We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“We won’t get those new books for two more years,” laments Morrison, who teaches in Manchester, Mo., near St. Louis.
To a large extent, this leaves secondary and even grammar school teachers relying on their own wiles to incorporate 9/11 and the events that have followed in rapid fire order into the classroom.
“The integration is challenging,” Morrison says about bringing Sept. 11 material into her lessons. Morrison says that last year she juxtaposed the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa with Al Qaida’s Osama bin Laden. “Would Villa be considered a terrorist today,” Morrison asked her class?
History is more important than this. History is more important than a teacher’s personal agenda. If we can’t rely on teachers to present facts rather than opinion who can we rely on?
Which isn’t to say that history is a collection of numbers and facts. It is much more than that. But it is important to look at history objectivly and without bias. Coming to the argument with many preconceived notions and biases, as these teachers appear to have, does nothing for the students. In fact, it hurts them. History becomes meaningless if it changes to fit a bias. Orwell taught us that lesson. History is written by the victor, but we must make sure that it is also true. If not, then we have lost it.
“Obvious parallels exist especially when looking at World War II.” Some are well-trod ground: 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, for instance. Others are more subtle. For instance, Chase says she asked students to compare the internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s to the increased scrutiny Arab-Americans have come in for following 9/11.
At the same time, it is important to look at history from all sides. America is not perfect. But is it really fair to compare increased scrutiny to the Japanese interrnment? Did FDR come out days after Pearl Harbor and urge Americans to not lump all Japanese together? I don’t remember hearing that speach.
This is why I want to teach. I think that many teachers have lost their way in their zeal. There is far too much emphasis on groups and collectivism in schools today. There is far too much PCness in schools today. There are far too many biases in schools today. And far too little honest teaching. History transcendes politics. At least it should. If it doesn’t, we are in danger of losing it.
via USS Clueless
Andy Duncan over at Samizdata.net gives 20 reasons why ID cards are wonderful. Frankly it’s a fraud, he can’t provide even one…
Who’d have thought it? The UK Department of Health has said ID cards are the best way for removing health tourism from the UK government’s dreadful National Health Service (NHS). What a coincidence that the Home Office, which has been struggling for decades to find a problem necessitating an ID card solution, are trying to introduce just the very thing. And at this exact moment in time? Fancy that.
And here’s the best part. State-subsidised UK family doctors already refuse people access rights to their medical lists, if they don’t have the correct UK citizenship qualifications or residency permissions. Yes, the very people whom the ID card is supposed to prevent abusing the glorious wonders of the NHS, are already prevented from abusing it, at least up to the point the government is prepared to stop them. And whatever happens, the Department of Health have said, nobody will ever be refused emergency treatment, whatever their circumstances.
So currently, without ID cards in place, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. And in the envisaged ID card NHS future, all those whom the state deems invalid for NHS treatment must go to Accident and Emergency departments, which will treat everyone who turns up regardless of status. Err…Doh?
The only solution to stop ‘health tourism’, where hapless British taxpayers are forced to subsidise the health needs of various global parasites, is to abolish the NHS. Immediately.
That way, everyone pays for what they need, or insures themselves against what they might need. And Britain can start becoming a welcoming place again, which people only come to for its wet Welsh weather and its fine Breakspear ales, rather than trying to sponge off our coerced goodwill after fighting their way through malevolent Blunkettesque security, at the ports of entry, before finding the nearest organised crime ID card forger.
Is this solution too simple, or should I be strung from the nearest lamp-post for daring to suggest that the great white elephant of our wondrous National Health Service should be slaughtered right here, and right now? String me up, baby. It can’t come a moment too soon.
Via Samizdata.net
This Telegraph piece by John Mortimer is a characteristic mixture of good ideas and bad ideas, of humbug and whatever is the opposite of humbug. I’m sure that all White Rose readers would (a) agree with that characterisation, but (b) argue fiercely about which bit is humbug and which not. Which is the whole idea of this blog. Nevertheless I’d file it under White-Rose-relevant, so here are a few sample paragraphs to make that point:
So, through much of my life, I have witnessed what seemed to be a slow but measurable improvement in the administration of the law. That improvement was to continue, strangely enough, only until the advent of a Labour Government that seemed to have been born without a single civil libertarian instinct.
