I have been in hospital for two weeks and not very active for a while before that so this link is as much a marker to prove I'm still here as an active post! The ALL site is well worth following though.
Source: alliancejournal.tumblr.com via Ian on Pinterest
The proposal by South Yorkshire Police Authority to replace police on the beat with PCSOs as the first point of contact with the public is interesting for a variety of reasons. It was of course suggested that this would happen when PCSOs were introduced some 10 years ago. It is surprising perhaps it has taken this long. However the very idea of a separate 'public' cuts against the traditional philosophy of policing in the UK as set out in Peel's Principles of Policing, #7 of which says:
Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
A Police Federation spokesman, interviewed on BBC R4 'Today' programme this morning described PCSOs as 'civilians', thus creating a definite sense of us and them. It seems that the modern pattern of policing, supported by police and politicians alike, has abandoned Peel in favour of the idea of an occupying force, keeping down a hostile populace.
That shift of perspective is dangerous. See for example Principles 2, 3 and 4:
Principle #2: The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions.
Principle #3: Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observation of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.
Principle #4: The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.
The more the Police consider themselves outside and above the general public, the worse it will get.
I recently came across a brief review (in The Philosopher's Magazine) of a book by the philosopher Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy in which he claims (I haven't read it yet) to be setting out a green conservatism. According to the Publisher's blurb this is based on the premise that the environment has up till now been the undisputed territory of the Left. I don't necessarily agree with that, but even if it were true, that is because the Right has abandoned the field. (I hate these simplistic labels, but for now Right and Left will do).
Back in 2006 I asked myself why so many Libertarians hate environmentalism. At the time I came to the conclusion that faced with the possible need for substantial state action, they preferred to simply deny there was an issue of concern in the first place. Scruton's book appears to be an attempt to reclaim some of that ground.
If this is to succeed, then there needs to be an end to the absurd hyperbole that calls Rachel Carson a mass murderer, Richard Attenborough a hater of humanity and which denounces Greens generally as evil (while without a trace of irony complaining bitterly when similar claims are made about 'climate change deniers'.)
I'm not holding my breath...
I deleted the Samizdata blog from my blog roll ages ago, but I still dropped in from time to time via my RSS feed. I'm now deleting it from the feed list too.
It is impossible to take an active part in any discussion because all my posts are automatically held for review after having had the temerity to disagree with blog editor Perry de Havilland. He is prone to irrational outbursts in any event but it has now got to the point where any comment I post that is even mildly critical tends not to appear at all, so I've given up trying. No doubt that is the point.
I've noticed over the years that people who are sympathetic, but critical tended to stop posting after a while and assumed they had simply gone elsewhere. I now suspect from my own experience they have been either actively blocked or simply driven away by filtering out enough of their comments to make their contribution look nonsensical.
They make much play of being "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." Their practice is very different.
So - try these instead (and follow links from there too):
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
Center for a Stateless Society
Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule
A client of ours -- a small, not-for-profit, economic justice organization [EJO] -- used social network analysis [SNA] to assist their city attorney in convicting a group of "slumlords" of various housing violations that the real estate investors had been side-stepping for years. The housing violations, in multiple buildings, included:
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