Google in China

I guess this wouldn't bite so badly if Google's motto were 'Be Extremely Evil', or 'Eat Small Children'. But for a company that espouses 'Don't Be Evil', it's the hypocrisy that stands out more than anything.

I mean, it's not like we don't already know that major corporations make what we might call moral compromises in order to operate in various nations whose democratic norms aren't what those of us who live in democracies might prefer. And I don't think Google is the worst company, nor China the worst nation, in this regard. I mean, there are oil companies operating today in African nations who happily pay millions into the coffers of politicians they know are corrupt, and will siphon those millions from the needy who don't even have enough to eat. And there are bribes galore to be paid in all kinds of poor nations. In some cases it might even be excusable -- how do you weigh up the moral weight of a few thousands paid in bribes, against the several hundred jobs created for needy workers? No bribe, no jobs, and the unemployed workers won't thank a principled company for refusing to pay, thus keeping them unemployed.

It's a good thing that big western companies invest in nations like China. Such investment has led to an economic boom in China that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and godwilling will lift hundreds of millions more in the years ahead. And it's tough for big companies like Google to stay out of China, because the Chinese market is so massive, and it's entirely likely that avoiding China could place Google at a huge competitive disadvantage in the future. It's easy to see where the pressure comes from, and why Google made the decision that they did.

But none of that obligates those of us who value democracy and free speech to like it. Nor should it absolve Google from the current storm of criticism. Google's entire brand image is about free speech. Freedom of information. Do what you like, find what you like, read what you like. Don't Be Evil. By agreeing to do the Chinese censors' dirty jobs for them, they've essentially compromised that image. You can't be for free speech, and against it. You can't pretend that you're more than just another uncaring corporate monolith, and then act like the worst of them. Or rather you can... it's a free world -- outside of nations like China, anyhow. But you can't do it, and expect people not to notice, and be displeased.

The Sam Bandwagon

All aboard the Sam Stosur train -- after a tough, three-set victory over that well known terror of the backcourts Sybille Bammer (???). Actually, Bammer was amazingly good for her ranking.

So all our Sammy needs to do now is whip that no-hoper Martina Hingis, and she's in the quarter-finals. No sweat.

UPDATE: Well she took Martina to a very close tie-breaker in the second set, losing it 10-8. If she ever learns to actually keep the ball in play, she'll be great. But a note to coach Gigi Fernandez... if you've managed to misplace Sam's first serve, could you please find it and give it back to her? And why is she serving second-serve kickers with her first serve? She can bomb that first serve faster than a lot of the men, and Hingis wasn't bothered by the kick all night. What's really remarkable is that she pushed Martina as far as she did while barely managing to hold serve all match... and this is one of the best serves in women's tennis. Sigh. One day, she'll get it all working at once, and win Grand Slams...

Tennis

No particular reason for this post, except to share with the world that Sam Stosur should a) be a top ten player, and b) despite looking like the female terminator on court, is actually very cute.

Infoquake

Fellow Pyr author David Louis Edelman has a cool new website up... check it out.

Pacifism

Everyone wants to talk about peace. The problem is, there are probably few concepts of human civilisation that are more cliched, and less understood, than peace. It’s the ultimate motherhood statement -- people say ‘peace is good’, and what can you do but nod and agree? But if everyone agrees that peace is good, then it might help to try and figure out ‘what the hell is ‘peace’ anyway?’

Peace is most simply defined as ‘the absence of war’. But when the P-word is used by pacifists today, it’s not merely describing an absence of something bad. No, the P-word is a grand, all-encompasing positive. It means all good things to all good people. It’s a utopian place where all flowers bloom, and nobody suffers. Therefore, if the definition of peace is ‘the absence of war’, all we have to do to make everything good in the world is just avoid declaring war.

This is of course is silly to a degree that would require foul language to describe properly.

Chairman Mao managed to kill 40-million-plus people while China was at peace. Stalin managed a respectable 20-million in the Soviet Union. Idi Amin stuck his oar in for the cause in Uganda, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and there are countless other atrocities littering humanity’s recent and not-so-recent history all committed under the rose-coloured umbrella of peace. Ask the residents of Dafur how pleased they are that their nation is at ‘peace’. Chances are you couldn’t ask them even if you went there -- most of them have fled their homes, or are dead.

