crime and freedom – Page 2

Hitchens vs Paddick

I happened to find myself with Wednesday evening free (a few weeks ago), so I coughed up ten quid to see Peter Hitchens debate Brian Paddock over the drug laws at St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street.

The subject isn’t one which interests me greatly, but I find Hitchens always worth reading and I work nearby, so I went to see him in action.

The debate centred entirely on cannabis. Hitchens’ thesis, stacked in £17 hardbacks on a table by the door, is that cannabis is much more dangerous than is generally supposed, and is at least comparable in harm to what are recognised as “hard” drugs.

Interestingly, Paddock (a former senior London police officer who has run unsuccessfully for Mayor the last two elections), agreed that cannabis is very dangerous to young people. He implied that the risks of severe psychological damage coming from cannabis use were lower than Hitchens had suggested, but both of them were very reluctant to quantify, both agreeing that accurate statistics of either use of or harm from cannabis are difficult to come by.

Hitchens has a very strong argument on the frequent comparison of drug prohibition with US alcohol prohibition, which is that alcohol prohibition did not ban possession or consumption of alcohol. I confess that that fact had never really registered with me. The argument that flows from that is that if you actually want to stop consumption of alcohol or cannabis, you have to ban it, and mean it, and that current drug policy is repeating the mistake of prohibition.

The weakest point of Hitchens’ argument was not really explored, but he claims, first, that cannabis has been effectively legal for forty years, and, second, that once it has been legal and widespread, it is practically impossible to get rid of it. By that logic, it is already too late.

I threw a question in towards the end, but by that point the questions were being gathered in batches, and neither speaker addressed it. I asked if either of them could explain why, when substances such as tobacco, salt and butter are being more restricted on health grounds year by year, it is even on the agenda that this one product, cannabis, be subject to more relaxed regulation, against the general trend.

There were some right morons in the audience. The first questioner went into a tedious, pointless rehashing of the best-known arguments on the subject, taking almost as long as the seven minutes each speaker was allotted to make their initial case.

Ultimately, the reason I don’t find the subject so interesting these days is because I rather suspect that a sane and efficient state could ban dangerous drugs effectively, or legalise them, and do better either way than we do. The precise details of how HM Government screws up drug policy just make for another tedious sordid history. Drug prohibition fails because of the astonishing inefficiency of the legal system — a simple arrest, conviction and sentencing for cannabis possession ought to take about one man-hour of police time and maybe three man-hours of lawyers and another three for administrative court staff. I get the impression it is about ten times that level, which makes the whole process unworkable. Alternatively, drugs could be legal if people had to take responsibility for their own welfare, but the toxic state dependency culture turns drugs which can be enjoyed in moderation by people who have serious responsibilities into life-destroying obsessions for those who have nothing else to do. My pet obsession, the infantilising of 15-25-year-olds, makes them particularly susceptible.

The real problems we see both from the “War on drugs” and from drug abuse flow not primarily from drug policy, but from other failings of the state.

Executions in North Korea

I take this as an encouraging sign

North Korean army minister ‘executed with mortar round’

As a supporter of the principle of absolute monarchy, I do not believe that the problem with North Korea is that it has a hereditary ruler. Indeed, now in the third generation, I would expect to see the benefits of hereditary rule to be starting to show themselves.

So far I have been disappointed. North Korea’s government remains terribly bad. As I have written previously, I attribute this to the fact that, while hereditary, the government does not rest on the principle of hereditary right. Its political formula is built on a form of Marxism, and while the extra stability given to it by its ad-hoc monarchism has served to preserve it well beyond the normal lifespan of Marxist states, it doesn’t confer the full advantages of an explicitly hereditary system.

What I am interested in, when it comes to the guessing-game of looking at the politics of North Korea, is whether the Marxist-politburo “scientific” government or the early-modern Monarchical government has the upper hand. The first is bad, the latter good.

The story that has leaked out of North Korea is that Kim Chol has been executed for unfeelingly carrying on with high living during the mourning period for the late King, Kim Jong-Il, and further, that the young King, Kim Jong-Un, was so outraged that he demanded “no trace be left”. Therefore the unhappy vice-minister was stuck out in a field to be blown up with heavy weaponry.

