It's mob rule at the Guardian....

(This blogpost should perhaps also be titled - 'What I did/didn't/did say at the Guardian today....')

There's nothing quite like rank hypocrisy to boil my piss. However, to ensure it is fully evaporated in anger, combine rank hypocrisy with crass stupidity, naked opportunism, complete resistance to facts or reason and censorship.

For that was the bread and butter of Leo "bless 'im" Hickman's disgraceful piece of yellow bellied journalism at the Guardian today.

Hickman decided it was time to form a posse comitatus to try tracking down the source of the climategate emails, laughably using the README textfile included in the latest tranche of releases as the primary source of evidence.

This was one of those pieces - especially as it was in the comment is free if you agree section - that really reveals the Guardian's true colours. Numerous commentators including me (prior to the first round of censorship - sorry - 'comment adjustment') attempted to point out the Guardian's and Hickman's rank hypocrisy on this issue. The most striking and obvious example having been the paper's massive support for Wikileaks, however there were many other examples, including the anonymous Enron whistleblower, as another commenter pointed out. As was repeated again and again, it appeared that all leakers were equal but some were more equal than others in the Guardian's eyes.

This was of course brushed off by Hickman and his part-time principle party of followers in the comments section.

Next I pointed out (prior to 'comment adjustment') that claiming it was the work of a hacker was still just an assumption. Hickman replied to me directly on that and similarly brushed it off. He claimed it was irrelevant. The poor dear didn't seem to realise that if he assumed it was the work of a hacker and in fact it was a leaker then his "investigation" would lead him down to all sorts of blind alleys, not least because the MO and levels of access would be completely different (not to mention the trail of evidence left behind).

There were a plethora of delightfully dense comments in support of Hickman et al and stunning leaps of reasoning. These people were also apparently immune to criticism because they "knew" what they were claiming was true, especially regarding the "hacker" claim. Many pronounced completely ill-informed statements about this showing that i) they knew nothing about IT security and ii) that they couldn't even be bothered to use google to check details. After all, The difference between an internal security breach and a carefully coordinated external breach is vast. Pointman gave an excellent overview after the first climategate - here. Moreover they absolutely did not care about their ignorance. What a familiar pattern, eh? No wonder they were immediately supportive of the "scientists" at the heart of the climategate storm - they're just like them!

There were some absolute crackers amongst the received wisdom of this bunch of easily led zealots and I highly recommend you read through the comments - well those that are left - as it is a laugh a minute.

Komment Macht Frei

Speaking of the comments - when the piece first appeared this morning, it was absolute devastation from the moderator. ALL of my comments bar the first one were censored, as were numerous other comments by others. I had no clue why they'd been removed beyond the fact that we all seemed to disagree intensely with Hickman.

Now I should point out something important here for Guardian watchers - they have two types of post moderation. There is the one we're all familiar with - where the boilerplate 'this comment was moderated because it breached our community (puke) standards' but there's also a much more insidious type and I only noticed it because I've been paying a lot of attention to their censorship pattern over the last couple of years - its what I call "nuking". In this case they remove all evidence that the comment was ever there. It's particularly chilling for freedom of speech because aside from the fact that by looking at the comments one can't actually assess the general level of censorship, if it's *your* comment that disappears in this way it's only your word that it was ever there in the first place....

Now bizaarely, after the comments spilled over onto two pages I happened to click back to the first page to see what else had been censored and was surprised to see that most of my previously "moderated" comments had reappeared (except for the "nuked" ones). I don't know if this is a bug in their software or a disagreement between moderators but it adds even more to the general sense of confusion and latent fear of arbitrary censorship that completely fucks any meaningful contribution over there.

Another important point to be aware of is this: One way to guarantee being censored on the Guardian is if you make a reference to your, or someone else's having been censored you will immediately be censored and they often use the "nuke" option too.

The Guardian is  - as a media institution - utterly reprehensible. Most other media outlets are of course too, across the political spectrum. But none outside the BBC attempt to present themselves so often as the default "good guys", nor do their followers similarly regard it as received wisdom...

The climategate 'gait' or the 'out of context paradox'

There's a regular pattern that occurs in any discussion of climategate (1 or 2). It is inconsistent but also entirely consistent with the unthinking nature of many of those who promulgate it:
i) They assert that the emails were "taken out of context"
ii) Responder says that they are not.
iii) A request is then made for evidence.
iv) Responder invites them to read the emails - there are numerous complete email chains, supporting claims against the "scientists" that ONLY MAKE SENSE IN CONTEXT. But the trick is you have to actually read the emails....