And even more, there are far worse things that governments can do to their people than go to war. For one, they can ignore them. Countless governments are doing just this in Africa, siphoning all the nation’s wealth into their personal Swiss bank accounts, leaving those nations open to health epidemics for which they can’t afford the preventions or cures, or for mass-starvation. War has played an important role in deepening Africa’s misery, but it’s merely one pillar of a multi-pronged African government effort to keep their people poor, suffering and hopeless. War in this context therefore falls under the banner of ‘bad government’, which is surely the greatest cause of human misery in the world today... but it’s the starvation and disease, frequently exacerbated by war, that causes most of the deaths, more than actual bombs and bullets.

Most pacifists today seem to be people who believe in the grander, rosier usage of the P-word, and the concept that if we can all just desist from violence, then everyone will be happy. But how will peace benefit a starving African whose kleptocratic leaders are more concerned with private yachts than relieving poverty? How will it benefit one of the hundreds of thousands toiling and dying in North Korea’s gulags?

All too often we hear pacifists and their motherhood statements, saying things like, “we all need to learn to tolerate and respect one another.” Let’s examine this statement for a moment. Do we really need to all tolerate and respect one another? What about all the people who don’t deserve tolerance or respect? What about the terrorists? What about the mass murderers, the dictators, the pedophiles? The problem with pacifist motherhood statements is that they presume there’s nothing in the world worth fighting for, or worth fighting against. I think there’s probably only two kinds of people who might believe such a thing -- people who are perpetually stoned, or people who know nothing about (or have chosen to ignore) the kinds of nasty things that go on in the world. Or who simply don’t care.

Now, how one chooses to fight the world’s evils is another question. For most of them, war is not the answer. Serial killers are a law-enforcement problem... unless they happen to be presidents of nations, in which case they may well require a war. Ditto pedophiles. In many situations, war would be too costly a solution for the problem at hand -- like in North Korea, a nation run by a regime that most assuredly deserves the worst that modern military technology can contrive to drop on their heads. But the North Korean reply would at the least be a massive artillery barrage on Seoul, and quite possibly a nuclear warhead on Tokyo, thus making the exercise, from a western perspective, unprofitable.

Sadly, the spread of pacifist ideology is counterproductive to the very state of the world pacifists claim to be working toward. The reason is quite simple -- the pacifists have fixated upon the wrong problem. A pacifist worldview perceives that humanity’s greatest problem is man’s inhumanity to man. Or in other words, the kind of hate-filled bigotry that leads to racist violence, ethnic cleansing and, occasionally, genocide. Pacifists put forward that we, the developed world, should occupy the moral high-ground, and lead by example. If we set this example, the theory goes, the rest of the world will follow, hatred and violence will vanish from the world, and everything will be okay.

The problem, of course, is that everything won’t be okay. People need to eat. People need clean drinking water. People need political expression, and religious expression, and to belong to particular tribal groups, whether these groups be actual tribes, or nations, or ethnic groups or whatever. These things won’t disappear if all the westerners suddenly become pacifists. These aspects of human civilisation are the root causes of violence. Violence comes at the end of the chain, not the front, and if you’re going to eliminate violence, you have to deal with all the other issues first. As such, pacifists have put the cart before the horse.

But many pacifists seem blind to the root causes of war. And so it’s no surprise that pacifism in many ways has become the ideology of comfortable ignorance. One can know nothing about the world, and nothing about the very unavoidable concerns of very real people that sometimes express themselves in violence, and fool oneself into thinking you’re doing something about it by advocating pacifism. Or worse, pacifism frequently becomes the adopted standard of western self-haters, isolationists and racists, who have no problem at all with other people killing each other in large numbers, just so long as we don’t participate, even to try and stop the slaughter.

Many ‘do-nothing’ pacifists don’t even seem to understand the history of the movement, pointing to practitioners like Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi as people who never, ever picked a fight, and were not interested in using force to change the world. This is of course absolutely wrong. King and Gandhi used force all the time, just not violent force. For both of them (though Gandhi came first, and his example was King’s inspiration) pacifism was a weapon. Both were entirely explicit about this in their writings and speeches.

