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 victory in the Netherlands for freedom of expression:
A political party formed by paedophiles cannot be banned because it has the same right to exist as any other party and is protected by democratic freedoms, a Dutch court has ruled. The Brotherly Love, Freedom and Diversity party (PNVD) was launched in May to campaign for a reduction in the age of consent from 16 to 12 and the legalisation of child pornography and sex with animals, provoking widespread outrage in the Netherlands.
The Solace group, which campaigns against paedophiles, sought a ban on the group, asserting that the party infringed the rights of children, and that its ideas were a threat to social norms and values in a democratic state. But a court in The Hague held otherwise.
– The Times (from the Reuters report)
Good for the court. Even easy-going Dutch society is prey to populism, it seems. Without constraint on ‘democracy’, then eventually non-majoritarian views will squeezed out; not defeated in argument, but denied even consideration.
Worth noting (1): Solace [can anyone find a web-site? I will link it if so], who would rather nobody hear the views of the PNVD, made their claim based on some putative ‘rights of children’. I would like to know quite how it enhances anyone’s rights to exclude from the political sphere discussion of policy on the age of consent, pornography, the treatment of animals, or the use of drugs – those questions that have aroused populist ire. Have any actual children complained? And if so, how have they been injured by ideas?
Worth noting (2): What is causing most frothing at the mouth both there and here is the idea of lowering the age of consent from 16 to 12. But that is the most plainly arbitrary, indeed vapid, of all the fringe policies on offer. While opponents can not bear the idea of even discussing a change, the precise age (unlike in Britain or the US) has not been agressively and rigidly policed in the Netherlands, and prosecutions of cases without actual rape or breach of trust are very rare. Those exceedingly law abiding teenagers who can not wait until they are 16 can hop on a subsidised train to France (15), Germany (14), or Spain (13) for a dirty weekend.
(His Most Catholic Majesty’s Kingdom of Spain is not generally pointed out by moralitarians as on the brink of social collapse – but then 13 is a rise from the Franco era, so perhaps it is more democratic…)
Back in 2004 I put a clothespin on my nose and endorsed the Republicans over the Democrats. This was primarily because with a hot phase of a war against our sworn enemies in progress, the thought of Kerry in the White House just scared the hell out of me.
Several years on, as the Republicans continue to erode civil liberties and dig their snouts into the porker trough as deeply as any of the Democrats ever did, I am beginning to pray for enough of a Democratic success this fall to at the very least deadlock the government. The following, which I have just received from Downsize DC was the last straw:
The politicians want YOU to be a snitch
HR 1528 has already passed through one committee and appears likely to pass through another. This bill, if passed, will force you to inform on your neighbors if you have any knowledge of drug related activity. We’re not making this up. First it was illegal to deal drugs, then use them, and then to be caught with them. Now, Congressman James Sensenbrenner wants to send you to prison if you don’t inform on your neighbors! “Informing on neighbors” has always been a key feature of past totalitarian regimes. Is this really what we want for America? Click here to send your message to Congress opposing this law.
It is time to throw the bums out. The problem is, we already know their replacements are bums who are just as bad. The best we can say is a new bum is less experienced than an old bum and less capable of causing trouble for a few years.
I really wish we could get a few more libertarians into the asylum to jam a spanner into the works of government.
We (classical) liberals have spent a lot of our lives worrying about how to keep the state small and stabilise free institutions against collectivist urges. It seems we missed the point. The gradual socialist slide we were resisting popped. Meanwhile the revolution happened and we missed it. In fact most people seem to have missed it, including the old leftists that we feared and who are now equally perplexed. We were all looking the wrong way: Blair’s Britain is no more like Scandinavia than it is like Soviet Russia.
Matthew Parris might be right to detect something of the Third World in the way that government pronouncements no longer have a relation to reality, but I submit the polity itself is something new. It is nothing so human as kleptocracy. At some point Britain became a totalitarian bureaucratic state in spirit, while retaining plentiful food and clean water, and the forms of the rule of law – where that doesn’t get in the way of official power. Week on week measures are brought forward that present ministers would have organised protests against (and in some cases actually did) had they happened in 20th century South Africa, Eastern Europe or Latin America… Had anyone been doing them but the benign guardians of civic republicanism (themselves), in fact.
Last week: Local authories get powers to seize empty housing.
Next week: Some more exciting ways for the Home Office to build a safe just and tolerant society.
1. Seize the profits of companies that employ people who are not permitted to work by the state, or subcontract to companies that do. And remove their directors and ban them from acting as directors.
2. The Serious Organised Crime Agency to have powers to seek ‘control orders’ on those it suspects of involvement in serious crime but does not have evidence sufficient to prosecute. These control orders would be like those on suspected terrorists and control potentially any aspect of a person’s life and their contact with others.
