It’s probably fair to say that David Davis’s announcement was the most surprising story of the day. I think his speech is bang on the money.

I had never thought of David Davis as the sort of person I would agree with. But he is absolutely right. This government is funnelling our civil liberties one-by-one into a level 6 shredder. And it’s all under a false pretence. More people are killed by ladders than are killed by terrorists. It’s right that the government should be made to account for this properly.

It’s funny because I never thought of David Davis as a liberal before now. As Bernard Salmon has pointed out, David Davis’s record on gay rights and the death penalty leaves a lot to be desired.

It just goes to show that even those who might be considered to be among the ‘nastiest’ in the ‘nasty party’ are not as authoritarian as the Labour Government. In the Conservative Party there is a strong liberal streak that simply does not exist in the Labour Party.

Were I to have a vote in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, I probably wouldn’t have any difficulty in voting for David Davis. I think the Liberal Democrats have done the right thing by choosing not to oppose David Davis in the by-election. Given that he has put the focus of the by-election squarely on the civil liberties issue, it is effectively a single-issue election in the same vein as Martin Bell’s anti-sleaze campaign. It would be odd for the Lib Dems to campaign against David Davis when they wholeheartedly agree with him on the issue.

But of course if Labour has any sense they won’t run either. Maybe they have to be seen to be defending their assault on civil liberties by running against David Davis. But pragmatically, they would be loonies to run in an election called under these circumstances. It’s already a safe Conservative seat. Which is the thing. If he wins the by-election, the wider reaction might be, “So what? Run in a tight seat and then tell us about it.” Imagine if he was the only serious candidate running. You couldn’t get a more pyrrhic victory.

On the other hand, Labour might be forced to put up a candidate in order to defend the 42 days policy. If they don’t, it might look like a sign of weakness — that Labour can’t defend their record.

Anyway, even though it is a little bit silly, you have to admire David Davis for taking this stance and putting his neck on the line for it. It’s rare for a politician to have such integrity. Just compare him with the MPs whose votes were bought in the 42 days debate. Those people are a stain on representative democracy.

I’ve just seen This Week (watched it for the first time in ages and forgot how bad it was). Kelvin MacKenzie just dropped a hint that he might be standing against David Davis. If that happens, I sincerely hope Davis is able to wipe the smirk off that poisonous man’s face.

And I dearly hope Labour get a really, really hard kicking in the next general election.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how Facebook applications are beginning to reveal their potential. It feels like a good time for me to review some of my favourite Facebook apps (in addition to Scrabulous and Neighborhoods which I already wrote about in the other post). I will start with the apps related to one of my favourite websites.

Last.fm

Last.fm got off to a bad start on Facebook Platform when it was shunned by the Facebook bigwigs in favour of iLike and Mog. As such, it was an agonising week or so before an official Last.fm app was unveiled. In the meantime, a plethora of unofficial apps were hurriedly made.

To illustrate how damaging the delay was to Last.fm, iLike (which was practically unknown prior to its presence on Facebook) now has 6.4 million users on Facebook. Meanwhile, both official Last.fm apps combined have just 138,000. Yowch!

iLike seems to appeal to a lot of Facebook users, but I just don’t get it. All it amounts to is a bunch of crappy thirty second long audio clips. Meanwhile, the Last.fm apps bring together everything that I love about Last.fm itself.

Last.fm Music displays my top twelve artists of the past week. Alongside sits the playlist that I described on this blog a few weeks ago. In a sense, I have made a mixtape ready for all of my Facebook friends to listen to! This is awesome! None of that thirty second clip nonsense.

You don’t even have to be a member of Last.fm to use the app and make your own playlist, so there are no excuses. This ought to be spread far and wide.

The other official Last.fm app is a simple box that displays what you are currently listening to. Cunningly, they have called it What I’m Listening To. Intriguingly, this app seems to hush up the connection with Last.fm, even though this time around you do need to be a Last.fm member to use it!

Formula 1 Picks

This is another way to showcase my failure at everything (as if Scrabulous wasn’t bad enough).

Formula 1 Picks allows you to select your favourite Formula 1 drivers. Slick logos appear for each driver that you choose. The colours relate to the driver’s team, although I would prefer the driver’s helmet to be displayed as well.

