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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It is part of being a good citizen to prove who you are day in, day out.
– Andy Burnham MP
The new film, V for Vendetta, based on the British comic strip (like so many movies are these days), is an absolute crackerjack of a production, in my view. I watched it last night, having already acquired an outline of what the plot is about from scanning comics over the years, but unlike some transfers from comic to the screen, this film works very well.
It is set in a Britain about 20 or so years from now, a Britain governed by a regime obsessed by managing the citizenry for their own good (sounds familiar), hooked on propoganda and the management of expectations (ditto), scornful of history and traditions (see above), deeply corrupt (recognise anything?) and also quick to resort to violence. Against this is a masked character modelling himself on Guy Fawkes, a character who, in the early 17th Century, attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
And that is what exactly is the aim of the character “V” in this film. Now, in an age of justifiable fears about terrorism, my first instinct was to recoil at the plot, but in fact if you read this film on a certain level, it is great propoganda against overmighty, corrupt authority, and a celebration of freedom, rather than the sort of totalitarian agenda espoused by the likes of radical Islamists in our own day. It may not be an explicitly libertarian film, but it is unquestionably an anti-authortarian one.
Also, any film that contains the following line has to be a must-see for Samizdata regulars:
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Not bad, not bad at all.
UPDATE: Objectivist writer Bob Bidinotto, a man who is a fine judge of films, dissents from my positive take on the movie, at least as far as this comment suggests. I agree that this is a flawed film – some of its points are a bit silly – but its overall message is about the need to keep vigilant against the abuse of power, something that a citizen living in a country framed by Jefferson, Madison and Adams would surely understand. Remember, the Founding Fathers were all thought of as subversive pains in the ass in their day. → Continue reading: A fine film
Increasingly in Britain people are punished for who they are; but it is not a completely new trend. Here, from today’s London Evening Standard is a sad, and to me disturbing, instance of a thoughtcrime that’s been on the books and zealously pursued for over a decade:
Paul Thomas, 45, a former Hackney councillor, had more than 60 CDs of child pornography in his Bow Home, many showing underage girls in swimwear, Southwark Crown Court heard. Damian van Duyvenbode, prosecuting, said: “This defendant has stored large numbers of images of children in swimwear which the prosecution say is part of his sexual gratification.”
Thomas, who did have previous convictions, admitted 14 counts of “making indecent photographs of children” and was jailed for 18 months.
We don’t know from the account what the pictures were that didn’t feature girls in swimwear. But it is pretty clear that the swimwear is being offered as an aggravating factor. Why?
Holiday supplements of magazines and newspapers, clothes catalogues, travel brochures, and family albums are all full of children in swimwear. Though perhaps they ought to fear it, since there appears to be no defence, at least half the households in the land must therefore possess similarly “indecent” photographs without fear of prosecution.
But they aren’t downloading them from the internet and storing them on disk – which is all that “making” means in this context. They aren’t presumed to be getting sexual pleasure from seeing them. Nobody thinks that children are injured merely by being photographed in swimwear, do they? That man is being prosecuted and punished, or at least his punishment is being increased, for what he might be thinking.
This is the chain of magical contagion at work, an arpeggio of tendentious definitions: The man’s a textbook middle-aged usual suspect; the pictures he collects are indecent because he collects them; indecent pictures of children are child pornography; child pornography is child abuse, by definition. Note that it has a doubly magical property… the presumptive equivalences turn a sad case into a mass rapist and they work both ways at once. Everything in the chain is bound by taboo and high emotion. We’re not allowed to ask, “Was anyone harmed?” It’s irrelevant. The existence of indecency is sufficient to convict. And the court, taking the advice of prosecution experts, will decide what’s indecent.
So be careful what you think. Be careful, in fact, what others might think you think. That you aren’t hurting anybody, that nobody has in fact been hurt, is no excuse.
Danny Finklestein has had a nightmare. About Britain becoming a despotic state. This one-time advisor to John Major (oh dear, we all make errors), even says this:
“But I have to admit that the legislation being debated in the Commons this week — the new ID cards, the smoking ban, the measure on the glorification of terror — has tempted me to take up smoking and start attending lectures about Hayek organised by earnest men with pamphlets in carrier bags.”
Nice patronising tone there Danny – I tend not to bother with carrier bags these days. Welcome to the concept of liberty and limited government.
MPs have just voted in favour of making it compulsory for Britons to have an ID card when they apply for a passport. Bastards.
I wrote to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (!) back on 10th January to nominate the CCTV camera as an ‘icon of England’… and they have just written back accepting the nomination.
Interesting.
Those who have felt left out by the various cartoon demonstrations recently, and fancy getting out on the streets in support of something they care about have a chance on Monday lunchtime. In my capacity as General Secretary of NO2ID, may I extend an open invitation:
NO2ID and Liberty will be holding an emergency lobby of Parliament on 13th February 2006, when the Identity Cards Bill returns to the Commons for consideration of Lords’ amendments. Mr Blair will be wielding the whip for MPs to assent to the nationalisation of the people with as little fuss as possible.