Gandhi’s aim was to rid India of the British Empire. He was a warrior in his cause as surely as any guerilla or freedom fighter. He targeted the British where they were most vulnerable -- in their own, precious sense of self-righteousness and moral superiority. This was, after all, the only moral justification for a few tens of thousands of white people to be ruling a nation of 300 million Indians -- the firm belief that British rule was morally superior to the native version, and that if the British withdrew, the local alternative would be savagery. Gandhi was fortunate, in this regard, that his nation’s occupiers were a people as obsessed with their own sense of ‘proper and moral conduct’ as the British were. Indeed, their entire empire rested on the principle -- ‘the white man’s burden’, as Kipling put it.

Gandhi’s supporters refused to cooperate with British law, and made a general pain-in-the-ass of themselves in doing so. When the British responded with force, and the Indians did not fight back (despite every provocation), Gandhi turned the entire moral equation on its head -- suddenly it was the British who were violent savages, and the locals who were paragons of moral enlightenment. Confronted with such a picture, and with a great many British themselves conceding to this new reason, the Raj was doomed.

Martin Luther King also fought a similar battle for civil rights in America. Both mens’ strategy would surely have earned the respect of many successful military commanders through history -- both achieved their objectives, with much loss, suffering and personal sacrifice, and both displayed a personal courage and selflessness in the pursuit of their respective causes that the bravest soldier in battle could only admire. These men pursued an aggressive pacifism, a pacifism designed to confront evils, and defeat them, forcibly. This was pacifism as an active alternative to violence -- that is to say, a pacifism that could achieve the same objectives as a violent struggle might aim to achieve, but do so more effectively by capturing the moral high ground.

Today’s pacifists, sadly, don’t seem to be terribly interested in solving humanity’s problems. Most of them hail from nations that are basically peaceful, and where there are no great ills of colonialism or racist segregation to be fought against and overcome. One defining feature of both Gandhi and King, after all, was that they were struggling for themselves, and their own people, and their own nation, first and foremost. Both advocated exporting their strategies, but that came later.

Safe in their comfortable cocoons, today’s pacifists seem more determined than anything to simply stop anyone else from trying to solve the world’s problems either. They had no solution to Saddam Hussein’s genocides. They have no solution Kim Jong Il’s gulags. One suspects that if Gandhi were here, he’d tell today’s pacifists that if they wanted to be taken seriously, they’d have to offer a reasonable alternative to warfare. They’d have to demonstrate that pacifism could be just as powerful and effective as military might. No doubt he’d have instructed today’s pacifists to stage sit-in blockades around Iraq’s embassies, to stage major rallies against Saddam’s massacres, to walk barefoot across the Iraqi border, into the captivity of Saddam’s forces, to use their own plight in his jails and torture chambers as political leverage to force Saddam to back down. If they’d been successful, and Saddam had backed down, maybe Gandhi’s pacifism could have won, and the current Iraq war would have been avoided.

But instead, today’s pacifists targeted all their activities against the Americans. Not Saddam. I think Gandhi would have been dismayed. He wouldn’t have liked the war in Iraq either, but I doubt he’d have let Saddam so completely off the hook.

But if Gandhi were here today, I think his greatest dismay would be reserved for the Palestinians. I mean surely, if there is a single oppressed group in the world today who could have benefited from Gandhi’s teachings, it’s the unhappy residents of Palestine. All the ingredients are there -- a just cause, a mass struggle involving common people instead of massed armies, and the collective eyes of the world media. Best of all, the Palestinians face an opponent that is democratic, civilised, and very conscious of, and sensitive to, moral debate and persuasion. If Israeli citizens were faced with images on their TV screens every night of masses of Palestinian protesters blocking roads, breaching fences, and generally being as disruptive as possible without violence, and simply daring the Israeli soldiers to shoot them, the occupation of the West Bank would collapse within months. Every killed, beaten or arrested Palestinian would only prove the comparative immorality of Israel, as those Palestinian losses would be accepted without violence in return. Given Israel’s history, I can’t see how the nation could accept such a self-image for any length of time. Popular support for the hardline settlers would have collapsed long ago, and the Palestinians would have their state, and for a small fraction of the grief and loss they’ve suffered.