That is seriously badass — we’re talking Tudor. The vital points are that (a) the offence was against the Royal Line, not the state or the politburo. And (b) the punishment was driven by personal anger, not a scientific principle of government. The Soviet Union was famously practical and humane about executing the deviationists, this is the opposite. Finally, it suggests that, if there is still some kind of internal power struggle going on — perhaps a continuation of some struggle over successsion — those with power are determined to win it absolutely. These three elements all point to better government for North Korea going forward.

Does this mean I want future King William V indulging in such Bond-villan escapades, come the Restoration? In extremis, yes. If senior, trusted members of the administration back the wrong side in a civil war, there is much to be said for going 16th-century on their arses. In peacetime, not so much. A good administration is one where the rule of law can be counted on. Once it is established that the King can rule by personal whim, he has little need to, since he will gain more by running a successful state.

Of course, with North Korea, it is not clear that the best thing would be for the government to improve. If the government failed and collapsed, the natural outcome would be a reunification under the South Korean government, which has an enviable track record over the last half century.

However, South Korea’s government has only one way to go, and that’s down. It is not twenty years since the country stepped onto the democratic conveyor belt, and it is not reasonable to expect the quality of governance that the DJP exercised to continue into the future. That doesn’t mean we should expect rapid decline in the quality of life there — One of the major misunderstood patterns of history is that secure autocracy produces peace and prosperity and, enjoying wealth and freedom, the subjects, associating wealth and freedom with the ruling class, expect that as they have the wealth and freedom of the ruling class, they should gain political power as a natural consequence. The autocrat is replaced or shackled, and the momentum of the former peace and prosperity produces a flourishing of improved life that the new regime first unfairly takes credit for, and then gradually proceeds to destroy.

Those who benefit most from their government are least loyal to it.

So, the story coming out of North Korea is consistent with a hereditary ruler cementing his dominance over rival power centres within the régime. That is by no means the only explanation, so any optimism should be very tentative.

Jimmy Savile

There’s a lot of mystified chatter around these days along the lines of, “How did Jimmy Savile get away with it”. There are some fun theories (David Icke is on form there), but the truth is at once boringly prosaic and shocking.

In the 1960s and 70s, being into teenage girls wasn’t a big deal.

It wasn’t exactly respectable, but DJs weren’t respectable anyway. It wasn’t legal, but neither was drink-driving, and everybody in those days did that.

Being into teenage boys was a bit worse, but that’s because homosexuality was not well-regarded. Stories about choirmasters or scoutmasters or latin masters who were a bit too friendly with their charges were common jokes. Not shocking, “alternative” jokes, but boring, mother-in-law, Benny Hill, variety show jokes.

I think messing about with pre-pubescent girls or boys was another matter, but Hugo Rifkind’s story, from Savile’s autobiography, where he keeps a runaway remand school girl home overnight, was not the sort of thing someone with a reputation for being a bit rough and wild anyway would be shy of admitting.

This is another example of those changes in attitude that are so severe and sudden that the culture just blanks out that things were ever different, leaving odd inexplicable anomalies like Jimmy Savile, the friendly childrens’ entertainer and sex-case.

Social-network threat models

There have been a couple of comments on my peer-to-peer blogging post, both addressing different threat models than I was looking at.

My posts were looking at countermeasures to continue blogging in the event that public web hosting service providers are taken out by IP enforcement action. The aim of such enforcement action is to prevent distribution of copyrighted content: since I don’t actually want to do that I am not trying to evade the enforcement as such, just trying to avoid being collateral damage. The major challenges are to avoid conventional abuse, and to maintain sufficient availability, capacity and reliability without the resources of a centralised service with a proper data centre.

Sconzey mentioned DIASPORA*. That is an interesting project, but it is motivated by a different threat model – the threat from the service providers themselves. Social-networking providers like facebook or google, have, from their position, privileged access to the data people share, and are explicitly founded on the possibilities of profiting from that access. Diaspora aims to free social-networking data from those service providers, whose leverage is based on their ownership of the sophisticated server software and lock-in and network effects. To use Diaspora effectively, you need a good-quality host. Blogging software is already widespread – if you have the infrastructure you need to run Diaspora, you can already run wordpress. The “community pods” that exist for Diaspora could be used for copyright infringement and would be vulnerable to the SOPA-like attacks.