However, if you are like me (and many other F1 fans — tifosi spring to mind) you tend to support teams rather than drivers. This application does not yet allow you to select which teams you support, although this is promised. In addition, it is promised that you will be able to select your favourite circuits as well as drivers and teams from the past.

This has one advantage over an application such as Sports Fan which allows you to select from a rather messy ragbag of teams and drivers (I counted at least five different variations of ‘Ferrari’, and that was just on the first page!). There are no duplicates and the logos are standardised and slick. However, it is frustrating not to be able to select my favourite teams yet!

Here is where my failure comes in: Formula 1 Picks is also a game. Prior to each grand prix you select three drivers. These picks translate into points. You score 100% of the championship points that your number 1 pick collected at the grand prix, 75% of the points of the number 2 pick and 50% if the points of your number 3 pick.

I have been playing for two grands prix, so my highest possible score was 38. My actual score is 27.5. Matters were not helped by petulant Lewis mucking up my number 1 pick’s chances in Hungary!

Friend Wheel

This is a neat visualisation of all of your Facebook friends. It is quite flexible, with various different display options for you to choose from. It is interesting to look at the tapestry to see the various connections between your friends. One disadvantage is that it does not update automatically, so you need to keep on manually updating it to ensure that it stays up to date.

Friend Wheel has proved massively popular. But the ‘friend visualisation’ is nothing new, and another application provides a more traditional way of viewing the connections between your friends.

TouchGraph Photos

Remember those Java applets that visualised your LiveJournal friends? This is a more polished version of that for Facebook. It’s quite neat, but beware. Its focus is on photographs. This means that the first thing you see when you launch the visualisation is those embarrassing drunken photos. Oh dear!

The Political Compass

We all know The Political Compass. It is the granddaddy of online political tests, much imitated but seldom bettered. I have posted about my position on the compass on this blog roughly once a year to track my progress.

This Facebook application allows you to display your position on your profile and compare it to your friends’ positions. Four of my friends have taken it so far. Slightly disconcertingly, I am the most economically right wing of them all, with a dangerously laissez faire score of 0.38. That’s centrist really (the extreme score is 10), but I was amazed that I am even slightly to the right of Angry Steve. Recount!

There are a number of other political tests available as applications on Facebook. Among the most popular is The Washington Post’s lame “are you a libb-rul or conservative?” test that claims to be a compass, then proceeds to chop that compass in half!

Another popular one is The World’s Smallest Political Quiz. It is, as its name suggests, brief. But this means that it lacks the nuance of The Political Compass. It is also made by a libertarian campaign group, Advocates for Self-Government, which surely compromises its neutrality. (Interestingly, in contrast to The Political Compass, I come out as “left liberal” in this quiz!)

Irrepressible.info

Staying on politics and issues, here is something that might be familiar to a lot of bloggers. Many sidebars — including mine — carry a little box containing snippets of content from various publications that have been banned by governments around the world.

It is a project led by Amnesty International with the aim of undermining censorship by publishing banned content in as many places as possible. This Facebook application simply puts some of this content on your Facebook profile. If you have the box on your blog, why not put it on your Facebook profile?

Anything else?

I didn’t think I would end up using so many Facebook Applications, especially since its closest relatives (such as Bebo widgets) are so dire. But I’ve been surprised at how many great uses have emerged — from the trivial time-wasters to the worthy and useful. So, are there any other suggestions? What excellent applications do you have on your Facebook profile?

I am in the run-up to a set of exams. And you know what that means. Lots of procrastination, although very little actual blogging.

I have just retaken the Political Compass test. I have come out as:

Economic Left/Right: 1.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.21

This is the first time I have appeared on the right on the economic axis. The last time I took this test, I was just about bang-on the centre, at -0.13. This continues the slow rightward trend.

In the meantime, I have moved even further towards the ‘libertarian’ end of the chart. The result makes me look like a bit of an extremist, or at least an outlier.

Of the four quadrants, mine is probably the most deserted. For perhaps obvious reasons, ‘left–libertarian’ and ‘right–authoritarian’ tend to have the highest concentration of inhabitants, because these ideologies are often — lazily — seen as going hand-in-hand.