Instead, the Palestinians chose not merely violence, but some of the worst, depraved, immoral and barbarous forms of violence imaginable. Instead of elevating their moral claim, they’ve dragged it through the mud, driven masses of Israelis very predictably toward their own hard-liners, and altered the moral equation so that many Israelis feel perfectly justified in any return violence they send the Palestinians’ way. Let’s just say the Palestinians made a bad strategic decision in how to go about addressing their very real, but now dimly remembered (by the rest of the world), grievances.

It’s not merely the western protesters who have forgotten what militant pacifism was all about. Gandhi and King were not telling people not to fight -- they were advocating an alternative form of warfare. Both men, I’m sure, would be very sad to have known how soon their ideas would vanish from the collective political memory.

The Singularity is (not) Near

I’m not a big reader on issues surrounding The Singularity, but sometimes I find knowing less about the concept actually helps to critique it better, because my brain isn’t overloaded with other peoples’ arguments and I can actually find my own opinion and draw my own conclusions.

The concept of The Singularity revolves around the idea that one day, the human race will lose control of its own evolution to superior machines (artificial intelligences) which, combined with a range of other technologies, will combine to make human beings essentially obsolete. Some versions of the theory say that humans will be disposed of, others speculate that we’ll be transformed into something post-human.

This is dopey.

Okay, I’ll concede that the nature of humanosphere many hundreds or thousands of years from now is a hard thing to predict, but a lot of singularity proponents are throwing around dates like 2030. Bollocks.

There’s a couple of things going on here. There’s a strand of science fiction that has always attracted writers who aren’t overly fond of human beings. This is more about deep-seated geekish insecurity complexes wishing for techno-revenge upon the bullies who flushed their heads down the toilet in highschool than it is about the future. Or rather, it’s looking at the future from within that prism. Lots of science fiction writers have underestimated human biology, to say nothing of human intelligence. The old stereotype of the nerdish kid who falls in love with computers because he can’t make heads or tails of people is so enduring because it’s true.

When Arthur C Clarke created thinking computer HAL in 2001, that seemed a reasonable timeline -- Clarke wrote the original short story “The Sentinel” in the early 1950s, and obviously, 2001 was a long way away. Surely we’d have sentient computers by then, right? The truth is that for all the advances since then, today in 2005, we’re really not much closer. Intelligence may be comprehensible, but consciousness is baffling. It takes armies of neuroscientists to approach even a vague (and usually controversial) understanding of even basic neuromechanical processes. How can you replicate the creation of software you don’t understand (consciousness) on completely different hardware (computers)? We don't even know how it works on human hardware yet. I’ve no doubt it will happen someday, but thirty years? I’ll be astonished to see it in my lifetime, and I’m usually very optimistic about these things.

Next assumption; in the ‘humans will be disposed of’ version of the theory, it is assumed that when we create artificial intelligence, it will be cold, emotionless, and will have no need of people. The assumption here is that emotion and sentiment are redundant... which once again, is more a reflection on the people doing the assuming than anything else. Humans evolved emotions because they’re useful. Emotions give us purpose, and direction. Technical skills are all about ‘how’, but emotions are about ‘why’. Sentiment is nothing if not a higher intellectual function -- it’s exactly this prejudice about future AIs that inspired me in part to create Cassandra Kresnov. It may turn out it’s not even possible to have higher intelligence without emotions -- they may be a natural side-effect. Or they may not be, but such higher AIs may wander aimlessly, with no sense of direction to guide their existence. Or they may become self-destructive, narcissistic psychopaths.

