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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Not a film review. Truth is more horrifying than fiction, sometimes.
The truth in question being the willingness of those close to power openly to advocate ever more interference with you and me, not ad hoc for venal, corrupt, human reasons, but in order systematically to enforce the currently approved good life on society.
From the BBC (Public Policy Research1 is by subscription, and I am not subsidising the bastards any more than I already do from taxes):
Jasper Gerard argues in PPR: “When it comes to booze, society seems to have lost its senses.”
He says current regulations are failing to tackle the growing trend of under age and binge drinking. By raising the age threshold, he claims: “It is at least possible that those in their early and mid teens will not see drink as something they will soon be allowed to do so therefore they might as well start doing it surreptitiously now.”
Alternatively, he proposes getting 18-year-olds to carry smart cards which record how much they have drunk each night and making it an offence to serve more alcohol to anyone under-21 who had already consumed more than three units. [Cant for a pint and a half of ordinary beer – or one decent cocktail – GH]
He conceded that no measure would stamp out youthful drinking entirely, but said it was time for a crackdown.
I note the BBC has this story under ‘health’, rather than ‘politics’. It does not have a ‘neo-Puritanism’ category (perhaps we should have). Medicalised bullying sails past the questioning pickets of journalism and gets straight into the credulous baggage train. As does technological bullying. And here we have medicalised state bullying enabled by technology. Woo-hoo!
One can not quote this fragment of C.S. Lewis too often:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
It may spoil the mesodiplosis, but those first too mays should be ises. The robber baron pursues his own whims and pleasures, regardless of others; the neo-Puritan is only happy when the lives of others are under control.
1 = The journal of the Institute for Public Policy Research, the tank in which New Labour thinking goes on.
<child’s voice>
“Stand still, citizen! Facial recognition software has identified you and made a cross-check with the national ‘Good Citizen’ data base.”
“You have not denounced anyone for…thirty… days… please remember that community policing is a civic duty and reporting people is easy and fun! Just use your mobile phone and send a text SMS to Whitehall 1212 with the name, address and crime of a school mate, family member or co-worker!”
“And remember, if you accumulate ten ‘Good Citizen’ points for denouncing smokers, homophobes, people eating high fat food, anyone making racist jokes in private, people making unauthorised D.I.Y. repairs to ‘their’ houses, anyone using illegal light bulbs, anyone questioning the unanimous and state approved scientific truth about global warming, home schoolers or people who buy banned war toys for ‘their’ children, you will get to appear on the Big Brother reality TV show by having your home’s internal CCTV footage broadcast live for seven days!”
</child’s voice>
From the linked article: “According to recent studies, Britain has 4.2million CCTV cameras – one for every 14 people in the country – which amounts to 20 per cent of the global camera total.”
Welcome to modern Britain.
This story in the Telegraph is no doubt just crazy right-wing paranoia, and we have in fact no need to worry, get annoyed or even become the tiniest bit cheesed off. Oh no. Polly has explained it all for us. To be worried about the surveillance state is a middle-class thing, apparently. All true denizens of a socialist Britain should be proud to carry ID cards and be photographed constantly.
If Polly Toynbee did not exist, we would have to invent her. Not even Ian Fleming could cook up a female villain as good as this woman. Henry Porter, meanwhile, has scathing remarks on his fellow Guardian columnist. Good for him.
Of course, if CCTVs are installed in privately owned streets, shopping malls or other privately owned buildings, I do not have a problem so long as it is pretty clear that such cameras are installed. But that is not quite the issue.
.. because someone else may be watching, too.
Pippa King is rightly outraged by the bad bargain Bury schools appear to be getting for taxpayer’s money with their their “cashless” fingerprint-based school meals systems. However, I do not think that is the most disturbing element of the story.
There is nothing wrong in principle with using a biometric instead of a separate token to charge an account. And cash-handling is expensive, so you need to minimise it. When I was a child, the school took dinner-money once a week and issued paper tickets: one ticket, one meal. What you ate for your ticket was up to you, though choice was limited. Poor children entitled to free school meals were handed the tickets free, and what money changed hands from whom was invisible to all other children. Each stage involved discrete self-checking transactions in truck/tuck, with no need for continuing accounting for individuals.
Having created individual accounts, the system might still be a simple acounting tool, if those accounts were private. But much more than that is happening here.
Pupils even register points for making healthy choices and are rewarded for healthy eating.
And this being information on ‘risk’ to children – the risk of eating chips, in this case – it will be shared with other authorities, common law confidentiality is expressly excluded [Children Act 2004, s12]. But the information need not be collected; it is because it can be.
The concept of limited government power under law is almost dead: any system in the hands of a British public authority, whatever its ostensible purpose, now acquires a function in surveillance and behaviour control.
My apologies for writing very little for a while. I have ideas but not much time. And I am a slow writer. By way of explanation if not excuse:
A Conservative front bench spokesman has been sacked for racially insensitive remarks, leading one former Conservative cabinet minister (Michael Portillo) to note that while people complain about the professionalisation of politics, this is what happens when you bring in people with life-experience outside politics: they do things no professional would.
A true professional can get away with more than dodgy anecdote. He can make a direct appeal to public xenophobia, and hang a major strand of government policy on it. And do it in such a way that no-one calls him out on it:
It is unfair that foreigners come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits, steal our services like the NHS and undermine the minimum wage by working.
Of course he is a socialist, so he could not be a racist, could he? But make no mistake about it, this is a dog-whistle to the political base of the Labour Party among the white working class.
