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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Hollywood illiberals such as George Clooney and Michael Moore made a career of sneering at the ageing Charlton Heston, which was almost enough to make me join the NRA. True, many of Heston’s conservative views might be as dated as his movies. But a willingness to take up arms for human freedom is one reason why we still don’t live on the planet of the apes.
– Mick Hume, reflecting on the stance on the right to bear arms that was taken by the late, great Charlton Heston. Here is a wonderful tribute to Heston by the US actor, Richard Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a ‘liberal’ in the American usage; his comments show real class and generosity of spirit.
Heathrow Airport is a horrible place: overcrowded, dirty and unable to cope with the volume of traffic. A few days ago, Terminal 5 was opened. As a result of the demented decision by the British Airports Authority, the Spanish-owned company which has a monopoly franchise on UK airports, to blend international and domestic passengers going through the terminal, BAA has decided to fingerprint everyone who goes through terminal five. Soon all passengers going out of Heathrow, and other BAA airports, such as Gatwick, will be affected. The queues will get worse, and ironically, so will the vulnerability of passengers to terrorist attack during peak times. One hates to think what it will be like during the summer holidays and over the Christmas break.
Richard Morrison has a good old rant in the Times of London today about this issue. He points out that BAA has introduced the system at its own behest, not because of the government. For once, a libertarian cannot just bash the state for this, at least not as the direct culprit. I have no problem per se in a private airport operator setting certain rules which customers are free to ignore by going elsewhere, but as BAA has a monopoly, it hardly is a model of free market capitalism. BAA was privatised initially with its monopoly largely intact, which was a mistake. Of course, if passengers feel safer going to airports which demand iris scans, fingerprints, ID cards, body searches, intense questioning, and all other manner of intrusions into privacy, by all means go to these places. For the rest of us, even those who fear terrorism, we might prefer to take our chances and travel like free law-abiding adults, rather than convicted criminals.
For a good, sober look at the trade-offs with security measures and the unintended bad effects of things like this, this book is a good place to start. The author is not some hard-line civil libertarian and quite friendly to a lot of security ideas, but he understands that there is no security system in the world that is fail-safe and argues that it is about time people were allowed to weigh the risks more intelligently.
In a recent interview (“When nature is one step ahead”, New Scientist, 2008 02 09) marine biologist Raphael Sagarin has little to say about security that a libertarian could disagree with:
You can look at virtually any question about security through a biological lens, from how to develop weapons systems to how to organise government departments. You look at what the most successful organisms do to solve their security problems, and then you try to use that. One clear lesson is that the species of systems that have been around the longest, adapted to many different environments and captured the most resources have a structure of fairly limited central control, with a lot of autonomy.
He believes DHS should be broken up into a number of smaller organizations; that TSA carries out actions which are an incredible waste of resources and that some of the best work the government does is through small organizations like DARPA.
It is a very interesting read if you can find it.
Thanks to Nick Cowen of the Civitas Blog, I have just been reading another of those man facing prosecution for defending himself stories:
A shopkeeper could be charged with murder after an armed robber who tried to steal the day’s takings was stabbed with his own knife during a struggle.
Tony Singh, 34, described as a hard-working family man who often works 13-hour days, was ambushed as he shut his shop on Sunday evening by Liam Kilroe, 25, a career criminal who was armed with a knife.
Mr Singh fought back and, after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, Kilroe was seen by witnesses to stagger away clutching the knife to his chest. Kilroe was taken to hospital, where he died, and Mr Singh was detained by police. He is now waiting to discover whether he will be charged, and is on police bail until February 29 pending further inquiries.
Lancashire police confirmed that papers had been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, which will decide whether Mr Singh should be charged with one of three offences: murder, manslaughter or assault.
Mr Singh, who suffered injuries to his neck and back during the struggle and had to be treated in hospital, insisted yesterday that he had acted in self-defence. …
I suppose the authorities have to consider the possibility that Mr Singh may have done something wrong despite all appearances to the contrary, but in this case they appear, unless this report is way off the mark, to have no evidence of any such thing. It could be that the police routinely hand over all the evidence in such cases to the CPS, no matter how heroically the shopkeeper behaved and no matter how completely the villain got what he deserved and how completely the heroic shopkeeper did the rest of us a favour by, as it turned out in this case, killing him. And whereas in theory there could be a prosecution, the chances of one actually materialising are very remote. In which case this is a story about lousy journalism.
But, as Nick Cowen points out, what the shopkeeper appears to have done is what the criminal justice system failed to do. He punished an already arrested and many times previously convicted career criminal, who should have been in jail already but who was actually roaming the streets trying to commit more robberies. The justice system should have stopped that, having already had every chance to do so. Tony Singh’s heroism showed up what a lousy job it was doing.
The phrase “taking the law into their own hands” is often used by the authorities in circumstances like these. But by the look of it, Tony Singh didn’t so much take the law as catch it and save it from being smashed, after the authorities had themselves dropped it. And you can’t help suspecting that, in the eyes of the authorities, this was the real crime here. Why couldn’t he just have handed over the money like a sensible chap?