A modern day climate "scientist"

Now given how unambiguous some of the exchanges are (in particular those that involve purposefully frustrating FOI inquiries and deleting emails....) one is then prompted to ask exactly what standard of evidence is required. For the evidence before us, if for example we stick with complete email chains rather than individual comments, is a magnitude higher than the typical standard accepted in the vast majority of journalism that we ever read or see. It means that - to be consistent - if one were to completely reject these email chains as sufficient evidence, one would have to throw out almost every received opinion on any quoted person in the press one has ever encountered. Will the zealots do that...no of course they won't. But of course consistency is in the same disused box in their basement as a regard for truth....

One final delicious irony of this of course is that 'The Team' will surely be scratching their heads now, trying to remember what on earth what was said to who. But because they very likely deleted these emails after they had been copied from the mailserver then they have only one place to go to check.....

The economy of the Digital Economy Bill

'Economy' in the title here is meant in the sense of 'making savings' - for that is exactly what our wonderful Lords and Masters have done in following appropriate procedures for consideration of this legislation. For, almost as awful as the legislation itself is the contempt our politicians have shown us in the way they pushed it through.

The Digital Economy Bill, now Digital Economy Act is shortly to become law. Whilst some of the worst draconian provisions have been removed or amended, many still remain. And like so much government legislation, contains a number of 'reasonable' (as far as any fresh legislation can be said to be so) provisions, along with a number of extremely dangerous clauses that never would have passed muster if proposed alone.

Much has been written already on the issues with the Bill. The long and the short of it is that it hands the government an enormous amount of power with regards to shutting off people's internet access and blocking websites that are accused of "copyright infringement", all on the basis of a bare minimum of evidence. It has 'bad legislation', 'law of unintended consequences' and 'guaranteed abuse' written through it like a stick of seaside rock.

For what I consider to be a highly optimistic (and unlikely to my mind) account of what the Act will now mean read the Register's article here. For a more realistic and wide ranging analysis, try this telegraph blog.

Their contempt for us is total

What really struck me about this legislation however, is in spite of the valiant efforts of organisations like ORG, is how it demonstrated just how much contempt the political class hold us in. This is possibly the most important and controversial piece of legislation under the aegis of this government since the Lisbon Treaty was ratified.

Here was parliament for the second reading of the bill:



And here was parliament for the third reading of the bill:



Notice a problem? That's right - most of our so-called "representatives" are missing. In the second reading, no more than 50 MPs were present. So nearly a whopping 600 could not be bothered to show up. The third reading, when the vote was taken, was not much better and also demonstrated one of those MP behaviours that makes me want to smash their teeth out with a hammer - a handful of dedicated politicians actually debate the bill, then when it comes time to the vote the numbers swell to approximately 200 so the MPs can vote according to whatever the whip tells them. Given the severity of this legislation this is absolutely unforgivable.

In any case, if you want to check to see if your MP was there, pop by the public whip. If they did not even turn up, perhaps when they are campaigning for your vote you might want to ask them why the fuck they weren't there and why anyone should vote for them if they can't even be bothered to do their job and turn up to debate and vote.

You'll note that the CHAMPION, nay the LION of civil liberties, Nick Clegg was absent. I checked his whereabouts and according to his itinerary he was in Westminster that day for Prime Minister's Questions. Why he couldn't stick around for the evening debate and vote I'd really like to know - I guess the Vote-grubbing tourbus and its groupies was too much to resist. I'll be pursuing this one for sure and have already written to him, though I think the best explosion can wait until I can catch him in public again. Here are the details of my last encounter with the Cleggover.

Miserable enough yet? There's more!

If you're ready to beat your head on the desk until unconscious, read this article. You'll see there that our "Digital Tsar" - 'Minister for Digital Britain' and chief cheerleader for the Digital Economy Bill, Stephen Timms writes the most colossally embarrassing drivel for someone in his position. The fact he obviously has NO CLUE what Internet Protocol (IP) is should be grave cause for concern for our entire political establishment and everyone that suffers under its yoke.

On the bright side.

There is an upside - I thought this comment over at boingboing was particularly apropos and funny, maybe even practical:

"This is great news, it will bring about a new era of lols.

I offer a reward of 1 million internets to the person or group who manages to disconnect a member of Parliament or recording industry executive for an alleged copyright infringement."

And another:

"No effort must be spared in getting MPs and their families banned from the internet with only accusations, no proof..."

Particularly impressive is the official position of TalkTalk, who have publicly stated that the company will resist the Act on behalf of its customers:

our pledges to our customers:

* Unless we are served with a court order we will never surrender a customer’s details to rightsholders. We are the only major ISP to have taken this stance and we will maintain it.
* If we are instructed to disconnect an account due to alleged copyright infringement we will refuse to do so and tell the rightsholders we’ll see them in court.

