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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Artur Boruc, a Polish goalkeeper playing for with Celtic, has received a police caution for “a breach of the peace” after he made the sign of the cross during a game. I can only marvel at how Muslims can march through London carrying signs threatening death against people who do not share their beliefs can get a police escort, whereas a devout Christian making the sign of the cross in public can get a police caution. The Polish player was not making rude gestures at a hostile crowd [see update & link below – perhaps he was] or trying to threaten anyone, he was just making a personal gesture indicating a set of beliefs.
I may be a godless rationalist myself but I sincerely hope Artur Boruc not just ignores the police caution but robustly reject it and continues to demonstrate his beliefs as he sees fit. If some Rangers fans cannot stand that and become violent, then perhaps that is where the police’s attention should be more properly focused. Moreover I hope his club supports him regarding this matter and if it does not then I hope he takes his talents elsewhere.
However I am rather bemused that the dismal Ruth Kelly is ‘surprised’ at this development seeing as how she is a leading member of the political class which put the legal infrastructure in place so that exactly this can happen.
Britain has nothing even vaguely resembling the First Amendment or the US Bill of Rights generally, instead relying on common law that springs from a highly imperfect cultural tradition of liberty. As this culture has been in effect ‘nationalised’ and largely replaced by fifty years of highly malleable legislation, there are now few legal tools left to secure individual rights against the state in the UK. Consequently we are left with just hoping for the state to act in a restrained manner as there so now so many laws that can be used to suppress freedom of expression (including not just social but also political speech) that the state can prohibit almost any action it wishes if it really wants to. Moreover public bodies have now been given so much discretion to exercise power ‘in the public interest’ that almost any petty-fogging official can seriously mess with your life if he or she is so inclined. And we can thank the likes of Ruth Kelly in both of the main political parties for this.
 Update: Although I stand by my general contention regarding the state of the law and freedom of expression in the UK, there may be a bit more to this specific story than the Telegraph article suggested.
The reliably entertaining, if not reliably sane, Ann Coulter pens a column this week with a pretty high libertarian quotient:
Last week marked the first official admission that everything government airport screeners have been doing until now is completely pointless — unless you’re an airport security guard with a thing for women’s undergarments, in which case it’s been highly effective.
As we now know, all the ingredients necessary to blow up an airplane can be carried in small liquid containers. Airport security has not even been looking for small liquid containers. Judging from my personal experience, they seem to have been focusing on finding explosive devices inside women’s brassieres.
After five years of submissively complying with bag checks, shoe checks and underwire bra checks, Americans have now been informed that the hell we’ve been going through at the airports (but which the president and members of Congress do not go through because they refuse to fly commercial air) has been a useless Kabuki theater.
Hard to argue with any of that. Her views on ethnic profiling (you get one guess whether she is pro or con) are likely to be more controversial.
Roy Bacon has spotted a shocking and indecent source of ‘child pornography’ that our political masters seem to have left us completely unprotected from
The criminal law has apparently caught up with thoughtcrimes associated with digital manipulation of imagery; but if the legislators want real headlines, and more celebrated scalps, perhaps they should look at more traditional means of picture-making.
Today I visited a central London venue in which were publicly displayed dozens – perhaps hundreds – of indecent images of children, ranging in age from a few days old to puberty. One child in particular seemed to have a voyeuristic cult formed around him, frequently appearing with his breast-flaunting unmarried mother in the company of older men and (in the most barbarous scenes) farmyard animals.
Most of the perpetrators of these images were, at least to judge from their surnames, foreign (Angelo, Velazquez, Rubens, etc.), and the vast majority are long dead and presumably burning in hell for their perversions. However, the guardian and curator of this squalid collection is alive and well and living under British jurisdiction. He is, of course, Charles Saumarez Smith, the Director of the National Gallery.
Who is going to inform the authorities?
Try painting this today and see how long you stay out of jail
I’ve remarked here before on how the paedo-craze leads to possession of ordinary images of children being deemed indecent, and hence their possession a serious crime, depending on who has them. Now comes an example where there were no children (nor, as the facts suggest, any young adults) involved at all, except in the imagination of the court speculating about the imagination of the defendant.