With the occurrence of yet another violent attack on a crowd of disarmed people in the news, Glenn Reynolds suggests we start sueing the universities. If a University or any other organization defines its facility as a ‘Gun-Free Zone’ it has an implied contract duty to protect you, and if it has failed to take measures to do so is in breach of that contract.
Think of it this way: you have a constitutional Right of self defense. When a property owner or government makes entry onto that property contingent upon waiving that Right, they imply they will in return defend you against harm. This is not all that different from a situation I faced a decade ago as a C-level manager at a UK ISP. If our net news feeds were wide open, we were a common carrier; but if we put any sort of filtering into effect we were expressing editorial control of content and therefor liable for what we missed, be it child-porn or whatever.
Let the fun begin!
…All the wonderful tools of liberty. But… but… I see not a single example of that German-Swiss engineering marvel, the SIG-226, as featured on this blog’s masthead!
Christopher Hitchens reckons the CIA should be scrapped for its many recent screwups, including the latest fiasco over the NIE report about Iran. I agree, although the question is largely academic: governments are not known for scrapping institutions that go awry. But the NIE fiasco – which actually might endanger our security since Iran is still trying to produce enriched uranium – does add to the impression that security services are in danger of becoming the problem, not the solution. And the recent issue surrounding alleged destruction of taped evidence of torture does not exactly square with an institution operating under the rule of law, as Andrew Sullivan has put it recently, although Sully has not drawn the logical inference that the CIA should be closed down.
Here is the crunch paragraph from the Hitchens piece. Read it all:
And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission, the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was after the grotesque estimate of continued Soviet health and prosperity that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the CIA should be abolished. It is high time for his proposal to be revived. The system is worse than useless—it’s a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.
Question: should the same logic apply to MI-6?
This YouTube video on the Volokh Conspiracy shows a truly outrageous incident where a policeman in the USA tasers a man who was at no point threatening anyone and who was actually calmly walking away from the policeman. The longer CNN coverage gives more context and makes it more clear to me that this was a completely unjustified use of force.
Yet more proof no state should have a monopoly on the means of violence. The incident is astonishing and at least it does show the value to the public (and without doubt to honest decent policemen) of having all traffic stop incidents videoed.
It seems to me that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in “gun free” zones is well-established at this point, and I don’t see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free.
– Instapundit
We have said this kind of thing here many, many times, and will say it many, many more times, but I think this puts it particularly well:
People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society.
The rest of it – the posting is by “marko” and is entitled “why the gun is civilized” – is equally eloquent. It is quite short and anyone who is inclined to will have more than enough time to read it all.
It is particularly refreshing to read an American arguing against gun control without once mentioning the US Constitution. I am not opposed to the US Constitution, most of it, but I think that Americans should spend at least some of their time explaining why most of it is right, instead of just taking it for granted as a stack of unchallengeable axioms. When they do argue without relying on this document, it certainly makes it easier for us foreigners to link to them. [M]arko’s argument is not American only; it is universal.
Quite a lot has already been written about the British government’s demented suggestion that security of public transport will be improved by installing airport-style security checks at 250 “strategic” railway stations (places, presumably, such as Paddington, St Pancras, Victoria and Liverpool Street in London). Bloody marvellous. A hint of the chaos this will cause, the enormous economic damage and ruination of the railway industry that will ensue, struck me this morning as I took a Tube ride from Covent Garden to Victoria on my way to work from an early meeting in the City. Victoria’s Tube station was closed due to “overcrowding on the platform”, according to a public announcement. The crush of crowds was terrible. Now, just work it out, gentle reader. Imagine in say, two or three years hence, if Gordon Brown’s daft idea takes root: massive queues at London railway stations in the evening rush-hour as people struggle to get home, huge groups of people milling around stations waiting to be passed through security. A perfect target for a terrorist, you might might think.
You might indeed think that. I bet a few of the more intelligent police and security service folk realise that. But not Gordon Brown. I am no longer convinced that Brown is particularly bright, in fact. We have long been assailed with this image of a brooding, obsessive Scot with his books and his clever ideas. Cleverness? I think his intellect should be regarded like one of those flakier tech stocks in the late 1990s – greatly over-priced and due for a rapid fall. I already sense that this process is under way. Let the selling continue.
Blogger Patrick Lasswell had a real world encounter of the ‘dial 911’ kind that shows whilst civic virtue is a good thing, it is even better when the upstanding citizen has a firearm to hand when investigating a disturbance.
Hiding in my front yard from a shotgun armed maniac last night made me reflect on my libertarian leanings. The Second Amendment never seemed so clear to me as an individual right as I waited for the police to arrive, and waited. I was carrying only a telephone and a flashlight, and updating the 911 operator as the lunatic passed twenty yards from my position it occurred to me how very much I appreciate owning rifles, and how very, very far away they were at the moment.
Read the whole thing. Fortunately the encounter in question was ‘merely’ alarming, yet clearly there was potentially for a shooting and thus Patrick was in violation of Jeff Cooper’s First Rule of Gunfights: have a gun.
Patrick, you live in the USA so you have no excuse to emulate the disarmed civilian population of Britain.
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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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