So now jury trials are to be diminished, previous convictions will be allowed in evidence so defendants will be convicted on what they did in the past, the presumption of innocence has been severely dented and the great principle that a guilty act must contain a guilty intention will be held not to apply in rape cases.
The right to habeas corpus has been denied in certain cases, where suspects may now be held in prison without the hope of trial or charges levelled against them. Just as shamefully, Tony Blair seems about to agree that British subjects should be subjected to what is a parody of a fair trial in Guantánamo Bay. Our great constitutional liberties, struggled for down the centuries, are now being denied.
The righteous wrath of Rumpole will be raised by the intention of the Home Secretary to remove sentencing from judges and hand it over to the vote-hungry hands of politicians anxious, as judges are not, to score political points and please the newspapers.
And so on and so forth. Read at will. Agree, and disagree.
White-Rose-relevant comments from Jim of Jim’s Journal about Homeland Security:
Now I happen to have a lot against Bush … besides the fact that I did not vote for him in 2000 and the only good thing I could think of to say about him then was that at least he wasn’t Al Gore.
I don’t think highly of his handling of national security – within the United States – that is, this ridiculous bureaucratic monstrosity called Homeland Security, headed by that total jerk Ridge. (What’s that matter with Ridge? Well, here’s just one thing, but it shows how wrong he is … He wants to use Homeland Security to track down child porn peddlers and Internet perverts. My goodness, how could there be anything wrong with that? Well, what does that have to do with national security? We have a multiplicity of police forces to handle ordinary crimes. Homeland Security was supposed to be about protecting us from terrorists, you know, 9/11 … So if the terrorist problem is so under control that he has to go looking for other jobs to keep his minions busy, well let’s just save a few billion dollars and dissolve his agency instead.)
Indeed, but that of course is not how these things work. Once an “agency” is set up, it mmediately goes looking for other stuff to do as well, and hence in the fullness of time, potentially, instead.
Principles, once conceded in one policy area immediately go wandering, often in the form of the very agency that embodies the original concession.
Tony Blair, at his monthly press conference, has just been asked whether he supports compulsory National Identity Cards.
He replied “In principle there is a case” and that he felt it was the right way forward in “the long term”.
However he also stressed that there are “huge logistical and cost issues” involved and that this was “not a quick fix” to issues such as asylum seekers.
Maybe I’m being too optimistic but I find this equivocation encouraging. It does tend to support the view that Big Blunkett’s plans are being put on the back burner.
The depressing thing is that the only problems Blair can see with ID cards are logistical and cost issues. No mention of privacy and civil liberties, those things simply don’t seem to matter.
I quite often stumble across snippets of news which touch upon so many big themes and ideas that they would easily support an entire political thesis. As it is, and as it’s blogging here, I shall confine my comments to the mere immediate and obvious.
And I suppose the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from this item is that the Home Office is not the only department of government to have embraced the desire for ID cards:
The Department of Health yesterday called for the use of identity cards to prove entitlement to free care as it acted to put an end to “health tourism” – the exploitation of NHS loopholes by visitors from abroad.
To avoid problems of racial discrimination everyone would have to show their card before they received non-emergency treatment.
In the meantime the prospect of proving identity or residency by showing a passport or a utility bill is being considered.
No surprises there really. HMG is running out of money so cutbacks in largesse are the order of the day (okay, today) and, in the first instance, that means no more free health-care for foreigners. In the fullness of time this restriction will extend to the elderly, children and, quite possibly, the sick.
We also now know (as if we didn’t already suspect) that ID cards are not just Mr.Blunkett’s obsession but a technocratic fetish that has gripped our entire governing elite. I wholly expect to see successive government departments producing their own niche raisons d’ID card’ over the coming months.
There is a damn good argument that can be used to undermine the state here but, in order to wield it effectively, our friends on the left are going to have to embrace that time-honoured (but generally despised) libertarian truism about public ‘services’ eventually becoming public ‘masters’.