James A. Donald says “we are going to need a fully militarized protocol, since it is going to come under state sponsored attack.” That’s another threat model again. Fundamentally, it should be impossible for open publication: if you publish something, the attacker can receive it. Having received it, he can trace back one step where it came from, and demand to know where they got it from. If refused, or if the intermediate node is deliberately engineered so messages cannot be traced back further, then the attacker can threaten to shut down or isolate the node provider.

In practice it can be possible to evade that kind of attacker by piggy-backing on something the attacker cannot shut down, because he relies on it himself. That is a moving target, because what is essential changes over time.

(One could avoid using fixed identifiable locations altogether – e.g. wimax repeaters in vehicles. That’s not going to be cheap or easy).

James seems to be thinking more about private circles, where end-to-end encryption can be used. That’s more tractable technically, but it’s not useful to me. I don’t have a circle of trusted friends to talk about this stuff with: I’m throwing ideas into the ether to see what happens. Any of you guys could be government agents for all I know, so carefully encrypting my communications with you doesn’t achieve anything.

Law, Order and Prisons

This is a truly bizarre article.

The author, Christopher Glazek, makes a lot of good points about the American prison system, in which prisons are run by the inmates. He points out that according to some statistics, the majority of all rapes committed in the US occur in prisions. We have heard elsewhere recently that more black Americans are in prison today than were in slavery in 1860, and that more people are in American prisons than were in the Gulag Archipelago (although, to be fair, that is partly because the latter tended to die).

The solution proposed by Glazek is: to let the prisoners out to commit more crimes. There is no mincing of words; the title of the article is “Raise the Crime Rate”. Not for Glazek any wishful-thinking “prison doesn’t work” rhetoric, his thesis is clearly that it does work, but the price is too high.

Part of the weirdness is that he seems to regard a reduction in crime partly as a bad thing in itself:

Certain breeds of urban dwellers benefit, too. In gentrifying sections of Brooklyn, for example, steep drops in crime, combined with the virtual depopulation of entire city blocks, has underwritten a real estate boom. In neighborhoods like Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, wealthy people with children have reaped the benefits of climbing land values from apartments they never would have bought had it not been for the removal of tens of thousands of locals from adjacent areas.

Er, yes. Reducing crime makes neighbourhoods nicer and encourages people to live in them. That’s more or less the point.

What Glazek never addresses is the question of why the US is unable to keep order inside its own prisons. From an international point of view, this is the obvious question. The UK, as he observes, imprisons fewer of its criminals, but here there is no assumption that prisons are run by the inmates. There is a possibility that here we are just misled, but I don’t think so. There was for a time one exception to the rule, the Maze prison, where Northern Ireland’s terrorists were held, but the management of that prison, with opposing factions kept in separate wings run by their own paramilitary hierarchies, was a major controversy. The terrorists were de facto prisoners of war, though de jure that status was always denied them, and the contrast demonstrates that the situation in the mainland prisons really is different. Compare to this astonishing paper on the Mexican Mafia, which demonstrates that gang prisoners in California have essentially the same status as the paramilitary POWs of the Maze H-Blocks.

There are statistics in the article: the US spends 200bn a year on a system which employs 500,000 correctional officers to supervise 2.3 million prisoners. Is it really not possible to control crime inside the prisons with a ratio of more than one officer to five prisoners?. The abandonment of law and order inside American prisons is a choice, one probably inherited from the country’s frontier days, and one which simply cannot be justified. If violent criminals continue to commit — and suffer — violent crime inside prison, the answer is surely not to move them out to prey on the law-abiding, but to actually enforce order in the one place where it ought to be easiest of all to do. Don’t, as Glazek recommends, put TV cameras all over the country: put TV cameras all over the prison. (That was a progressive idea in 1791). And finally, if you’re going to release prisoners because there are too many, release the ones that don’t commit crimes inside.

A Case for Ispettore Zen

I’ve probably mentioned before that I read a lot of crime novels. My favourites of the modern era are probably the Aurelio Zen series by Michael Dibdin. Zen, a detective of the Polizia di Stato, solves his cases with a blend of staggering luck and an involuntary bloody-mindedness which distracts him from his more important tasks of attempting to understand and navigate the women in his life and the political machinations of the Italian bureaucracy.