I can only hope their bravery will gain them lots of custom and inspire others to resist this, truly, the most awful and corrupt of all parliaments.

Hacking Capitalism

I learned a new term this week - "hacker capitalist". Reading an article, via the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, by Edward Miller, 'Hackertopia and Piracy, Inc.' got me thinking on a more positive note for once.

Miller details the rise of the hacker / pirate ethic and the notion of freedom of information (including information based products of labour). He refers to the hope invested in the so-called 'Milennial' generation (of which I myself am part). There is despair on the other hand at the 'hipsters' - part of the Milennial generation - who appear to have developed serial ADD and enable cynical marketers to co-opt any new trend or idea, however anti-establishment, and sell it back to the 'youth'. I have known some activists (of various political persuasions) who have despaired at this masterstroke of the establishment - to commodify dissent, often very effectively.

However, Miller reminds us of the flipside to this, the adoption of certain technologies and lifestyle choices that fundamentally alter our relations not only with eachother, but the 'state' or establishment also. "[S]taggering amounts of time on the computer and mobile communication devices, surfing social networks and wikis, gaming, texting, filesharing, blogging, making youtube videos, and building the new participatory panopticon" has unleashed forces the state, and its snooper agents, simply will not be able to control.

My personal site, 'Upwingers', is inspired by Persian futurist F.M. Esfandiary. It's strapline is perhaps his most famous quote: "There is no government, no industrial-military complex, no economic system, no mass media that can ever reduce us to puppets and robots as thoroughly as the biological and environmental dictatorships have." I'm a big fan of working through the implications of Esfandiary's transhumanist/futurist philosopy in this regard: Many others like him and inspired by him (such as R.A. Wilson, Timothy Leary etc) pointed out systematically how centralised authorities can use basic knowledge of body and mind to trap, torture and brainwash us. What was sadly lost in the popular consciousness regarding Leary's drug focused philosophy and experiements was his claim that intelligent application of said drugs could undo any brainwashing. This was of course Leary's undoing, and probably the main motivation behind the establishment attempts to destroy him.


Leary, Wilson, Esfandiary and many others have pointed to a profound truth. Regaining control over "the biological and environmental dictatorships" might be our single best opportunity for wresting our lives back and fundamentally challenging the status quo. I recently said, in a discussion over at Anna Racoon's blog that the root of all evil is not money, or love thereof, or 'lax morals', but low self-esteem. Once you get past the most basic survival needs, (and *every* political philosophy, however noble, once reduced to talking about survival needs, becomes nothing more than lifeboat ethics and Hobbesian dilemmas*), the most crushing, most enervating, most life-destroying force is our own psychological and emotional binds. It's why the thought police are more powerful than the real police.

Back to the 'Millennials' - Miller makes a bold claim: "It is no wonder, then, why their entertainment choices include trolling, LOLcats, the Daily Show, South Park and ridulous sarcastic wikis [e.g. Encyclopedia Dramatica]. Yet, they are not nihilists. Beneath all this lies a belief in classical liberal ideals which is at least as sincere as that of previous generations, if not moreso."



I agree with Miller's assessment, even if for the large part this isn't a conscious adherence to classical liberal ideas; these values are rather embedded within the very technologies now spreading ineluctably like viruses, and in the new social relations they are forging. This also tends to be the point where I cross swords with social conservatives. The sign is often confused with the thing signified. The state is panicking in response. It can sense its impending doom, even if it is still a few generations away. People's behaviour is becoming increasingly chaotic - sometimes for the good, sometimes for ill. And while I welcome any restatement of the importance of personal responsibility, I'm suspicious of any that focus largely on the old hobbyhorses of sex, drugs and rock'n roll - sex in particular. While there is certainly an every growing, largely state supported, underclass - rightly lampooned by many social conservatives, there is also a corresponding - and in my assessment much larger - growth in increasingly aware, adaptive and responsible "youth". The curtain has started to rip and the man behind it is starting to slip into view:

For the 'Millennials', "[t]he problem is that for as long as they can remember, all the institutions which they were told to look up to have only given them reasons to be cynical. Instead of honest journalism, we have demagogues. Instead of corner grocers, we have sterile megastores. Elections aren't won, but stolen... not that it matters. Politics became a series of sex scandals. Religion too, only in a far more sinister sense. The economy is in crisis, but the Millenials are not surprised".

There is a new wave of classically liberal sentiment under the surface. The millenials are beginning to join their older fellows in rejection of the program. Look at almost every online outlet for public opinions, from the Guardians' Comment is Free through to LabourListing to Guido Fawkes' blog. Look at the failure of the MSM to adapt to the Daniel Hannan phenomenon. The consistent outpouring of sentiment is immense. The cracks are starting to show.

