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I pledge that, if stopped and questioned for no reason by an officer of the law without having invited him or her into a conversation with me, I will make it my business to make the whole business as long-winded and bogged down in paperwork and police time as possible.

Thanks to Liberal conspiracy for highlighting protectionist amendments being sneaked into the Telecoms directive which MEPs will decide on tomorrow:

The amendments basically set the scene for forcing ISPs to monitor all their customers' traffic to catch them sharing copyrighted material on the web and to cut customers off if they keep doing it.

Over in the comments on Matt Wardman's blog posting the other day I suggested that this whole surveillance obsession smacks of "we do it because we can". Why should one's electronic communications, voice or data, be any more permissible to be snooped on than any other communication - snail mail, face to face or similar. Just because we can. For a variety of reasons electronic communications leave traces, and traces can always be tracked, but why should they be?

It is true that we need to have a debate about intellectual property and how, or indeed whether, it should be enforced in an era of global instant communication. It appears that the artists tend to be ahead of their production companies in exploring how to use the massive marketing opportunity that is the internet, such as recent experiments in releasing music for free, or on honesty box terms, on the web. But of course it is the media corporations and production companies that are lobbying for this sort of protectionist measure. The debate needs to be held much more widely than that though, and not snuck through where these measures were explicitly removed from the directive last time the European Parliament discussed it.

I have written to Sharon Bowles and Emma Nicholson. I suggest everyone take a look at the details of these amendments and give some thought to writing also to any of their MEPs. It is being debated tomorrow, so act fast!

I very fundamentally believe that the internet in particular is seen as a threat by both governments and corporations who feel they are not able to control it. For me, it is the greatest advance in people communicating with people and eventually needing far less "government" to broker their international relationships or trans-national corporations to broker their trade. But for it to bring about the vast benefits of voluntary co-operation amongst individuals around the world it needs to find its own rules, not have them imposed by those very bodies that are scared of it!

Again, (much) closer to home, the Oxford Mail/Times reports that:

Residents near Plater College in Headington, Oxford, have expressed concern about a

new influx of students after the college was sold



for £5.6m to an international language school.

Though I know and respect all those mentioned in the story, I am a little perplexed by this "fear". Plater College was, as the name suggests, a place of learning with students in residence and an ambition to expand, already taking in weekend residential courses and the like before they collapsed.

The site was protected for residential educational use, and indeed when Plater themselves sought to build some flats on a piece of spare land last year planning was turned down because housing use would intensify the pressures on traffic in a narrow private lane. They did however get permission a few years back, not yet acted upon, to increase the number of student rooms from, I think, about 75 to just over 100.

Plater accommodated students. EF will accommodate students. EF's main business throughout most of the year, like many international language schools, is not the hordes of Euro-teens that descend on the city each summer but young adults from overseas mainly spending several months getting their English language skills up to a standard at which they can study at degree levels in English speaking universities.

They are the least likely to bring additional traffic to the area for example. Yet they also tend to save to come here and have disposable money while they are here.

They will hopefully feed much needed overseas student fees into Brookes at the end of their courses with, perhaps, less effort on Brookes's part because they can be recruited locally.

I'm not sure I see the problem. Though it would have been nice (I have to say this bit I suppose) if Brookes themselves had managed to buy the place. Mind you, that outcome would also have involved students staying there.

Technorati Tags: oxford, plater

Having established myself as an anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist I can't help wondering why is it that many libertarians seem to gravitate towards the Conservative party. A party with less libertarian instincts I can hardly imagine. Whatever their rhetoric on occasion, when they tactically oppose Labour's assaults on peoples' freedoms for example, when it comes down to it they are the archetypal we know best patristic party that is happiest telling the plebs what they can and cannot do, should and should not expect.

They may point to Thatcher's rolling back of the state in the form of privatisation of government owned business assets, but a true Libertarian cannot be happy with reform merely of the economic sphere. Rolling back the state means ending interference in all areas of our lives. Anything else is authoritarian. And so, it is with little surprise that I find this reported in today's Observer:

Tories highlight cannabis dangers in drug blueprint

Jo Revill and Nick Watt
Sunday July 8, 2007
The Observer

The health risks of cannabis are so great that it should now be reclassified as a class B drug, carrying much greater penalties for possession and trafficking, says David Cameron's new blueprint for dealing with Britain's growing addiction problems.

The Tory leader has been convinced by emerging evidence that a strong form of the drug, skunk, is causing an epidemic of mental health disorders. A report being published this week by a Conservative policy commission will confront the issue, recommending an upgrading of the drug to class B, as well as arguing the case for a complete transformation of addiction treatment in Britain.

What utter bollocks. Look, the rush to create ever stronger strains (and actually the evidence is mixed - while people report finding stronger strains the prevalence of those strains is far from clear) mirrors precisely the ever stronger concoctions of alcohol produced under prohibition. If you want to control such production, the best way is to free it up and regulate it lightly. If the problem is primarily with growing brains (and the science here is also mixed as I've mentioned before) then, as with alcohol and tobacco, make it illegal for licensed vendors to sell it to minors. But while all vendors are unlicensed and unregulated there are no controls and it is pot luck, if you pardon the pun, as to whether the authorities catch someone selling to kids.

It is fact that cannabis can be a sociable drug. It is fact that cannabis can be a soothing drug for all sorts of ills, from stress to MS and arthritic pain. Indeed only on Friday there was a case of a grandmother effectively being allowed by the courts to continue to use cannabis as pain relief. But the silly side of the law means she cannot cultivate it for her own use, so she has to go to a criminal to get hold of it by definition.

The drugs laws in this country are a mess. And no party seems really to want to grasp the nettle and look at how individual freedoms to do what one wants with one's own body and mind, where it does little or no harm to anyone else, can be combined with protecting the truly vulnerable. Yes, addictions kill. But they mainly kill because the market in addictive things is so often criminal and the vulnerable are open to the worst kind of exploitation. Therefore I say that the authoritarian state, with regard to addictive substances at least, is complicit in those deaths. And by extension, the party that imposes more prohibition are murderers.

They can change the language if they like - the Tories say the phrase "war on drugs" is outdated and doesn't convey what they want to achieve - but returning to ever more criminal sanctions will harm more people, and will do the law itself a disservice by continuing a charade that everyone knows is upheld more in the breach than the observance. If you ever want to even imagine you might get the vote of this anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist, Cameron, you're going to have to do a lot btter than this knee-jerk classic moral panic nonsense.

Technorati Tags: tories, conservatives, Dave the chameleon, libertarianism, cannabis, drugs laws