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One of the essays I have recently been asked to write for my politics degree was titled “Should democracies be concerned about the losers in a capitalist system?” As part of the process I went through in answering the question I asked a few of my non-politics student friends the question to get their views and almost unanimously they answered ‘yes’. Their gut reaction was that we as a society should care about the people who are given the short end of the stick by the capitalist system we have in operation. When I pressed them to ask if they would be willing to pay more taxes to finance this caring they were almost unanimous again in their answer: No.
I tried to get to the root of this apparent (well, to my mind anyway) contradiction of opinion. How did they envision the government would help those who lose out if they were not to spend any money on helping. They didn’t want the losers to be helped, just for their to be concern that they were losing out. I was confused. I tried to argue that concern without action was the same as no concern at all. Their argument was that we can be concerned and use that concern to limit our actions and so make sure the losers don’t lose out too much. I asked who was to police this, they didn’t want anyone to. I asked how we would ensure that the losers don’t lose too much, they said we didn’t. I asked who defined too much and they said it was down to the individual. I asked how this was to stop anything. I was missing the point.
I don’t think that concern without any action, limits, etc, is actually concern at all. I think concern without action is simply ego stroking. We can be concerned without acting and so we can feel better about paying slave labour wages. We are concerned after all, that’s enough. We can be concerned without acting to stop mass species extinctions. We are concerned after all, that’s enough.
When a question about change is asked it is almost always limited, qualified, in such a way as to be essentially: How can we change everything without changing anything? For example: How can we make a sustainable society while protecting economic growth? You can’t, sustainable and growing are against one another. If something is growing then it’s not sustainable. The economy is part of society, if it’s growing then society is growing. If society is growing then it’s not sustainable. How can we change everything without changing anything?
How can we cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. Well, economic growth is almost predicated upon the release of greenhouse gas emissions. It almost necessitates the externalising of costs, for example efficient, effective clean up of pollutants. How can we change everything without changing anything?
The question posted by my politics tutors was aimed at generating a discussion between the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls believes that society should protect and help people and should use taxation as a method of doing this. Nozick believes we have three rights: Life, liberty and property. Any taxation of the state which is not used to ensure the protection of the first two breaks the third and should therefore be illegal and is immoral.
Rawls wants us to imagine how we would like society to be ordered, but he first wants us to imagine we don’t know what position we would have within that society. As a white, middle-class male I might find a certain way of doing things where women or blacks bore the brunt of the costs of society as fair. However, as a free-floating entity creating society from scratch and destined to be a part of it without knowing what part, would I be so happy with that arrangement? If I might be black then I’ll want a better deal for blacks. If I might be a woman I’ll want a better deal for women. Etc. So Rawls believes.
Nozick believes the state’s only legitimate role is that of protection of our rights. This is legitimately done through the police, to protect our rights against each other, and the army, to protect our rights against the people in other states. Any taxation not for these two purposes is theft and slavery. It’s the state demanding we work for them. If we are taxed at 25% above what it takes to finance the military and police, and we work 40 hours a week, then the state is enslaving us for 10 hours every week, in Nozick’s vision.
In my experience, most people agree with Nozick’s analysis of taxation and slavery, but want Rawls’ society… contradictory.
Tag surfing yesterday I came across a blog entry made by Strategerie, saying nobody is above the law. They had some good points, and made them well.
“Just following orders” was supposedly thrown out as an excuse after the second world war when we deemed it insufficient to justify the actions of the rank and file Nazis. If they couldn’t use it then, we can’t use it now because, as Strategerie says, we’ve all got our own brains and we should realise that certain actions are just wrong, no matter who told you to do them.
Personally I think that anyone who wishes to engage in ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ should be forced to first endure them. If you consider them to be legitimate to use on innocent people (and you have to remember that the people they use them on are only suspects, not convicted of any crime, and are by the definition of our society innocent until we can prove them guilty) then you should consider them appropriate to use on yourself.
I’ve read about half a dozen instances of people who were rabidly pro-waterboarding, pro all kinds of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, who agreed to undergo the process because ‘it wasn’t that bad’, only to come out of it totally against waterboarding. Like the Mythbusters who experimented with Chinese water torture who thought it would be just a bit of a laugh because having a drip land on your head couldn’t possibly be that bad, these people found out that torture isn’t funny.
Torture is not okay. I’ve said this for a long time, in a lot of places. People will formulate all kinds of non-existent scenarios in order to justify torture. One of my most loathed is this one: “You have a suspect. You caught him red handed planting the bomb. The bomb will explode killing everyone in London (10+ million). Is torture okay to get the deactivation code?” Those who fight so hard to justify torture will say: “Yes, because it will (not the certainty) save the lives of the citizens of London.”