The Times reported yesterday:-
A COMPUTER expert who altered indecent images of naked women to make them look like children has been warned that he faces a prison sentence.
Stafford Sven Tudor-Miles scanned photographs of adult porn stars into his computer and used sophisticated digital equipment to reduce the size of their breasts.
The images, which Tudor-Miles also manipulated with graphics software so that the women were partially dressed in school uniforms, appeared to be of girls aged under 18.
For those who have not been keeping up with the intricacies of UK sexual offences legislation: Possession of, or (more seriously) making, indecent (not defined) photographs of children (defined as being or appearing to be under 16) became illegal a while ago. But it was extended to pseudo-photographs, i.e. digitally edited images, in 1994. And the age criterion was raised to 18 just a couple of years ago. And the courts have in their wisdom decided that copying an image to or within a computer counts as ‘making’ it.
So photoshopping or downloading a picture (which also counts as ‘making’ it) that appears (to the court) to represent someone under 18 and is indecent (as it appears to the court after hearing the evidence of prosecution experts that may relate as much to the nature of the defendant and the context in which it was found as that of the picture itself) is a crime bearing a prison sentence and registration as a sex offender – even if the defendant made absolutely certain that no-one under 18 was in any way involved.
You can screw your sixteen-year old girlfriend or boyfriend however you both like*, but snap them with their top off, or even leering suggestively, and use it as a screensaver, and you are a manufacturer of child pornography who could easily, given bad luck and a zealous prosecution, end up unemployable and/or be locked up to be tortured by career criminals. I don’t know how unlucky Mr Tudor-Miles was, but The Times also quotes Ray Savage, one of the professional experts involved in the case:
“I’ve seen it in only two previous cases,” he said. “To create an image of a child by altering an image of an adult is just as serious as downloading child porn, and probably more worrying in terms of the time taken and work involved to produce such images.
“In general terms, these images can be as crude as someone having pasted a cut-out of a child’s head on to an adult’s photo.
“At the other end of the scale, someone will use sophisticated computer image manipulation equipment to alter the size of the breasts and genitalia to make a very realistic image.”
More worrying? Mr Savage worries me more than Mr Tudor-Miles.
If our protectors wish to stamp out people having sexual fantasies about schoolgirls, then police raids and mass arrests here and here are clearly called for. Better still, lets deal with the problem at source and stop women going to school. It worked for the Taliban. I have it on good authority that you still can not buy a stripy tie or a navy-blue mini-skirt in Kabul.
[* But not, under the new Sexual Offences Act, wherever you like.]
According to Scotland Yard a plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit “mass murder” on an unimaginable scale has been disrupted.
It is thought the plan was to detonate explosive devices smuggled in hand luggage on to as many as 10 aircraft. High security is causing delays at all UK airports. The threat level to the UK has been raised by MI5 to critical. Three US airlines are believed to have been targeted.
There are no more details about the plan available at the moment other than it revolved around liquids of some kind and that the explosives would have been sophisticated and extremely effective. Flights from Heathrow Airport and Gatwick are suspended until this afternoon at least. The security measures are pretty drastic:
Passengers are not allowed to take any hand luggage on to any flights in the UK, the department said. Only the barest essentials – including passports and wallets – will be allowed to be carried on board in transparent plastic bags.
Another article reports that intelligence is often fragmentary and partial, so the fear perhaps is that there is another, parallel group or other individuals who are also going to carry out similar attacks and that is why such security measures are being taken.
This is all very distrurbing, of course, both for the obvious threat to lives as well as the disruption it will bring to our everyday existence. Another disturbing fact is this kind of comments (a reader’s comment next to the BBC article I got the news from):
This disruption [security measures] is one of the short term limits on freedom that are needed. Tony Shield, Chorley
Apparently the terrorism threat level in the UK has just been raised to ‘critical’. Which we are told means, “an attack is expected imminently”.