The authoritarian right contains just about every major political party and almost all the governments of the EU. The libertarian left contains green and socialist parties. Meanwhile, the authoritarian left contains such delightful characters as Stalin, Robert Mugabe, Pope Benedict XVI and the BNP.

Going through all of the pages on the Political Compass website, it is difficult to find any allies. I feel a bit lonely. Worse still, I can’t tell which party I am closer to between the Lib Dems and the Greens. But they are both very distant.

It seems as though I am destined to be the third corner in a triangle between the Dalai Lama and Angela Merkel.

Boring update: I found out by chance that this post contains the 400,000^th word that I have written on this blog. Blimey. Someone needs to get a life.

On the surface it looks like David Farrer has found an instance where increasing immigration controls is compatible with a libertarian outlook.

David Farrer quotes Murray Rothbard:

…[O]n rethinking immigration on the basis of the anarcho-capitalist model, it became clear to me that a totally privatized country would not have “open borders” at all. If every piece of land in a country were owned by some person, group, or corporation, this would mean that no immigrant could enter there unless invited to enter and allowed to rent, or purchase, property. A totally privatized country would be as “closed” as the particular inhabitants and property owners desire. It seems clear, then, that the regime of open borders that exists de facto in the U.S. really amounts to a compulsory opening by the central state, the state in charge of all streets and public land areas, and does not genuinely reflect the wishes of the proprietors…

And here is Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

…[P]opulation movements, unlike product shipments, are not per se mutually beneficial events because they are not always necessarily and invariably the result of an agreement between a specific receiver and sender.

This is a reasonable explanation (at last!) as to why free movement of people could be bad while free movement of goods is always beneficial. But this land is a place where you could find yourself having to go down on bended knee and ask permission from the land owner to cross the road. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think this is what DK thinks of when he describes himself as ‘libertarian’ (although it possibly is what David Farrer thinks of).

Whether you would actually have to ask permission to cross the road or not is a different matter. But in this world, if people are guaranteed the ability to walk to the shops it is described as “compulsory opening”. The easy and obvious answer to this is the fact that if you were to ask people whether or not they wanted to live in such a world, almost everybody would say ‘no’.

That’s in a totally privatised world. But in a more realistic world where there is (small) government the picture changes somewhat. Here, the government’s main (only?) role is to protect individuals’ property.

…if the government admits a person while there exists no domestic resident who wants to have this person on his property, the result is forced integration.

I’m guessing that, if we are being consistent, it is also the case that if a person is allowed to enter Edinburgh from Glasgow while no Edinburgh resident wants him there the result is also “forced integration”. If it isn’t, what makes the Glasgow–Edinburgh case so different to, say, the Tallinn–Edinburgh case?

At all ports of entry and along its borders, the government, as trustee of its citizens, must check all newly arriving persons for an entrance ticket — a valid invitation by a domestic property owner — and everyone not in possession of such a ticket will have to be expelled at his own expense.

This is a bit strange to me as surely such an arrangement would exhibit almost all of the traits that are meant to make big government so abhorrent. No doubt the administration costs would be hopelessly high and the bureaucracy would be sprawling. Not to mention that the Big Brother aspect is present in full force here.

Infact, the only thing this plan seems to have going for it is the fact that the government is carrying out its role to protect private property. A-woo-hoo if you think that’s the only important thing in life. For everybody else, this plan must be seen as too ridiculously authoritarian.

In this world there will be property owners who want their property to be protected from people as a whole, not just people from foreign countries. So if the government has to check people “at all ports of entry and along its borders” to stop unwanted foreign people from trespassing on private land, surely it has check people walking down the street aswell to ensure that unwanted people are not trespassing on private land.

Hang on a minute, that rings a bell.

David Farrer and DK both strongly oppose ID cards on libertarian grounds. Yet what we have in this proposed libertarian world is a de facto ID card (or the slightly fluffier “entrance ticket”) scheme. This ‘libertarian’ world is not a world where you can be free to walk the streets without being asked your identity. But that shouldn’t be a surprise since it isn’t even a world where you are free to walk the streets.

DK responds. David Farrer joins in. This will be interesting. Farrer lives and breathes libertarianism, so I’m sure we will all learn something.