I have no idea how realistic Dibdin’s grotesque presentation of the corruption and hidden motivations of Italian life really is, but I have not been able to see the Costa Concordia story in any other context than as an Aurelio Zen mystery. The captain who accidentally fell into a lifeboat and then argued with the coastguard on the phone, the mysterious blonde on the bridge, the cruise line that was blaming their own captain for everything even while the passengers were still being rescued: all we can be sure of is that nothing is what it seems to be, and nobody is telling the truth. Only Zen can actually get to the truth of it, and even if he does, we probably won’t know, because the official story might be completely different…

Diane Abbot

@bimadew White people love playing “divide & rule” We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism

Offensive? Of course not. How can that possibly be offensive? Just because it implies that it is possible to generalise about what “white people” like? You mean like this? What rubbish.

Well, is it wrong, then? I think so, but so what? She’s a Labour MP — saying things that are wrong is her job. Further, it’s worth arguing about.

Speaking on behalf of white people, we do not love playing “divide & rule”. It’s strictly a last resort — keeping track of different groups of black people gives us a headache. Which ones are the Tutsis again? We much prefer to have “community leaders” deal with all that stuff for us¹.

I would not have been able to say that had Diane Abbot not raised the issue. She was right to raise the issue, despite being wrong: like I said, that’s her job. She should not have been shut up or made to apologise.

The reflex to hang her out to dry is understandable: we are frustrated at not being allowed to say things about race, and when one of “them” does it, we take revenge. But I think that is a bad mistake — ironically, this is one time where we have to risk that headache and play “divide & rule”. Abbott is not one of “them” that want us to shut up about race. Rod Liddle says that she has used the same tactics in the past, but when he talked about black crime, she at least disagreed with him on the merits. Probably wrongly, mind, but, Labour MP, etc. Yes, she used the R-word as well, but if everyone complaining had also engaged the argument like her, they wouldn’t have been able to shout it down. It is the likes of Alex Massie and Bonnie Greer weighing in that make it near impossible to have such a discussion.

Non-white politicians are generally willing to talk about race. (Sometimes at enormous length). Being offended is Stuff White People Like. And that’s not something I’m going to apologise for saying.

¹ If it turns out that the “community leaders” are all from one group, and are using the power we give them to exterminate another, we would rather not know about it, thank you very much.

Freemail

In The Guardian, a journalist tells of her experience of having her email account hacked.

“The realisation dawns that the email account is the nexus of the modern world. It’s connected to just about every part of our daily life, and if something goes wrong, it spreads. But the biggest effect is psychological. On some level, your identity is being held hostage.

“The company that presents itself as the friendly face of the web doesn’t have a single human being to talk to in these circumstances.”

I love free stuff. I use free blog services and free email services, and I see it as a double advantage that, as well as not costing me anything, these services are somewhat at arms length from my identity. Possession of a few keys and passwords are what make me “anomalyuk”, nothing more than that.

My real-world identity is another matter. My personal email accounts, with which I support my personal relationships and business relationships, are provided to me — here’s a novelty — as a paying customer. The providers’ customer services may be good or bad, but at least they exist and I can use them. It makes no difference to a Gmail user how good Google’s customer service is, because Ms Davis and other Gmail users are not Google’s customers at all.

I actually pay a couple of quid a month just for my email service, but that isn’t necessary. Like you, Rowena Davis has an ISP — possibly more than one, if she gets her mobile separate from her home internet. They will provide her an email address, as part of the service she is paying for. They know it belongs to her, because she pays the bill, and if, as the bill-payer, she phones up and needs it reset, they will do it for her. However, for this service which she correctly observes is the nexus of her life, she has chosen to rely instead on a handed-out-on-the-street freebie instead.

I hereby declare that to be a Bad Idea.

Davis’s story links to another recent one, of a 79-year-old charity volunteer who went through the same ordeal. Twice. The police told her: don’t use free email services. Her conclusion at the end of the article: the police need to devote more resources. Not her — she’s sticking with free.

There is one drawback with using your ISP’s email service, which is that you may lose it if you want to change ISPs. As it happens, two generations of free services have come and pretty much gone (remember bigfoot? rocketmail?) in the time I’ve been with my current ISP, but that may be a fluke. And in any case, the old addresses are still supported.