Flaw 1: Just because he planted the bomb doesn’t necessarily mean he has the code to turn the bomb off.
Flaw 2: If you have time to get a reliable answer from the suspect then you have time to evacuate the city, or at least start to and save as many lives as possible.
Flaw 3: There is every chance that the code he knows is one which will instantly activate the bomb, rather than deactivate it. It’s what I’d do if I were masterminding attacks (and for one that has a scale of 10 million victims, there is a mastermind) of this magnitude. I’d tell the guy a deactivation code to give him the illusion of control, knowing him likely to get an attack of jitters right after he plants the bomb and possibly trying to ruin my plans. If he then tries to ruin my plan, boom.
Flaw 4: If torture is okay to save the lives of 10 million, is it okay to save the lives of 1 million? 1 thousand? 1? At what point do we stop and say that torture is not okay, once we allow it? 10 million is used because it’s emotive. London is used because of its financial importance. The question is formulated to make ‘no’ as hard an answer as possible, but the lengths needed to make you feel like saying ‘yes’ are so extreme as to make the question almost meaningless. The scenario is designed to chip away at the certainty of conviction that comes with the statement “torture is never okay”. What about Rabidly Extreme Case A? Chip. What about Rabidly Extreme Case B? Chip. What about Extreme Case C? Chip. What about Extreme Case D? Chip. What about Case E? Then enhanced interrogation techniques are okay…
Flaw 5: These criteria of certainty are never, ever, ever going to be met. Even if you catch someone with the bomb, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are the terrorist. Even if their hands are on the bomb there is no certainty, they could have been trying to stop it and the police could have misunderstood in the confusion. The certainty in the example is necessary for the argument to work as we balk at the prospect of torturing innocent people. They need to provide us with a concrete example of a terrorist caught in action, certainly guilty of being a terrorist.
The example is fiction and so to is the idea that torture is okay.
Of course, the terminally clueless will not understand this. People like That’s Right Nate, who believe that television shows such as 24 provide genuine, accurate examples of how torture works. Anyone looking to macho fiction for exemplary material and drawing analogies between waterboarding and having their hair washed probably shouldn’t be someone I point out, since it might only get them more attention and spread their diseased mentality still further. However, I chose that blog post because it seemed to represent the mentality that thinks waterboarding is okay, the 24 mindset that thinks shooting, or threatening to shoot, someone will make them squeal like freshly spanked pigs. But torture is unimaginably repulsive, as Hunter says.
The guy posting that 24 is a good example of torture in action, also seemed to think torture was good because it allowed the war in Iraq. Seriously, what? We went to war in a country with no connection to al-Qaeda because people under torture provided information that there was, and you think that’s an advert for torture? I’d have to agree with Daniel, Bush and Cheney should be tried as war criminals, along with Tony Blair and all other ‘leaders’ who participated in this world-wide disgrace.
Torture is not okay. It does not provide accurate information. There are claims circulating that the torture of Sheikh Mohammed stopped an attack on LA which could have destroyed the Library Tower (more commonly and accurately called the US Bank Tower) in LA. This is strange, since the plot was broken up in 2002, and he wasn’t even caught until 2003. Now, changing history is nothing new, Bush and the neocons were doing it the entire time they were in office. They got very good at it in fact. One of my favourite memories was watching a UK television programme where two Americans were arguing, one a Democrat, one a Republican. The Republican starts to spout off a whole ream of total falsehoods about the second world war and his Democrat counterpart turned to him and said “You do remember we’re in the UK right? These guys actually know their history!” The audience laughed and the Republican was very red-faced. He didn’t try it again after that.
It seems to me that if an American is a Christian or believes in their Constitution then they must demand to see the people who ordered these actions brought to justice along with those who did the most torturing. Not only to ensure accountability, but to ensure their Christian/Constitutional values are upheld.
In my youth I was very anti-guns. Guns kill people. The argument that people kill people is stupid. Although it acknowledges that people will kill other people with or without guns, it ignores the numerous instances of people shooting each other by accident (something decidedly harder without a gun). This is especially relevant for children, who are able to get hold of keys, are very inquisitive and boastful, and who are not renowned for their ability to listen to basic instructions or their finesse and subtlety of grip.
It seemed to me that it was obvious that a nation with easy access to guns would necessarily be a nation with very high levels of gun crime and homicide. I looked at America and it was instantly obvious that this was the case. Things like the number of Americans, per day, dying from gun crime compared to the number of people in the UK made the case seem water tight. I was unshakable in that conviction for many years and got into many debates with people about the need for weapons.