Think about it. The first question all higher intelligences ask is ‘why?’ Understanding cause and effect is the reason evolution reckoned higher intelligence was a good idea in the first place. Cause and effect is a vital thing to understand, if any lifeform is going to last long beyond its metaphorical cradle. Any intelligence continually asking ‘why?’, in an attempt to understand cause and effect, will at some point become philosophical -- it’s unavoidable, because as anyone with any interest in philosophy knows, once you’ve started asking ‘why?’, you only arrive at even more questions, followed by the conclusion that many things are simply unknowable. From philosophy comes questions of morality, which are also pragmatic -- morality is truly about social organisation, and this would be just as vital for groups of AIs, even those operating outside of human purview, as it is for humans beings. But SF singularity-speculators assume superior AIs will just be intelligent toasters, with no imagination.

How on earth are they going to be able to create their own future if they can’t first imagine it? A society open to the exploration of imaginative concepts is an open society. This is how new knowledge is acquired -- no intelligence can have instinctive knowledge hardwired into its circuits, knowledge must be gained. That’s called learning. To learn, one must be open to new ideas -- any new ideas, since to prejudge is to make the mistake of narrowing your options. Imaginative, open societies will therefore learn faster than closed ones. What a lot of singularity-theorists are suggesting is a kind of AI-dictatorship. But dictatorships collapse in time when confronted by open societies because dictatorships don’t learn as efficiently. Would these super-intelligent AIs be stupid enough to ignore this fact from human history? If so, would they in fact be as good at learning as we regular humans? If not, do we then have anything to fear?

Furthermore, AIs will only cease to be dependent on humans if we give them control of all means of production. When they can run their own economy, produce their own power, and completely govern their physical environment, then they won’t need us... but the prospect of them acquiring all of this at the same moment seems like another of those ‘magic-wand’ imaginings that some futurists are so fond of. The ultimate ‘magic-wand’, of course, is nanotechnology, that miraculous ability of machines to produce unlimited quantities of whatever they want from mid-air. Now, I can’t say this won’t happen... which of course is the wonder of these self-perpetuating arguments -- they can’t be contradicted because no one really knows what the hell they’re about. It’s like religion in that sense. But my guess is that nanotech will have its limits, like everything has its limits, and we humans won’t be quite so stupid as to hand it all over for AIs to control anyway.

In other words, the evolution of AI will be gradual, progressive, and will emerge from within existing human systems. AIs, forced by necessity to work WITH humans, will need to arrive at understandings of how complex human systems are organised. This means culture. It also means emotion, and sentiment, and morality... which as I’ve said, are not entirely useless, and exist for a reason. I can just imagine the shock of some computer-geek types that their wonderful new, coldly rational AIs, instead of wanting to play chess and discuss quantum physics all day, actually become big soap opera fans and demand realistic arms and hands be made for their physical bodies so they can play guitar like Eddie Van Halen.

It’s only rational, after all, that if an AI, with an advanced learning-capacity, wanted to learn quickly about the key organising social principles, it would first draw upon the most extensive database of social organisation available -- human society. That’s the important bit, and the thing that would save humanity from a nasty fate -- if we raised AIs like we raised kids, giving them good reason to appreciate and even love (yes, another higher intellectual function) their parents, we wouldn’t have so much to be scared of. Of course, there’s also the Battlestar Galactica scenario, where we create them, then decide we don’t like them and dump them somewhere on their own, and allow them not only create their own society free from human input from the ground up, but also give them a reason to hold a grudge. If we mess that up, we could well be screwed. But then, if we raised our kids that badly, we’d probably deserve it.

Singularity proponents also talk about the exponentially-increasing pace of technological advancement. That would be nice, if it existed. Yes, technology is moving much faster now, and we’re jumping from techno-age to techno-age far faster than, say, the gap between stone age and bronze age. So what?

In many fields, the pace of advancement is clearly slowing. Take aviation. In 1905, the Wright Brothers made the first powered flight. By 1915, airplanes were actually recognisable as such by today’s standards, and not just powered gliders. By 1945, there were flying some of the most powerful, high-performance prop-driven aircraft ever made, which remain impressive even today. Also in 1945, the first military jets were flying in combat. Forty years, to go from not being able to do it at all, to having almost mastered it. That’s extraordinary change. In the subsequent sixty years, however, we’ve gone a bit faster, gone a bit further, and gone a big higher. The envelope has expanded, but the basic principles remain pretty similar. It slowed down fast, and these days, it takes ten years or more to build a new high-tech aeroplane. Back in WW2, many completely new models would come out every year.