Pardon me for being critical, but that is entirely meaningless. It has been raised from ‘severe – an attack is highly likely’ which is also meaningless. When I write “meaningless,” I suppose that is because I want to know what is meant by ‘an attack’, and what probabilities are adduced to distinguish between ‘unlikley’, ‘possible but not likely’ [are not those the same? – no, apparently], ‘a strong possibility’, ‘highly likely’, and ‘imminent’? The announcement is full of meaning, but it is a purely political meaning.
This morning the police announce they have “disrupted a major plot” and arrested 18 people overnight, “as part of a long-running operation”. Unless there is actually someone known to the police to be loose with a bomb as a result of the raids, then disrupting a plot would reduce the actual level of danger, wouldn’t it? Maybe the danger was ‘critical’ (whatever that means) before last night, and they did not know it, so now a misleadingly low level of threat is being corrected.
What is entirely evident is that in the threat levels do nothing to inform the public. They contain no information. Actual threats (those that might succeed) are by definition unknown unknowns, because the security services can (we hope) cope with what they know.
What threat levels do do is provide justification for actions the authorities might otherwise have to explain in detail. One cannot help notice the timing, immediately after a vague but minatory speech by John Reid:
[W]e may have to modify some of our freedoms in the short-term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy our freedoms and values in the long-term.
It is up to each and all of us to ask the questions: what price our security? What price our freedoms? At what cost can we preserve our freedoms?
I do not think the plot is invented to support the Home Office’s war on liberty but I do think it is so interpreted. I do think that Reid, with knowledge of what would happen in the next few hours, was well situated to take advantage. And the timing could not be better to monopolise the news.
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An acquaintance of the left-liberal establishment, whom I will not embarrass by mentioning his name on this blog, remarked on Reid’s speech that it marked another step in the perversion of language: “None of us should be anything other than vigilant and that vigilance is the price of securing our freedom,” the Home Secretary said, inverting the meaning of a well-known phrase.
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilence” once meant we should take care of our liberty at all times lest we lose it to surreptitious encroachment. Now the official meaning is to be that we may only repurchase our freedom (at some indefinite time in the future) by indentured labour for state security, exchanging it just for now (and future nows to be determined) with vigilence – that we should subordinate our lives to watching for the Bad Wolf. And Big Brother is a TV programme.
“One of the perverse effects of the Endangered Species Act,” writes Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy, “is that it encourages private landowners to make their land inhospitable to potentially endangered species. ” He then links to a sad but predictable tale of residents of an area hastening to make sure that a particular endangered bird finds no place to nest and rear young – at least no place on their land, since once this bird is found there, environmental regulations make the land unsaleable.
In North Carolina they persecute woodpeckers. They do not hate woodpeckers, they just do not love them enough to lose thousands of dollars for their sake. Here in Britain we persecute bats, and not because we are afraid of vampires.
We all have a vision of Medieval justice as violent and barbaric. According to Cambridge historian Helen Mary Carrel, this was simply not true:
“The common view of the medieval justice system as cruel and based around torture and execution is often unfair and inaccurate,” said University of Cambridge historian Helen Mary Carrel. Most criminals received gentle sentences merely meant to shame them, Carrel said, with the punishments often carried out in the open so townspeople could bring them charity.
Her work covers only medieval English civil society: punishment traditions in other parts of Europe were perhaps nastier and more closely aligned with our Hollywood induced image of the era.
I’ve been re-reading the report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee – Identity Cards Technologies: Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence in preparation for an interview this evening. It is full of wonderful sarcasm couched in parliamentary politeness, and I recommend it to you, if you care to understand how Britain is governed and/or have a taste for black comedy. MPs are as much bemused spectators as the rest of us.
Nobody knows what the Home Office is up to, because it refuses to tell anyone – even select committees – any more than it can get away with. It does have 180-odd people now working on its Identity Cards programme. But I begin to wonder if they themselves know what they are about…
In case you think I am exaggerating, this is from section 30 of the report:
In written evidence, Microsoft said that “the current phase of public consultation by the Home Office has primarily focused on issues of procurement”. Jerry Fishenden [NTO for the UK] from Microsoft elaborated that “every time we came close to wanting to talk about the architecture, we were told it was not really up for discussion because there was an internal reference model that the Home Office team had developed themselves, and that they did not feel they wanted to discuss their views of the architecture”.