Most of the people I argued against believed that hunting was the best and most sure-fire way to win the gun control argument. As a native of the UK, this argument was lost on me. We have no big game. We have no hunting traditions. We wouldn’t have anything worth buying 9mm ammo for, which we would be allowed to hunt.
Then I found out about the gun ownership laws of Switzerland. They have fewer deaths per year than America has per day. For this to be comparable on a per capita basis the population of Switzerland would have to be little more than 825 thousand. It’s 7.5 million. The rate of gun crime in America is around nine times higher. There must be a reason, other than the availability of guns, to explain this difference.
If you look at figures for homicide, America outstrips most ‘civilised’, democratic nations in the world. Compared to Finland, the US has around seven times the gun related homicide rates and twice the overall homicide rates.
Gun ownership is clearly not causing the murder rates, see Lithuania as a country with stong gun controls yet very high murder rate, so the question must become “What is?” And I think it’s clearly cultural. The US is in love with violence. The South Park movie might have its tongue firmly in its cheek when it has a parent saying that “Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, so long as people don’t say naughty words” (or something to that effect), but it is clearly exemplified in the shows you can find coming out of the US. Very little swearing of any kind, yet lots and lots of violence.
Now, as I’ve matured, I’ve come to see what the Second Amendment is FOR. It’s not so some stupid Yank can go shoot some animals with a high powered assault rifle. It’s so the government fears its people. As Jefferson said, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears its people, there is liberty.” Gun ownership should be about the prevention of tyranny, not hunting, nor defending oneself against ones fellow citizens. It’s about protecting your liberty against your government. You have a right to defend yourself against others within your society, but your gun is not the first or best means through which that should be done, the government is. Your gun’s primary purpose should be the protection of your liberty from tyranny, plain and simple.
Since I came to this realisation I have been in favour of fewer gun controls. The people should be able to buy armour piercing bullets, high explosives, high velocity rifles, assault weaponry, etc. They should because they need it against their government. You don’t need an AK47 to take down game, you need it to take out soldiers who are coming to take away your freedom, your property, or your/your families life. You don’t need high explosives to go fishing, you need it to make the government think twice about sliding into fascism. You don’t need a pistol in your bedside table in case of break-ins, you need it in case of late night Nazi-style round ups of your friends and family.
You need a weapon capable of protecting your liberty from the one thing most capable of taking it. Your own government.
The survivalist angle that you need guns for hunting come the collapse is also flawed. Ammunition has a limited shelf life, primers stop working, without the easy access to the means of maintenance guns stop being reliable, etc. If you want a gun so you can hunt you would be much better advised using the last few years of cheap, easily availability of everything to learn how to make an implement from natural materials and use it to hunt with. That will set you in a much better position to survive than having a static stockpile of ammo and guns.
Even the best, most prepared and most heavily provisioned person can be dropped by a stray/lucky shot. Making a strong point and defending it might be a very civilised way to go about self defence, but a nomadic, light and knowledgeable person, capable of simply walking away into the wilds and finding food and water has a much better chance of surviving the fall of civilisation. A house is a target for gangs looking for food. A shelter which is concealed, made by someone who can, if needs be, leave it at a moments notice and make another somewhere else, is much better.
Unsurprisingly I am opposed to ID cards. Shocking, I know.
ID cards as being pushed on three main fronts: They will help the fight against terrorism, they will help the fight against crime, they will help prevent and return illegal imigrants.
The terrorism point is my favourite. It uses the public’s ignorance against them something cronic. Almost all of the terrorists involved in the recent terrorist attacks on the UK, Spain, America, etc, have had perfectly valid ID which they left in places they hoped it would get found. They are not like ‘old skool’ terrorists who wanted to plant their bomb and scurry away before it blew up. They are martyrs, they know their bombs will explode with them attached to them. They want that to happen, so who they are either isn’t important, or is very important because they have composed messages to be found once they are done.
The fighting crime point is also quite high in my list of amusing points. They have said, on many occasions, that this will not turn into a case of ‘papers please’. The police will not be allowed to ask you for your ID card during their routine stop and searches, so what’s it going to do for the fight against crime? Oh, of course. The lines about it not becoming a case of ‘papers please’ is just a smoke screen so they can get the cards in place. Once they’ve spent billions rolling out the system, forced everyone to pay hundreds of pounds for the right to be stamped like cattle, they’ll then realse! Oh my god, you know what, these don’t work as tools to fight crime unless the police can ask to see them! Convienient, the opposition will want to cry, but they will quietly allow the amendment because billions have already been spent and the cards are already in place.