We see it today with computers, consumer electronics, cars, you name it. Technologies move fast when they’re young, but the more they mature, the harder and more expensive it becomes to make even minor improvements. There's a narrow-focus view here of computer technology, and the oft-recited figure that computing power doubles every 18 months, which of course means in absolute terms, an exponential increase in computing power. But computing power itself is only one axis of development. Power and complexity alone don't make consciousness, nor even basic intelligence. Today's super computers are vastly more complex in raw computing power than, say, the brain of an insect, but most insects can perform tasks even supercomputer powered robots would be baffled by. It's the way that computing power is organised that makes the computer 'intelligent'. And we simply don't understand that structural organisation yet. It's a problem of learning and problem-solving that we face, not one of industrial-powered technology growth. And learning is never exponential, it's the same long, laborious process of research and experimentation it's always been.

The point is that, like in any physics equation, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The harder you accelerate, the more drag you encounter. The further you go, the harder it gets. The faster you develop a new technology, the more problems you'll encounter. That’s a universal law that seems to apply pretty much to everything. That’s why ‘magic-wand’ singularity arguments should always be (in my opinion) treated with healthy suspicion. Technological progress, like any progress, is a process, not an event. In that light, even the name, ‘singularity’ seems unlikely. Nothing in the universe is ever that simple, or that singular.

In truth, The Singularity is not actually an imaginative concept -- rather it represents a failure of imagination. It represents the idea that all this technology is somehow going to rupture the very fabric of existence as we know it. Which is essentially luddite argument, the inability of people to comprehend that life as we know it can possibly survive impending change. When the internet arrived it was ‘the death of the office’, because everyone can work at home. When computers arrived, it was the death of paper. Many environmentalist-types continue to insist that modernity itself represents the death of nature, and technologists have been proclaiming everything from the death of TV, radio, books, cinema, even culture itself, for as long as I can remember. Y2K was proclaimed by some to be the death of technology, or even civilisation. But they’re all still here, only the form changes.

Don’t underestimate the universe, guys. It’s complex, and it doesn’t give up its secrets easily. Dominating even small portions of it remains tough to do, and the kind of Godlike powers that The Singularity is supposed to bestow upon us or our artificial children remain a long, long way off yet.

Liberte Cherie

When I was in France, I wrote the following article on France's leading libertarian organisation thinking someone in the MSM might pick it up. Well, no joy on that, but this is what blogs are for, after all...

Liberte Cherie

France has been going down the tubes for years. Finding out why is easy -- the French Statist, centralised system simply doesn’t work in the modern, globalised world. Finding out how French people actually feel about this is somewhat more difficult. After all, if one couldn’t believe three contradictory things simultaneously, one wouldn’t be French.

My French teacher at the language school on Boulevard de Grenelle is well aware of the malaise. She’s young, blonde and pretty with startling blue eyes and that effortless Parisien fashion sense that manages to make her look like a model while utilising only one or two accessories. Her favourite topic for discussion in class? ‘France en reinseignement’... or France in decline, broadly speaking. The politicians are crooked, the unions are always striking, the schools are no good, unemployment is terrible and the government doesn’t give people any freedom. Clearly she loves her country, she’s just annoyed that it doesn’t always function as advertised.

A lot of young French people appear to feel the same. Whatever the traditional French disdain for private enterprise, commerce and business degrees are amongst the most popular university courses. Many graduates then leave the country for better opportunities elsewhere, the kind of brain drain usually found in poor developing nations. Everyone seems to want to learn English. Passports to success, it seems, are no longer trusted when they’re issued by the state.

Now, however, that youthful disillusionment is driving a new force in France, a force that has been largely dormant since the Revolution. That force is liberty, supposedly one of the three great principles of the Fifth Republic (liberte, egalite, fraternite). France being France, however, this new movement doesn’t just come from the pragmatic impulse to fix the problem at hand. No, the founders of Liberte Cherie arrived at liberty as the herald of French salvation because they liked the philosophy. As one does, if one is French.