If that concerns you, then do what I do and pay for it. One leading provider charges 69p a month for email hosting, plus £2.99 a year for domain registration — giving you an address that is transferable across providers and that looks more professional than a vodaphone or gmail address. And they have 24×7 telephone support. Alternatively, Yahoo! do an email service for $19.99 a year. Bigfoot, it emerges, are still around, and charge $19.95 a quarter. Is £1 or £3 a month really not worth paying for “the nexus of the modern world”? I should emphasize: it’s not just that paying for the email makes it feasible for the provider to offer you some level of support: the mere fact of there being a payment makes it enormously easier for them to identify you, and therefore to clear up these fraud issues.

The surprising thing is that they’re not marketing this more aggressively. The problems Davies had have been common for a few years: everyone in her position should be paying for decent email, but the providers aren’t advertising on that basis. Google don’t offer a premium service like Yahoo’s, Microsoft charge $9.95 a month, which is a bit steep, and the services just aren’t marketed.

ISPs could offer domain and mail hosting as an extra, but the consumer-oriented ones don’t, or don’t push it.

Possibly the providers are worried about adverse selection: if they advertise on the basis of being able to handle hacking incidents, they’re offering hostages to fortune in terms of the inevitable dissatisfied customers undermining their name with complaints.

As a disinterested (and irresponsible) third party, I will do it for them: Do not use Gmail. Do not use MSN Hotmail, unless you are paying the $9.95 a month for premium (which I don’t recommend, because it’s too much). Use your ISP’s email account if you’re not planning to move or switch in the next five years. Otherwise get a personal domain and get a basic email service from the likes of 1and1, or, if that’s too complicated (and it is a bit complicated), get Yahoo! Plus for $19.95 a year. I’m not recommending these through experience, just through looking for email services that cost a little money and offer telephone support.

If you’re not willing to pay, or you’re not willing to give up Gmail (which, I admit, is a very nicely done service), then remember that you have nobody to whine to if your Gmail is hacked. You have other options, and you have chosen to trust your email to a company you have no commercial relationship with. I have nothing against Google, but if you want a company to have responsibilities towards you, you have to pay them.

Who has the power to authorise perjury?

One of the most striking things about the last few decades is that relatively low-ranking elements of the state apparatus have arrogated power to themselves without any legal or legislative basis, and that this has been calmly accepted by the public at large.

Because these seizures of power are technically illegal, they can be challenged in the courts, and occasionally are. See for instance Neil Herron’s campaign against imposition of arbitrary parking rules by local councils.

While the courts can, and technically should, rule in favour of eccentrics such as Herron, they sometimes exhibit reluctance to contradict the common assumptions of society, which are that someone who works for the council or the police or a government department can do whatever they decide within the area relevant to their job.

Because it is so accepted, it is not easy to spot, and only becomes really obvious when they overreach. What is interesting about the police decision to “authorize” an undercover officer to give false personal and identity details under oath in a criminal prosecution is not whether they will actually get away with it this time (I assume they won’t), but that they ever imagined they could.

The same effect was evident with the MP expenses affair: I quoted at length Nadine Dorries’ insistence that a group of party whips and civil servants had encouraged MPs to make false expenses claims, and that that actually made it OK.

A more significant example is the Foot and Mouth cull back in 2001, in which, it is widely argued, the culling of healthy cattle was done without any legal authority.

At this stage in the post, I should turn these observations into a neat argument in favour of whatever broad political position I am in favour of at the moment (formalism, monarchy, etc.) I suppose I just about could manage it: lines of authority are unclear, nobody ultimately admits to being responsible for anything, so people on the spot feel obliged to just assume responsibility, blah, blah, blah. If I thought about it and worked on it for a while, I might really come to take it seriously as an argument, but right now it feels a little dishonest, so I’d rather just put the whole thing forward as an observation and a point for further consideration.

Slavery

One issue that comes up when you declare that the last 400 years of political “progress” are a bad thing is slavery. Lobbyists, the International Olympic Committee, sustainability facilitators, interior design licensing, bank bailouts, the Milk Marketing Board, these are indeed changes for the worse, but are you saying you want to bring back slavery?

