of Students; such acts by the Guild violating the rights of association of religious bodies and representing religious animus. The Court will be asked to quash the decision to suspend. The committee has also instructed Paul Diamond, a leading Civil Rights Barrister to represent them.
The action was taken after the students advised both the Guild and the university authorities that it had failed to support their right as Christians to the freedoms of speech, belief and association.
The 50-year-old Christian Union (CU) at Exeter University is currently suspended from the official list of student societies on campus, has had its Student Union bank account frozen, and has been banned from free use of Student Guild premises, or advertising events within Guild facilities, because the Student Guild claims the CU constitution and activities do not conform to its Equal Opportunties Policies, which have only recently been introduced.
That’s the Christian Union point of view. Here is the Exeter Students’ Guild point of view. It appears what’s wrong with the Christian Union (though there seems to be a side dispute about what it is called) is it expects members to be Christians – and this is written down somewhere.
I find it very difficult to believe that the Student Friends of Palestine welcomes applications from hardcore Zionists, or that the change-ringing group offers opportunities for extended bongo solos, or that their Amnesty branch is really open to those who think the Uzbek government is a bit wishy-washy and needs positive reinforcement in the form of fedexed floral tributesfrom the society to its president in order to hold the line on law-and-order. It is just those bodies have not recorded such obvious facts in their constitutions.
Clubs don’t and shouldn’t appeal to everyone. That’s the whole point of them. They provide social opportunities through giving scope for people to get together with people with whom they know they’ll have something in common. That’s why traditionally they were so much a part of student life, as escape from the non-discriminatory potluck of faculty and accomodation. If Exeter Students’ Guild doesn’t get that, then why is it offering subsidy to societies at all?
Update: A notice that is rather strangely hidden away, but dated the same as the threat of action above, says that privileges have now been ‘restored’. Though nobody seems to have changed their mind about anything, there is to be a “consultation process” instead. Does this mean the Christians are expected to be persuaded not to be Christians? [Is this consultation going to involve lions?] Or is the question being postponed in the hope that it might go away, or that a new set of officers might have a better idea? All very odd.
Well, fancy giving money to the Government!
Might as well have put it down the drain.
Fancy giving money to the Government!
Nobody will see the stuff again.
Well, they’ve no idea what money’s for –
Ten to one they’ll start another war
I’ve heard a lot of silly things, but, Lor’!
Fancy giving money to the Government!
– A.P. Herbert (no relation)
Thanks to Brian Walden for reminding me of this, in a brilliant but very depressing radio essay: Lessons from Herbert.
Rob Fisher has an interesting posting up about police harassment, as displayed in a reality TV show. Basically, the police took it upon themselves to mess with some apparently quite innocent citizens, fishing for crimes that they might have committed. And it turned out one of them had apparently done something evil. He had, apparently, committed the crime of failing to be on the police driver database. Said the policeman: “You don’t exist” …It turned out that the database did contain him, but spelt slightly differently.
Rob Fisher is depressed about all this. But what I think this episode – by which I mean not just the police harassing people, but it being on television, and Rob Fisher copying out what they said and blogging about it – is that one of the benefits of total surveillance (see my immediately previous post) might be that the authorities might find themselves having to behave rather better.
On Saturday January 6th of what is still next year – Happy New Year when it comes everyone! – I will be giving the first of Christian Michel’s talks in his 6/20 Series of the year 2007. My talk will be entitled “Getting to grips with the Total Surveillance State and the Total Surveillance Society”. And for reasons which will become all too clear if you read the rest of this posting, I would appreciate some help. Last week I sent Christian the rather long and discursive ramble below concerning my thinking on this subject, which he had to shorten to turn it into a useful email announcement. What follows is a very slightly amended and extended version of that original ramble. As I say, all pertinent answers to and comments on the many questions I am now asking myself would be greatly appreciated… by the way, I already know that I need to be paying a lot of attention to this guy.
Some talks are given because the speaker has something important to say, and is very confident about what that something is, and that it is important. The first talk I gave to the 6/20 Club (on January 6th 2006) was of this sort. Oh, it had blurry edges, as all talks will, but the central thesis was something I was really pretty sure about and still am, namely that A-bombs and H-bombs had turned major war from something that Great Powers had to prepare for at all cost, into something they had to avoid at all cost. Hence globalisation. A nice and clear, nice and understandable thesis. Not necessarily right, but if wrong, then wrong in a nice clear way.
But then there are the talks such as the one I will be giving on January 6th 2007, which I am giving not because I know what to say about the Total Surveillance State and the Total Surveillance Society, but because I do not, but want to find out. About the only thing I am sure of concerning this topic is that it is an important topic, and worthy of all our best efforts to make sense of it. And if I agree to talk about this topic, I will have to think about it, no matter how much of an effort that may be.
Here are some of the questions, points, thoughts now rattling through my head on this topic:
- Total Surveillance is definitely on its way. Saying that the technology won’t work is delusional. Sure, governments waste millions on technology, but it eventually works, if only because eventually you can buy the necessary kit in the High Street. On the other hand, so long as progress persists, new kit will means new blunders, neand w surprises (often nasty) about what it can be used for.
- The USSR tried totally to control economic outcomes. Can its abject failure illuminate what I now sense will be a similar failure to control safety outcomes and crime outcomes? Crime statistics certainly have a USSR steel production feel to them.
- Is total surveillance such a bad thing? Maybe not, if the only laws and behaviour enforcements are modest in scope, and very reasonable. But total surveillance enforcing crazily voluminous and tyrannically intrusive laws is very bad news.