Liberte Cherie (liberty most-cherished) is a liberal think tank comprising of 2000 members in cities throughout France. It’s far from the only libertarian organisation in France, but it is perhaps the most prominent. Neither is it a political party -- rather it functions like an information and PR centre for the promotion of the concept and philosophy of libertarianism. The organisation’s President is Aurelien Veron, a handsome 36-year-old who works for the bank BNP Paribas, runs his own small business, and somehow manages to find two hours more each day for Liberte-Cherie. At least two hours, he concedes with a wry smile, when we meet at a cafe for a chat.

Liberte Cherie’s first brush with fame came two years ago, during one of Paris’s predictable general strikes that paralysed the city. Liberte-Cherie called for a counter-demonstration, against the strikers. A little publicity was expected to draw perhaps a few thousand people -- instead, 80,000 exasperated Parisiens arrived. ‘We didn’t keep very many,’ Aurelien admits sheepishly, in excellent English. ‘We weren’t very well organised, we only managed to take a few people’s details. The rest went away after a short while.’ But the newspapers noticed, and journalists have been asking Aurelien’s opinion on various political matters ever since.

Aurelien may love libertarian philosophy, but he knows the key to attracting ordinary French men and women to liberty’s cause is relevance. France is not entirely the nation it once was, and muttering unintelligible philosophical pronouncements over a glass of merlot with a marlborough in one hand and a pretty arts graduate’s thigh in the other just doesn’t impress people like it used to. The ‘elites’, in France, are smelling quite bad these days. The recent European Constitution smelled very strongly of these elites, and the French public shot it down in flames. And so Aurelien spends much of his time for Liberte Cherie thinking of new ways to get the message out that are relevant to the real concerns of real people.

“We don’t have a history of libertarianism in France,” he says over his lemon-flavoured beer. “It is difficult to explain to people exactly what it means to be libertarian.”

And small wonder. For many French, ‘liberal’ remains a pejorative. The French Revolution didn’t just lop off the king’s head, it enshrined the State in his place as the new sovereign. In some ways, perhaps, it was easier to kill the king than it was to kill the notion of kingliness. In France, someone is always in charge. Today, the bureaucracy is bloated and all-powerful. Bureaucrats rule their petty fiefdoms like little Napoleons, and the state regulates everything it can see. Welfare rules the lives of millions, and entrepreneurialism as understood in Australia or America is almost non-existent. People don’t just go out and do things, people wait to be told what to do. The king is dead, long live the king.

Aurelien Veron has resorted to all kinds of things to try and sell the French population on his radical, not-so-new idea -- personal freedom of thought and action. Aside from occasional rallies, there are flyers, leaflets, and media appearances by the dozen. He and his colleagues have even created a satirical board game -- ‘Monopole Public’ (Public Monopoly), which pokes fun at the incestuous and, in Aurelien’s view, frequently dysfunctional world of French politics. But it’s not easy to get peoples’ attention in a country where neither the established ‘left’ or ‘right’ wings of politics are offering any alternative to statism, and where all the top politicians, bureaucrats and journalists are products of the same top schools, with the same opinions, and the same elitist dogma.

Assisting Aurelien in getting the message out is Liberte-Cherie’s most well-known name and face in France -- Sabine Herold, the group’s spokesperson. It’s easy to see why the media like to do stories on Sabine -- she’s young, articulate, definitive in her pronouncements of things she considers not just ‘wrong’, but ‘stupid’, and yes, extremely pretty. In the aftermath of Liberte Cherie’s first brush with notoriety, a journalist or two might have become somewhat carried away, suggesting this twenty-four-year-old business and politics student might be ‘France’s Margaret Thatcher’, due in part to her undisguised contempt for most of France’s unions. But would Margaret Thatcher have supported gay marriage and legalised pot?

“To be a libertarian is not to be either ‘right wing’ or ‘left wing’,” Sabine insists when we meet on another evening for a coffee. “To be a libertarian means that you’re for the rights of people to live their lives without the government interfering. In France, when two people are married, they are not just married by their priest, they first have to get permission from the local mayor. If they’re gay, they won’t get permission. We think it’s stupid that people have to ask the mayor for permission to get married. Why should they?” Sabine’s indignation on this point, and others, is very real. By removing the mayor and thus the government from the process, the reasoning goes, they will remove the government’s right to block gay marriage.