There are a couple of answers to that. One is to argue that the lot of many in the modern world is no better than slavery, so that, even if slavery is bad, it’s not necessarily worse than what we have now.

In “The Servile State”, Hiliaire Belloc predicted that capitalism would necessarily lead ultimately to nationalised slavery, as the state would be forced to take responsibility for the poor landless, and would still need them to work.

That things haven’t evolved quite as Belloc predicted is due only to the decline in the social usefulness of unskilled work. When, from time to time, the question comes up of forcing the unemployed to do some kind of government-organised work in exchange for their handouts, there is only a little opposition premised on the basis that it is unfair to inhumane to the slaves themselves. The idea fails on the grounds that it will cost more than paying them not to work, and that it will constitute cheap competition against those that are in jobs. The fact that the unemployable are in essence slaves of the state is not widely disputed.

(Of course, the distributivists did not themselves intend this argument as a defence of older forms of slavery; they sought a compromise between feudalism and capitalism)

The true argument for slavery is this: that those who are not able to support themselves are necessarily slaves, and abolition ultimately amounts to an exercise in creative linguistics.

A liberal will object, correctly, that ability to support oneself is a can of worms. The ‘inability’ of the propertyless is an artificial condition. None of us are able to support ourselves if every hand is against us, and very few would manage in the hypothetical, and impossible, state where neigbours neither helped nor hindered us. The ability of a particular person to support himself is a social fact as much as a physical one.

Even so, given any social arrangement, there are those who can, in and with that society, support themselves, and those who cannot. The distributivists aimed, admirably, for a society of smallholders in which all could live free, but even if their plans were implemented there would still be some failures.

The natural arrangement for such failures has been demonstrated for us by the Irish travellers of Leighton Buzzard. If a person cannot live independently, someone must take charge of him, and if they can profit by doing so, then a solution has been found.

It is alleged that the workers in the charge of the travellers were not looked after at all well. That may be so, though a significant proportion of those “rescued” appear willing to go back. But when this natural arrangement is illegal, and therefore carried out only among that section of the population which cannot be policed without the UN getting involved, it is not reasonable to expect it to be done very impressively.

The conditions of slavery are a matter of compromise: legitimately a matter of public policy. The bulk importation and inhumane handling of captured tribesmen from a remote continent quite understandably gave slavery a bad name. I am not here to argue for any and all forms of slavery. However, drawing the line of what is unacceptable to include all forms of coercion is clearly an error when so many cannot actually live adequately without being coerced somehow. There have been many varieties of slavery, and I will use the term serfdom to emphasise a distinction from the form of slavery most familiar to us from history and fiction, but not to pretend that I am not talking about a form of slavery.

Back to those conditions: ideally, all those capable of freedom would be free, and the incapable should be given the best chance of becoming both capable and free. But there needs to be some compromise here. The welfare state is geared to the capable but unfortunate, is grossly unsuitable for the most incapable, while at the same time dragging far too many of the marginally capable down into dependency. There seems ample room to improve on it with a system of humane serfdom under which a serf is subject to a lord who his responsible for his support and humane treatment. Such an arrangement would probably require a long-term commitment on both sides, in order to work adequately. The lord has insufficient motivation to improve the serf’s knowledge and behaviour if he can wander out onto the job market as soon as he has learned enough skill and discipline to do so. I think it is essential that such a step would require some compensation to the lord, or a minimum period, or both. At the same time, every capable person who is not free is a cost of the sytem, so there should be some calibration to minimise that cost. It is worth bearing in mind that assisting those who would most benefit from exiting serfdom – by raising the necessary compensation – would be an obvious and worthy aim of charity.

All this really only leaves one question to answer; one which has probably occured to the reader, which is, “are you actually serious you mad loony???!??”

My answer is, “kind of”. The argument above is not presented to convince: I am not convinced by it myself. Rather, as I intimated initially, I am exploring the limits of the reactionary position.

If slavery is unthinkably evil, then the political wisdom of most historical civilisations is basically disqualified by it. If it is defensible, even in some limited way, then that wisdom becomes relevant again, not as infallible authority, but as something to be taken into account. Do I want to reintroduce medieval serfdom? It’s not high on my to-do list. But I refuse to accept that political thought begins in the 1780s.