Illegal immigrants do not, on the whole, get jobs with reputable businesses. They get jobs at very low rates of pay for businesses which are happy to exploit them. These businesses don’t care now if the person is illegally in the country, what difference is an ID card going to make? There are already in place perfectly viable and useable methods of checking if a person can legally work in this country, the businesses which employ illegal workers are the ones which don’t care what the check returns or don’t even bother to do one at all. There is enough undercover footage of people making it clear that they can’t legally work in the UK and these people being totally unconcerned for this to be considered fact. If the police can’t stop you and ask to see your ID, so how are they going to be able to use the system to find and deport illegals?
The police will eventually be given the power to stop you and ask for your ID card. The majority of people in this country don’t care about that though. They’ve no experience of being harrassed by the police because they’re white. ID card stop and searches will provide yet another reason to stop minority groups, to ask for them to prove their right to exist.
No computer system is perfect. Biometrics are not perfect. What happens if your details are lost or stolen? Can someone tell me how I can get a replacement retina and set of fingerprints please? Once your information is lost there are no ways of changing it. There already exists the technology to clone finger prints, if everyone in the country is on the database then there will be even more reasons for people to develop this cloning technology for all biometric data. Once you’ve lost control of your biometric identity, what then? When the technology is the sole arbitor of your right to exist freely, what happens when someone cracks the database and changes your bio-scans to their own? When your ID card says you’re not you, how do you get your details back? What happens when the more mundane happens and the biometric scanner returns a false when it should have returned a true? How long does that follow you for?
ID card supporters have ignored all of the questions and jumped on a knee-jerk billion pound bandwagon. It’d be sad if it wasn’t going to cost me a large amount of money.
After writing my entry about Hobo Stripper’s blog, it got me thinking about the use of the police as an arm of the state designed to remove obsticles to the rich getting richer. I think one of the most compelling and obvious areas where their use in this regard can be seen is in the sphere of protest.
The police have powers under the Public Order Act (1986) to regulate both static assemblies and processions. These powers have very loose restrictions on them. For example, the most senior officer present at a procession can impose any limits he likes (such as changing the route, limiting the number of people allowed to take part, limiting the number of banners, restricting the use of objects used to make noise, etc) so long as he believes doing so will prevent:
- serious public disorder
- serious damage to property
- serious disruption to the life of the community
- the purpose of the persons organising it is the intimidation of others
Most people can probably get on board with 1,2 and 4. They seem reasonable at first glance and so 3 manages to worm it’s way past as well, it’s in reasonable company, after all.
However, how does one quantify the disruption to the life of the community? I don’t know how you would define the life of the community, let alone what serious disruption is. Were the bombings of 7/7 seriously disrupting? Or was that very serious disruption? Is a bunch of people blocking a road serious disruption? Even when section 11 of the Act requires that the police be given 6 days notice of any planned procession?
How does one place protest outside ‘the life of the community’? How does one judge so as to qualify certain acts as within and other acts not within the life of the community? Protest is, we are so often told, fundamental to the democratic tradition. So, if something is fundamental to our way of life, how can it not be part of the life of the community? So how can seriously disrupting it make sense if the disruption is to prevent a serious disruption to the life of the community?
By ‘life of the community’ they mean ‘day to day life of non-protesting consumers’, because, as we know, while protest may be important in a democracy, commerce is the life blood of capitalism and we are a capitalist society much more than we are a democratic one. As such this provision is used to stop protests using busy roads. But, I would contend, a protest which does not inconvenience anyone is a waste of time. The point of a protest is to get noticed, to get attention and to make people think about the cause. These things are invariably done best when the person is put out in some way
Demonstrations which support the status quo are all fine. Things like the Memorial Day marches are fine (most people would not recognise these kinds of things as demonstrations, but they are, they are demonstrating support for the armed forces or veterans of the armed forces, supporting the status quo).
Because the police are charged with ‘keeping the peace’ they are empowered to do whatever is necessary, including detaining you for 7 hours even without you having done anything other than be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The case ,which I can’t remember the name of now, involved a man being detained with a lot of protesters, despite not being a protester himself. The House of Lords ruled that it was fine, since other people might have possibly done something to cause a breach of the peace. Other people might have done something so this man, who told the police he was completely unrelated to the demonstraters, was allowed to be detained for 7 hours. Legally.
So long as it supports the status quo the police can do whatever they like, including push protesters backwards when there is a sudden drop behind them, as can be seen in Taking Liberties.
No one is ever asked if they want to be subject to the power of the police. No one is ever given the choice because there can be no choice. Your input into the process is once every four or five years when it comes time to vote for your colour of preference. This doesn’t change the powers the police can use, of course, it simply means you can take heart from the knowledge that you either helped the new bunch of liars into power, or moan that they’re doing it wrong and how your guys would have been so much better. Truly, if voting changed anything it would be illegal, as are all viable protest methods.
Sorry about the scatter gun nature of this post, I’m a little unfocused.