A woman who had (what I certainly think was) a humorous sign on her gate saying “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses” was forced to take it down by British police because it is “distressing, offensive and inappropriate”. Yet seeing as Muslim extremists can walk down the street holding signs threatening to decapitate people, all with a police escort, it is clearly time to stop co-operating with the police and being so damn polite to them. Instead urge them not to allow themselves to be used to repress people’s right to express themselves and force them to fill out as much paperwork as possible. Got a lawyer? Call him. Just do not meekly co-operate.
We need to establish that there is no right not to be offended that trumps the reasonable right to self-expression. In fact I would argue that police escorted Muslims have already established that. If Muslims extremists can threaten people with death unless they express themselves in accordance with the restrictions Muslim activists want imposed on them, then we clearly do indeed have the right to make jokes about feeding Jehovah’s Witnesses to our dogs.
So stop making the job of the police easy when they try to impose such restrictions. If they want to stop you expressing themselves, do not threaten them but do not feel any great need to be unduly polite, make them arrest you and take the matter to court, every single time. I often go out wearing a tee-shirt saying “My Imam went to Mecca and all he got me was this lousy Tee-shirt”. Offensive? I do not think so but if anyone disagrees, I will not take it off and will force any policeman who takes issue with it to arrest me if he wants to stop me walking around wearing it.
The jury, at least, did not convict. A pity we shall never know (their deliberations being secret) whether this was that they found the evidence lacking, or the whole prosecution ludicrous. But it is perhaps some comfort, that if you are entrapped by a newspaper into discussing the purchase of an entirely fictional substance, and prosecuted with the Attorney General’s permision on inchoate Terrorism Act charges drafted to be hard to rebut, you can still escape gaol.
Whether this will be of much comfort for the three men just acquitted in the red mercury trial I doubt. They have been in custody as “terrorist suspects” since 2004, and had to find the funds to defend a trial that cost the prosecution £1,000,000 in taxpayers money. I only hope they have a million or so left to sue the News of the World and its “fake sheikh” agent provocateur, Mazer Mahmood.
Even if they were successful in that, of course the police, prosecutors, and their secret witness, B, are likely to go unpunished. It will be said they acted in good faith. It will be ignored that the waste of public resource and the injury to the defendents’ lives, was dealing with a ‘threat’ that could only ever have been fictional. It will be said that this is valuable and valid because it “sends a message” to all the real terrorists (200… 2,000… whatever the estimate is this week) that they were not investigating while they were wasting their time – and three families’ lives.
I have noted before that British justice (in a number of areas, not just terrorism) has started to take on the characteristics of a witch-hunt, with accusation the philosophers’ stone that transmutes ordinary objects and actions into evidence of guilt. But at least the persecutors of the witch-crazes purported to believe in witchcraft.
In whatever shape England emerges from the war […] The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture
– George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn
But we live further from Orwell than Orwell from Bismarck. The current rulers of England are keen on uniforms, inspectors, permits and controls. (In 48 hours: “Ports and airports to get to discipline young offenders: Home secretary considers community work uniform.” The replacement for the Child Support Agency [not authoritarian enough], “will wield extra powers to punish parents who fail to pay, including evening curfews to prevent fathers going out after work, and having their passports confiscated to stop them taking foreign holidays, and even the threat of prosecution and prison”.) Law is treated with contempt if it gets in the way of the state’s priorities. (Last week the Home Office revealed its ideas for Serious Crime Prevention Orders, to be used to control the activities – such as telephone, travel, banking or internet use – of “known criminals” without the evidence necessary for an actual criminal prosecution.) The prohibition of suet puddings has yet to be ‘put out to public consultation’ (which is how we would know the matter had been determined). But it can only be a matter of time.
I saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil again last night. I had not for a long while. Seen just now, its aptness to New Britain is shocking. More surprising, I think than the utter submergence of Orwell’s gentle, un-Prussian England. We knew, in petto, we had lost that.
How long before we see official signs pronouncing “Suspicion breeds confidence” and “Help the Ministry of Information help you”? Eh?
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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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