‘Free’ ends up being very expensive.
The Guardian reports that the government wants biometric iris-recognition machines installed in ten UK airports within a year.
The scanners will probably be welcomed by regular travellers for “speeding them past immigration queues”. Simply look the machine in the eye and say goodbye.
How many will consider the privacy ramifications of saving a few minutes at the airport? Are we to believe that once a big enough database is established these machines will not spread?
How long before we are scanned every time we enter a public place and that information recorded centrally? All to protect society, of course.
It seems Big Blunkett is determined to get us all on file by any means necessary.
This from the BBC:
Eavesdroppers, including stalkers and jealous spouses, are listening in on hundreds of thousands of private conversations in Britain every week because of a legal loophole, BBC News Online has discovered.
Telephone tapping without a valid warrant is illegal under both the 1998 Wireless Telegraphy Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
The law relating to intrusive surveillance devices – bugs – is less clear.
But it is legal to trade in taps, bugs and covert cameras, which explains the myriad websites, mail order businesses and spy shops.
And so on.
I’m a libertarian and I don’t quite know what I think about all that. I mean, I’m in favour of trades of all kinds, including lots of trades that other people aren’t in favour of. I think, for example, that it ought to be legal to buy a small and sneaky camera, if you want to buy one and if someone wants to sell you one. It’s a bit like guns. It’s what you do, and in this particular case it’s also where you do it, that matters, not the mere owning or buying of the thing itself.
But my attitude to posting on White Rose is: if it’s of interest and relevance, stick it up. I’m trying to give the customers here, that is to say the people the editors here want to be the customers here, what they want. No doubt they’ll straighten me out if I’m doing it wrong.
Killing the Terrorism Information Awareness program is very much akin to killing a vampire. You can stick a stake in the heart of a vampire and it will die. But pull that stake out, and it will spring back to life.
– Steve Lilienthal in his CNSNews.com commentary Protecting Law-Abiding Citizens
Declan McCullagh has a commentary on CNET News.com about privacy in the post-9/11 US. He concludes:
It’s unclear what will happen next. One possibility is that Americans honestly may be so fed up with privacy invasions that they demand that their elected representatives do something. The tremendous interest in the national do-not-call list supports that idea, as does the conspicuous lack of congressional support for the Justice Department’s proposed sequel to the USA Patriot Act.
Another possibility is that the report on Sept. 11–prepared by the two most clandestine committees in Congress and released last week–may lead to more efficient surveillance techniques. Two key findings say the National Security Agency did not want others to think it was conducting surveillance domestically, so it limited its eavesdropping, even against spooks or terrorists inside the United States. The report concludes that the NSA’s policy “impeded domestic counter-terrorist efforts.”
What the report doesn’t say is what should be done about terrorism–and whether that would swing the privacy pendulum back in the other direction.
More drug war chaos:
A prosecution based on a huge undercover police operation in which £15 million was laundered then returned to suspected drug dealers was thrown out of court today.
In a lengthy ruling that allowed 10 defendants to walk free and left the taxpayer to foot an enormous legal bill, a judge branded the “honeypot” operation as nothing less than “state-created crime”. He said it was “massively illegal”, and, in the case of two suspects, amounted to entrapment.
That’s the Guardian. I couldn’t find anything about this at the Indy or the Telegaph, but that could just be me.
I disagree with those people who claim that Tony Blair is delusional or psychotic. I think he might have a better grip on reality than many of his detractors claim. For example, he appears to be under no illusions about how unpopular both he and his wretched government have become:
Tony Blair has put off the launch of a plan to compel every Briton to hold an ID card in response to fears that it will turn into an expensive and frustrating assault on liberty.
But why should this exercise prove either ‘expensive’ or ‘frustrating’ if, as Mr.Blunkett assures us, the ‘vast majority’ of the public are in favour of the scheme?
I suspect that the truth is grubbier but no less welcome. A weakened and frightened Tony Blair realises that if Blunkett is allowed to press ahead with his despotic little plans the result will be widespread civil disobedience and a PR disaster.
Maybe we can still win this.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also 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.
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