We will have to wait for the announcement to discover whether, “for operational reasons” they will, like the terrorist versions, have to be imposed in secret at secret hearings with the suspect unable to hear or challenge the evidence against them. What’s the betting?
[Note: The current default definition of ‘serious crime’, by the way, is that in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, s81. It is extraterritorial. Activity is serious crime if it would be a crime anywhere in the UK, involves the use of violence, or “substantial financial gain” or is conduct by a “large number” of persons in pursuit of a common purpose… The former NCIS (now part of SOCA) defined “organised” crime as that committed by three persons or more, so a “large number” may not be all that large. Mind how you go.]
Paul Routledge in the Mirror (not a permalink, sorry) offers a follow up to the “Bollocks to Blair” story covered here by Brian the other day:
“Getting fined worked,” he says. “I had only sold two before the police came. Once word got round, people took pity on me and everyone wanted one. I ended up selling 375.”
But more scarily…
The cops asked for the shirt seller’s eye colour, shoe size and National Insurance number to keep track of him “in case he reoffended”.
Once you know that, you know what the fuzz are up to – building a national database of people they don’t like.
Well that we knew. In fact the government is building a database of everybody just in case it might not like them – or might have some reason to ‘assist’ them personally (as a matter of ‘enabling’ a more ‘active citizenship,’ you understand) by telling them what to do – at any time in the future.
For myself I’m only surprised the cops did not take careful note of the brand of footware, and take his footprints for the national footprint database, which they have recently acquired the power to do – I kid you not. Or perhaps they did…
This is daft:
POLICE issued two stallholders at a farming show with £80 fines for displaying T-shirts bearing the slogan “Bollocks to Blair”. Officers questioned staff on two stands at the Royal Norfolk Show after receiving a complaint, subsequently issuing two fixed-penalty notices of £80 for the offending garments.
But, it is entirely legal, given the state of the law these days. Someone says something is offensive, and if they say it is offensive it is offensive, because offensive is whatever offends anybody. Then, once the complaint is made, the police are legally obliged to inflict over-the-top and ridiculous summary justice.
Last night Norfolk police defended the action. A spokesman said: “Officers from Norfolk Constabulary issued two fixed penalty notices, each with a value of £80, at the Royal Norfolk Show in relation to two trade stands displaying T-shirts emblazoned with offensive language. The notices were issued under Section 5 of the Public Order Act as the language was deemed to cause harassment, distress or alarm at an event, where a cross section of people were present including families and young children who may have found the displays offensive. Police did receive a complaint from a member of the public.
Quite so.
I reckon that a creative application of this law could render illegal just about any damn thing anybody took against, definitely including the Police, Tony Blair, etc. Has Tony Blair never used language that was “deemed to cause harassment, distress or alarm at an event”? Selling the Koran would definitely be illegal, provided only that the Police received the complaint about it through the proper channels.
My guess is that Police morale is now so low that a lot of them are now in Good Soldier Schweik mode, i.e. doing every stupid thing that the law says they must, just to show everyone how ridiculous the law now often is.
My late father, who was a rather distinguished lawyer, used to tell us about a bloke who sat in Whitehall somewhere looking at all new laws that they were threatening to pass, pointing out inconsistencies and collisions with other laws, and unintended but possible consequences, and then deftly rewriting all the laws so that they achieved only what they were intended to achieve, and stopped only what they were supposed to stop. (He himself, apparently, had no firm opinions about what the law should do, other than what the people passing it said they wanted it to do.) Then he died, and they were never able to replace him. That must have been, if I remember it rightly, round about forty or fifty years ago. And that, my dad reckoned, was when, legally speaking, the rot set in.
This story about a drugs bust at a drive-thru restaurant may get some folk chuckling but I am not getting the joke. One of thousands of examples, in fact, of how the war on drugs is a waste of time, energy and law-enforcement talent. At a time when we live with the threat of terrorism, one would like to think that priorities were a touch different on both sides of the Atlantic.
Such is the changing nature of that world and the ferocity of those forces, we need to adjust, to reclaim the system and thereby the street for the law-abiding majority.
That means not disrespecting civil liberties but re-assessing what respect for them means today and placing a far higher priority, in what is a conflict of rights, on the rights of those who keep the law rather than break it.
This is not the argument of the lynch mob or of people who are indifferent to convicting the innocent, it is simply a reasonable and rational response to a problem that is as much one of modernity as of liberty. But such a solution will not happen without a radical change in political and legal culture and that is the case I make today.
– Tony Blair MP, June 23 2006
As ever, the pretext is “modernity”… odd how that trope of Marxian theory crops up all the time. Things have changed, we are told. Rebalancing is imposed upon us by the sudden new wickedness of the world.