- In general, what happens to the world when everyone else can easily learn anything in particular about us that they want to learn? What social institutions falter? (Marriage? Insurance?) Is privacy a human right or a mere historical phase? A phase which now may be passing?
- Is celebrity obsession a pre-echo of a world in which all are potential celebrities, due to the ubiquity of completely invisible and unblockable cameras and microphones?
My main conclusion so far is that Total Surveillance will mean very different things depending on what else happens along with it. You cannot analyse the phenomenon in isolation.
For instance, just who will be allowed to browse through all those sound and vision files. Will it be everyone? Or only a self-appointed elite? Both arrangements have major hazards attached to them.
Since writing the above stuff to Christian, I have begun to fixate on another question, which is this: What does an individual have to gain by being totally surveilled? Fewer aggressive attacks against him is an obvious answer. Insurance premiums might be another. (If you live a totally safe and careful life, you might gain greatly if your insurance company can see this for themselves.) But I suspect that there are many other answers. (Simple showing off springs to mind.) Which is why I think that a great deal of, if perhaps not total, surveillance is probably here to stay.
As already stated above, I wish all of Samizdata’s readers a Happy New Year, but fear that for many of them, the above thoughts will have done little to contribute to such happiness.
Defenders of ancient British cultural rites have thumbed their nose at Tony Blair’s government edicts and have apparently had a magnificent turnout for Holiday fox hunts.
Government authority exists only for those who accept its invisible bars, so I am exceedingly happy to see so many exercising their liberty and cocking a snoot at the State.
A tip of the hat to Glenn Reynolds for the link.
I have noted before that an inordinate number of doctors seem to be totalitarian inclined folks, dead keen on using the force of law to impose their view of what is best on other people.
This, however, takes the biscuit not just for the totalitarian meta-context within which it is framed, but also for sheer idiocy:
The prevention of attacks involving kicking or blunt objects is just as important as preventing knife violence, new research from Cardiff University shows. A team from the University’s Violence Research Group found that injuries inflicted with feet were more likely to result in severe injury than any other method of assault
[…]
The research, published in the international academic journal Injury Prevention, is the first ever to compare injuries by method of attack. Professor Jonathan Shepherd, who led the research, said the surprisingly severe injuries from kicking and blunt objects should make them just as high priorities as knives in violence reduction strategies. Professor Shepherd said: “This might be achieved through public awareness campaigns and tackling alcohol misuse to reduce the chances of people falling over, since victims of violence are usually kicked after they have fallen. “We also need to take action to reduce the availability of blunt objects coming to hand in licensed premises and city centre streets.” [emphasis added]
So… Professor Jonathan Shepherd (a Professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery from Cardiff and Director of the Violence Research Group) wants to find a way to make it less likely that people will fall over in a fight (he must mean that as people tend not to get kicked when they fall over unless they are in a fight) and he wants to reduce the availability of blunt objects coming to hand in licensed premises and city centre streets. Blunt objects? As in, well, anything you can pick up? Bottles? Chairs? Bins? Umbrella stands? Ashtrays (oh, silly me, those are due to be made illegal in effect anyway)? So how exactly would you do that? Needless to say ‘bovver boots’ are going to be frowned on.
Presumably the Good Professor wants a panoptic state in which we all wear state approved (and mandated) padded clothing, state approved soft shoes and require everything (and and I do mean everything) be screwed to the floor. Amazing. This is not a man I would like to see in a position of power over me or anyone else.
The Times reports that Rickshaw pullers reach end of ‘inhuman’ road
Rickshaw pullers … could soon be out of work after the Indian city of Calcutta banned the trade as inhuman.
The vote was boycotted by the Opposition, but Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the West Bengal Chief Minister, told the state legislature: “In the 21st century it is not right for a human being to pull another human being.
I shall try not to be diverted into asking what the date has to do with it and go straight to the main issue. Why, out of all the millions of possible services that one human can perform for another is pulling a cart someone else rides on deemed “inhuman”?
It certainly would be inhuman if the rickshaw pullers were forced to this labour – but they are not. The only force involved is that Mr Bhattacharjee is forcing the rickshaw pullers to give up their livelihood. Compensation is promised but the plan for that seems haphazard and uncertain. In any case compensation diminishes but does not annul the wrong done to people who were making an honest living.
What is so bad about human muscle rather than batteries or internal combustion engines being used to power a conveyance? There are plenty of dirtier jobs, plenty more dangerous, plenty (if it were any business of Mr Bhattacharjee’s, which it is not) in which the generally perceived difference of class between the person paying for a service and the person providing it is greater than it is between a rickshaw puller and the person riding on the rickshaw. (Though if the class aspect is what bothers you, bear in mind that according to the leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly, quoted in Kolkata Newsline, many of the users of rickshaws are “school goers and senior citizens”. Not that it matters. If every rickshaw user were a sneering rich businessman with a villain’s moustache, it would still be a private matter between the sneering rich businessmen and the rickshaw pullers whether and at what price the latter sold transportation to the former.)
Such has been the strength of the idea of socialism for a century or more that even those who explicitly reject it often adopt its assumptions.
Socialists have always claimed to defend the dignity of labour, and have always been lying. If they really believed that the man who labours with his body was fully equal to the man who labours with his brain they would not have presumed to deny him the right to direct his own life and sell his own labour in the way he thought best. Rickshaw pullers are only one example of people whose dignity has been violated in this way, and India is far from being the only place where it happens. Readers will be able to think of many other examples closer to home.
Incidentally, pound to a rupee the twenty first century will not have run its course by the time the city of Calcutta bans everything but human-powered rickshaws on evironmental grounds.
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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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