The lobby will take place from 12 noon until 1:00pm on the sundial in Old Palace Yard. This is opposite the St Stephen’s Gate entrance to the Houses of Parliament. [Location marked ‘H’ on this map (pdf)]
This will be your last chance to make a visible protest against the Bill before it goes into the final stages of negotiation between the two houses. And for Samizdata people, it is a rare chance to make common cause with a true rainbow coalition – the fabulous collective of security professionals and technologists, business-people and anti-capitalists, spooks and mooks, great and good, lefties, ultra-lefties, Greens, red-greens, nationalists, internationalists, peaceniks, Old Labourites, New Tories, LibDems, Europhiles, Euroskeptics, Muslims, evangelical Christians, not-so-evangelical Christians, outright pagans, constitutional wonks, geeks, babes, and Trots that are backing the NO2ID campaign.
As always, we shall be laying on some props, but please do bring your own (death-threat-free) banners and placards – the bigger and clearer the better.
To get an idea of numbers, for our own comfort and the helpeful people from Charing Cross police station. we’d appreciate a note to events@no2id.net to let us know if you’re intending to come, though it is not obligatory.
End of commercial. Here’s the musical version.
I have been in the habit of buying zone 1 (i.e. very central London) tube (i.e. London Underground railway) tickets, in clutches of ten, for a reduced price, compared to what such tickets would cost if you bought them one at a time. I tried again, a few days ago, but it seems that as of January 1st 2006, the only way to get cheaper tube travel is to buy an Oyster Card. Oh no, please no, I said, you’ll make me fill in a ludicrously complicated form. No, they said, just buy an Oyster Card. What just buy it? No name, no address, no grandmother’s maiden name. Yes, just buy it, and put some money on it. Okay then.
A day or two ago, I was out and about, and had forgotten how much money I had left on my Oyster Card, and saw a machine which looked as if it might tell me, if I put my Oyster Card on the sign, like the one you use when you are passing through a ticket barrier. It duly told me how much cash I had left, and it also gave me the option of learning about my ‘card usage’. I pressed that. And this is what I got (click to get it bigger):
The message is loud and clear. We know where you have been, and when, and we want you to know it. Because, combine all that with surveillance camera info, and they can tell at once who you are.
The times we now live in.
How long before not wanting to buy an Oyster Card is itself regarded as cause for suspicion?
Only a complete ass would make the cost of ID cards, rather than principle behind them, the main thrust of their opposition to such an imposition. And it would appear that Tory Blair David Cameron is exactly such as ass.
So presumably Cameron, who does nothing not somehow calculated to help return the Tories to power, thinks that such a stance will play well with people who actually care about civil liberties? Well if that really is his objective, does he really think that the NO2ID crew and the LibDems (the two main anti-ID card groups) are really just worried about another small tax? In short, is he really that stupid? And if he is trying to curry favour with ‘Middle England’, is this not the group we are told do not really care one way or the other on the issue?
All he needs to do to get the serious civil libertarians to cheer him to the rafters is stand up and say “regardless of what it costs, we oppose them because they are wrong and any government that tries to impose them is not just wrong, it is wicked. And if they are imposed, we will scrap them the moment we take power, again regardless of what was spent to impose them.”
There is of course no chance whatsoever he will ever say that because clearly the idea of that ID cards are all about civil liberties does not really resonate with a Blairite like Cameron… but of course I would love to be proven wrong.
While in the US there is an argument going on about whether the intelligence services may spy on Americans without a warrant, in Britain we have had unsupervised surveillance for years. But The Independent on Sunday reports that Mr Blair’s quest for total power has started to worry even some cabinet ministers. This in particular:
Until now, successive administrations have pledged that there should be no tapping “whatsoever” of MPs’ phones, and that they would be told if it was necessary to breach the ban.
But that convention – known as the Wilson Doctrine, after Harold Wilson, the prime minister who introduced it – is to be abandoned in an expansion of MI5 powers following the London bombings.
American readers may wish to note that our equivalent of attorney-client privilege is very nearly dead, too.
This was the text of what I submitted for inclusion as an ‘icon of Britain’ via the Department of Culture, Media & Sport website mentioned by Guy Herbert yesterday:
The CCTV camera is the perfect icon for Britain today, summing up the nature of the changing relationship between civil society and political state. They are an innovation in which Britain leads the world both technologically and in usage and are the visible manifestation of so many things which happen out of sight. It is almost impossible to avoid their gaze for an entire day and sitting like steel crows on their perches above us, truly they are emblematic of modern Britain.
The thing is, I am not taking the piss, this really is modern Britain…
I look forward to Blair apologists spinning this unsurprising revelation.
Town hall bureaucrats are to be given sweeping new powers to investigate homes for identity card evasion and to impose heavy fines on occupants found without one. The revelation, in an obscure Whitehall consultation paper, calls into serious doubt the Government’s repeated promises that planned ID cards, already hugely controversial, will be voluntary and that no one will be forced to carry one.
But we should trust the government because… well, just because.
At least the Telegraph is putting out bloggy articles like this one in opposition. I wonder, is the rest of the Fourth Estate going to sleep through this?
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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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