An idea I've frequently encountered at blogs such as Old Holborns' is that the state is increasingly seeking to put us in hock to it. The "bailout" having been its most spectacular recent success, saddling us all with an astronomical debt level (based on a completely fake economic system of valuation in the first place - the value of perception is now more important than actual supply and demand). Truly a masterstroke. Also a good reason to read the Wizard of Ozymandias if you have not done so already. The establishment is becoming increasingly brittle and vulnerable. It has to put us in hock to survive like this. And it is no coincidence that committed collectivists such as ZanuLab should be at the helm when such a bold attempt to ruin us is enacted. The "state", "society", and now "shared values" (in the horribly scary form of 'Contest 2') are bigger and more important than us individuals you see. They have a life of their own, they really do - thanks to our Lords and Masters. It's the fundamental aspect of collectivist thinking that is so inimical to human life - as Stirner put it, "because they serve Man, they cut off the heads of men."


We're starting - ineluctably - to reclaim our own spaces, bodies and minds. It is starting in the realm of information. The "cost" of information is dwindling to almost nothing. Our means of gathering and distributing it are being similarly demolished. This is where we get back to that new (or at least new to me) term -'Hacker Capitalist'. Miller refers to the likes of Mark Shuttleworth (creator of Ubuntu) and Jimmy Wales (creator of Wikipedia) as great examples of the new breed of successful capitalist - the 'Hacker Capitalist'. These gentlemen provided open source innovations that they were able to both share and profit from. This is an oxymoron to some.

Something I've always noted with amusement is the wholesale endorsement of Open Source technologies and philosophies by collectivist-leftists. I wonder what they make of the likes of Shuttleworth and Wales. I've found consistently that whenever individuals who are actual innovators in the Open Source community put pen to paper they are, almost always, of a Libertarian persuasion. And even those who are more left-leaning, tend to be in one of the groups not incompatible with libertarian or anarcho-capitalist sentiments (the mutualists for example).

The time of the authoritarian statists and the dogmatic collectivists is coming to an end - ineluctably. They will go down like mad dogs though and even if the wittering of the collectivists (especially the left-anarchists (as opposed to their innovative and steadily prospering brethren - the market or anarcho-capitalists)), seems pathetic, their ideology is still pervasive and infectious. They chomp and moan because, apart from many other things, one of their defining characteristics have been taken away from them. There were two invasions of parliament by activists in recent memory - one by Fathers for Justice and another by the Countryside Alliance. Not an anarchist in sight. And at the last Anarchist Bookfair I attended in London,(at which, incidentally, us Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists are NOT welcome) the most innovative idea they could come up with was to camp outside parliament until the Prime Minister resigns. Outstanding.

Our aims now should be to really - literally - capitalise on these opportunities and technologies. The great danger is that in their death throes they might take us with them. What they fear most is that we, individually, become more powerful, capable people. We don't need them anymore, but they need us. As Miller put it: "Now is a superb time for all you hackers, tinkerers, hobbyists, and DIYers to kick it into full gear. The political and economic cards are in our favor. Let's make the most of it!".

Indeed. There has never before been a time like this of such rapid technological change. So many new questions, dilemmas and possibilities open up before us now on a daily basis. States and collectivists are pathologically and literally unable to deal with this. Only individuals can respond and innovate in a timely fashion. It's a chaotic time, but it might yet prove to have been the best time and place to have been alive thus far. It's a time for heroes and heroines of all stripes to step forward. Get to it.

*A great shame this is not more commonly recognised. Many people - scholars among them - interpret Hobbes' nightmare scenario of the 'all against all' society as being the baseline for all political philosophy. It isn't. It is, instead its nullification. All political philosophy (except perhaps the most lunatic and misanthropic interpretations of collectivist-primitivist anarchism) is based upon some kind of surplus. As soon as a social configuration produces a surplus, multiple political philosophies are then on the table. Discussion of this surplus is what political philosophy is. Societies throughout recorded history have had a surplus, however meagre.

Sidenote: After a diasterous attempt to upgrade software, resulting in the loss of my database, I decided to rebuild my 'upwingers' site (again!) - and I think I've finally settled on a configuration to my liking, though it will take me some time to repopulate it with content (especially on my research into A.Q.Khan, Sibel Edmonds, MI5/6 etc). It's going well so far and I'm very pleased with the new collated news feeds - I'm finally making good on the site's philosophy; focusing on positive uplifting (and often - action orientated) aspects and subjects as much as negative. There's still plenty of work left to be done, however by all means, have a look.