But read this in the context of other recent statements by Blair and his coterie and you can see that the PM is propounding a double fallacy in order to persuade us make a great leap backward. Ossa is the false dilemma between victim’s rights and suspects’ liberties; Pelion is the great mandarin standby, seeking ‘a balance’ – conceptualised as some mid-point between where we are now and the far extreme in the direction of the proposed policy. The Olympus the New Labour titans would storm is the fundamental western concept of trial. → Continue reading: Forward into the 14th century!
The Libertarian Alliance is highlighting the disgraceful way Belgium has been trying to intimidate people who hold politically incorrect views. Put an article up that the powers-that-be do not like and they will order you to take it down or face prosecution. But then what can you expect from a country which simply bans established political parties they dislike?
Support the right to home school your children? Advocate the right to self-defence? Want to express your views about Islamic culture? Prepare to be criminalised by the Belgian state.
I’ve got a little list — I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!
The Cereals Authority makes its hay with what is grown;
The Asset “Recoverer’s” take what you think you own;
The Office of the Regions now does what the council did;
The control of state surveillance is quite completely hid;
Elections are conditional, the Standards Boards insist;
They’d none of ’em be missed — they’d none of ’em be missed!
Chorus:
He’s got ’em on the list — he’s got ’em on the list;
And they’ll none of ’em be missed — they’ll none of ’em be missed.
Some recent court rulings show that marriage is turning into a nice little earner for certain spouses, as Tim Worstall discusses on his blog. He pinpoints a key problem in English law that it is not possible to have pre-nuptial agreements recognised as valid, although pre-nups might influence a ruling (he goes on to discuss how things are a bit different in Scotland). It seems pretty basic to me: the State has no business legislating at all on marriage. The way in which persons choose to form long-term contracts with another is for the parties concerned and no-one else, period.
If a rich entrepreneur, or musician like Paul McCartney, say, wants to shield himself or herself from being taken to the cleaners by a wife or husband, then it should be within their rights to do so. Of course, it may not be terribly ‘romantic’ to have pre-nups, but let’s face it, if rich people fear they will lose a huge chunk of their money to a cynical spouse on the make, it will raise calls for no-fault divorce to be abolished. It could prolong the divorce process at the expense of children’s happiness, foster further cynicism about the institution of marriage, and erode respect for an important part of civil society.
In the interests of the institution of marriage, then, I call on politicians to let consenting adults get on with whatever arrangements they please. It really is that simple. (Which is probably why it won’t happen anytime soon).
By the way, I will be getting married to a lovely woman in just over a week’s time in Malta. Just thought I would mention that.
I oppose the ID card & panoptic centralised database plans of the UK government on the grounds it is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberties and truly deadly expansion of state power… but even on the utilitarian basis of the state’s own objectives, the entire scheme is a disaster in the making. This comes not from some civil rights activist but from an IBM researcher whose specialty is secure ID cards.
The big issue is that the UK government, plans to set up a central database containing volumes of data about its citizens. Unlike other European governments, most of whom already use some form of ID card, the central database will allow connections between different identity contexts – such as driver, taxpayer, or healthcare recipient – which compromises security. Centrally-stored biometric data would be attractive to hackers, he said, adding that such data could be made anonymous but that the UK Government’s plans do not include such an implementation.
Read the whole article.
(hat tip to commenter Shaun Bourke)
How can I disagree with A C Grayling on British values when he sums up Blair’s agenda so succinctly:
Motivating the illiberal policy of Blairishness is a huge and poisonous fallacy. It is that the first duty of government is the security of the people. This is a dangerous untruth. If it really were true then we should all be locked into a fortress behind the thickest walls of steel and concrete, and kept still and quiet in the dark, so that we can come to no harm. Or the government should be prepared to allow us to stay home behind drawn curtains, and to pay our mortgages and deliver our groceries under armed guard, to protect us form venturing into the streets where (so government fear-mongering might have us believe) thousands of bomb-carrying lunatic fanatics lurk.
To sum up, Blair would prefer us to be sheep, compliant, uncomplaining and stoical. These are the values that he would instill in new immigrants for his legacy: the great and glorious socialist millennium. That part of our history which has ensured our survival would be lost:
To this end they are to learn about our empire, our industrial revolution, our agrarian revolution, our Glorious Revolution of 1688, and so on back to Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort (the sanitised version) and the demand for, and founding of, Parliament.
This will gloss the fact that all our “revolutions” (after the Civil War at least), which by being so called give us a faint aura of past flair, were very pragmatical affairs, and like the empire almost accidental ones, driven from below by thoroughly banausic impulses and only retrospectively embellished, Boys’ Own style, by a sense of the heroic.
Their pragmatism is no doubt a virtue, and it would do no harm to anyone to learn as much; but Mr Blair wants it to be understood as the pragmatism of the ox under the yoke – an ox with an ID card, surrounded by CCTV cameras, stoutly resisting the temptation to have opinions, and certainly not to voice them if by chance one should form between its safely capped horns.
Indeed, we would no longer be part of the Anglosphere.
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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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