It is not the legality of immigrants that makes their competition unwelcome. It is the fact of competition. Those who compete most effectively are legal migrants from the Commonwealth or Eastern Europe who have rights to the services as well as work ethic and education. Resentment does not check your papers: ‘illegal immigration’ is code for ‘immigrants’ tout court. Note John Reid’s language: “foreigners”.
So when your landlord checks your ID and registers where you live for the authorities, in fear of a £20,000 fine; when Kylie and Madonna, Rupert Murdoch’s children, Sheikh Maktoum, Shilpa Shetty and all have to be fingerprinted for their ID cards* to make sure they are not “stealing our services” as well as adding to the colour of our national life; when you have to prove your residential status to see a doctor, who probably has to have an ID Card marked “Foreigner” if he is one of the tens of thousands of overseas doctors working in Britain (and threatening the minimum wage); when you.have to prove your own identity constantly for the official record even in private transactions and it would be so much easier to ‘volunteer’ to join the National Identity Register… then remember it is all the fault of filthy foreigners coming here, not in the least the exploitation of popular racist sentiment for political advantage. The Home Office has to watch you, just in case you might be a foreigner.
* Or not, since I can not see them hanging around to put up with it. All the world’s interesting people, who live here for the combination of privacy and open society, might well go elsewhere.
And while we are on the subject of the Antichrist, is there not something very sign-of-the-apocalypse about this?
CHILDREN aged 11 to 16 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a secret database, internal Whitehall documents reveal.
The leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.
‘Leaked’, my balls! This is being floated in order to measure public reaction. A muted response and all the right boxes will be ticked. A mass cry of protest and the plans will be shuffled off to another in-tray to await re-floating later in the year or early next year (preferably under cover of some news-consuming natural disaster or terrorist attack). These people believe that time is on their side and maybe it is.
Our masters are not only deeply and irredeemably malignant but they are also intoxicated with the heady fumes of power and verging on the insane. The question is, what do we do about it?
I read the headline of John Lloyd’s article in the FT Magazine this week, and I read it again, and again. Every time it seemed to make less sense than before:
Personal politics: There are times when the government is right to intrude into the realm of private morality
Regardless of what it is or is not right for the government to do, state intrusion means something is no longer a matter of private morality, or morality at all. It is certainly not private, once the state is involved. And regulation displaces morality. The capacity for choice is required for morals to play a role.
Reading the article was even more perplexing. To the extent Lloyd’s piece is about the Catholic/gay-adoption argument, it is as tedious as most of the vacuous discussion on the question. What engaged and enraged me were his premises. Mr Lloyd in this discussion treats the state as a kind of super person, possessed of its own opinions and moral sense, and that hectoring people who do not conform to those pseudo-desires is legitimate.
The morality of the welfare state depends on contribution and responsibility. Since some people don’t contribute and many are irresponsible, the choices of those who do contribute and are responsible is [sic] either to tolerate the free riders, refuse to pay for the effects of their irresponsibility or trust the state to educate them.
False dichotomy and all, this is the authentic voice of the New Labour branch of civic republicanism: ‘citizenship’, which is to say personhood, defined by duty to the state-collective. He notes entirely accurately that:
[T]he British state has progressively, and under New Labour very significantly, delved deeper into both the prejudices and the private behaviour of citizens, and sought to reform both […] ensuring that society as a whole observes the new order.
The square brackets there stand for the omission of two and three-quarter paragraphs, so apologists for the New Labour point of view may object that the last clause refers only to removing some disadvantages from homosexuals. But I am not being unfair. Ensuring that society as a whole observes the new order is the key to the project.
Despite there being other theories of the welfare state that I and other Samizdatistas might reject but that are less repugnant to human autonomy, we are now offered a Hobson’s choice: be treated as drone in the sense of a worthless idler – or become a drone in the Borg sense, actually not a fertilising drone but a sterile ergate, emptied of all capacity for moral choice.
What is the eGovernmental equivalent of soft hands, marking the unproductive drones out for hounding to destruction of their dronish identity? Inadequate contribution. Failure to comply with whatever compliance is required.
You will not will incorrectly. You will comply.
The Register reports:
Following four hours of heated debate, the San Francisco Police Commission voted 5-0 in favor of adding 25 new cameras in eight locations throughout the city’s roughly 50 square miles. Currently there are 33 cameras in 14 sites.
I had to read that story several times to acclimatise myself to the culture shock. If you do not live in Britain compare another Register story:
The police and Home Office are to press for regulatory powers that will insist that every one of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain is upgraded so it can be deputised to gather police evidence and provide a vehicle for emerging technologies that will automatically identify people and detect if they are doing anything suspicious.
Now (if you do not live in Britain) count your blessings.
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?] 
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?
Labour has contrived to do something very difficult indeed… they have made the ‘Conservative’ party look good. By announcing that failure to produce your ID card will make a person liable for a £1000 (about $1,850) fine if, for example, they cannot find and return the ID card of a recently dead relative, they have allowed David Davies, the Tory shadow home secretary to very reasonably point out that the ID card scheme…
…will hit the taxpayer not the terrorists” and is “just another Labour stealth tax” [..]”It is shocking that the Government is considering charges and fines on people at some of the most sensitive times in life. The Conservatives would scrap this plastic poll tax and invest the savings in practical measures to improve security.”
…which puts me in agreement with the ‘Conservative’ party and that does not happen very often.
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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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