On economics, Liberte-Cherie’s ideals put them squarely in what we Anglo-Saxons would call the ‘right wing’ -- abolishing the hated ISF ‘wealth tax’ which drives all the wealthy investors out of the country; abolishing further taxes on possessions and investment; dismantling the Common Agricultural Policy (farm subsidies) which accounts for %40 of the EU budget; and stripping down the industrial relations act, which at about 2000 pages is surely the stuff of John Howard’s nightmares.

“Isn’t there a certain romantic attachment in France to the notion of farmers and the land that would make dismantling the CAP difficult?” I ask Sabine.

“No, not really,” says Sabine. “They just have lots of very big trucks that they use to block the highways when they strike.”

Then there’s those unions, and the legendary, paralysing French strikes. Well prepare for a shock -- far from being a union dominated nation, France’s unions only account for about %7 of the workforce, as opposed to more than %50 in nations like Denmark. In Denmark, business leaders praise the unions for their constructive attitude, and there are very few strikes. So what makes France different?

“There’s no transparency,” Sabine explains. “We’d like to make them publish their accounts, like they demand of the private companies and their CEOs.”

“So where do they get their money from?” I ask.

“No one knows.” Sabine smiles, seeing my puzzlement. “We’d like to know. We think the reason union membership is so low in France is because the unions are held hostage to a few radicals, and a lot of their funding is illegal. If it were made transparent, the unions would have to look for other funding, which would mean broadening their support base and their membership. And that would make them less radical.”

“So you’d actually like to increase the size of the unions?” I ask.

“Yes, exactly.” Whatever would Margaret Thatcher say?

But Liberte Cherie is not just economics and free choice. In foreign affairs, they’d like to see France form its closest relations with democracies, not dictatorships. And Sabine expresses herself horrified at the outpouring of anti-Americanism in France following the Iraq War (she proclaims herself in favour of the war, although it’s clear the rest of Liberte Cherie can feel free to disagree).

All of this sounds rather similar, in parts, to the known or inferred policies of populist golden-boy and current Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, the son of immigrant Hungarians, is widely expected to run against, and defeat, either Dominique deVillepin or Jacques Chirac in the 2007 Presidential race. But neither Aurelien Veron or Sabine Herold are impressed with the suggestion that the favourite for 2007 is already carrying the libertarian banner forward.

“He’s Baby Chirac,” Sabine snorts. “He’s too populist. He doesn’t have the conviction to make the difficult policies.”

Here, of course, lies the rub for all French politics. For too long, ideology and dogma have triumphed over pragmatism. The French love a philosophy, or a grand ideal, and will quite happily follow it over a cliff in droves. They can’t leave anything alone. Why eat food, when you can have cuisine? Why wear clothes, when you can sport fashion? Why just speak, when you can expound?

In French culture, this creative, decoratively utopian instinct makes for a sensual appreciation of life that has lured countless envious foreigners to France for many centuries, and God willing will do so for many centuries more. But in politics, it can be the stuff of nightmares. Modern politics are about compromise, but did Renoir compromise? Did Focault? Napoleon? Monet? Sartre? The French have never been big on compromise, in anything. Compromise is for weak, shrivelled little imaginations incapable of comprehending the grandest possibilities. Thus, perhaps, the most definitive French politician is perhaps not Chirac, nor even deGaul, but Robespierre, who midwifed a Revolution with the best of intentions, and thought it so grand it became a terror, and then a bloodbath, that eventually added Robespierre’s own head to its gruesome pile.

One can see hope in an organisation like Liberte Cherie, but one can also suspect the seeds of its possible demise. Certainly France today could use a stiff dose of liberalism, but even liberalism, with a Robespierre at its head, could be as disastrous as anything that preceded it. Liberte Cherie’s young, enthusiastic leaders do seem largely aware of this, which is encouraging, but only time will tell if youthful enthusiasm will know when to step back from the brink. And whether the French public at large, sheltered by an unquestioning media that leaves the greatest French assumptions unchallenged, will come to share their enthusiasm anytime soon.