Anarchism

bushco Must Be Very Envious

This entry was posted in Anarchism Privacy on by

Where will all the freedom loving Brits move to?

Big Brother-style surveillance is growing on Britain’s roads, where police will have the greatest ability in the world to scrutinise, control and record the movements of drivers by the end of the year.
Thousands of cameras reading vehicle number plates and comparing data with a central data base will analyse some 35 million pieces of information per day.
The data will be transmitted to the police and also MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, to help in the hunt for suspected criminals or terrorists. It will be kept for two years, but the period may be extended to five years.
Prime Minister Tony Blair’s centre-left government has invested some 15 million pounds (27 million dollars, 22 million euros) in the project this year.
“The plan is to deny criminals the use of the road,” said retired police officer John Dean, who is coordinating the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) programme.
“We will combine our efforts in a national network which, we hope, will be active from May,” Dean told AFP.
The entire country will be hooked up to the ANPR system between now and the end of 2006.
The network of cameras will automatically alert the authorities when it finds a car listed as stolen, with an out-of-date tax disk or a vehicle that is not insured.
The system also raises the alarm if it recognises there is an arrest warrant out for the driver of a vehicle. And it can be used simply to track the movement of a certain person who is of police interest.

You shouldn’t feel all that secure in the US either. Surely you’ve noticed the increasing numbers of cams at intersections in your community…well, maybe only in larger cities. Once installed it is a relatively simple step to interface the imagery to a system similar to what the British are using.

Via Lew Rockwell.

Smoking Outdoors

This entry was posted in Anarchism Drug Laws Law Libertarianism Regulation on by

In the midst of a fine hammering of the use of false information  to support efforts to ban all outdoor smoking Michael Siegel says the following:

There is, in my opinion, simply no justification for invoking the state’s police powers to regulate smoking on streets and sidewalks, places where people are free to move about and where, in most situations, people can simply avoid substantial exposure to secondhand smoke. And I am aware of no scientific evidence that secondhand smoke exposure on streets and sidewalks is a significant public health problem.

Well, yes, it is not a public health problem but it can be damned obnoxious and offensive to a nonsmoker. I can choose whether or not to enter a smoking establishment but why should I have to delay or hasten my walk down a sidewalk because some jerk (being polite) decides to light up right in front of me (other examples are myriad).
Outdoor smoking should be allowed but the smoker should be subject to charges of simple assault and/or battery if the smoke touches another person or forces them to change their position or path in order to avoid the smoke.
Via Hit & Run via To the People

Policy Soup

This entry was posted in Anarchism Constitution Democracy Government Law Libertarianism on by

Steve at Begging to Differ rolls out a pretty important idea:

He’s right, but then, sometimes regulatory chaos is a good thing. State-level law is a primordial policy soup, subject to the Darwinian pressures of elections and lawsuits. Good ideas adapt and propagate. Bad ones wither and die. It’s messy. It’s chaotic. It’s perplexing and unwieldy, but it’s a glorious disaster. It’s democracy. And it works.

I’m not going to bite on the It’s democracy bit but it can work and is a good reason to subject most, if not all federal law, to some slash and burn activity.

For that matter the largest geopolitical level this chaos should operate at is probably a city or county level.

The Dancer and the Dance

This entry was posted in Anarchism Culture Libertarianism Literature on by

Arthur Silber is back again. Both at Once Upon a Time…

I offer these stories not to condemn the genuinely great and revolutionary achievements of the West, or to challenge the profound, inestimable worth of what we generally refer to as “Enlightenment values.” I offer them to make a more modest suggestion: that the fundamental approach inculcated in all of us by our cultural traditions of thousands of years does not represent the only way of viewing the universe and our place in it.

And at a new site called The Sacred Moment where he has aleady reposted his important series On Torture.

Make Arthur a regular read!