Responding to the London Metropolitan Police's new anti-photographer snitch campaign, wherein posters urge Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras, many people have taken a crack at redesigning the posters to point out the absurdity of them.
via Brenda and Boingboing
I don’t means that it has abandoned socialism – although it has – but through its continued obsession with social control. Blair and his cohorts apparently believe that no principle is immune from their dreadful mantra of modernisation. The truly chilling aspect though is that they seem to believe it themselves.
Liberty cannot be modernised, only compromised. Blair’s Brown's modernised ‘liberty’ is not liberty but its antithesis. The possibility of dissent, the ability to say NO was once the foundation of our liberties. We are well on the way to losing that right:
With every chip the foundations are eroded.
Originally posted Dec 6th 2006. I didn't think so...
Have things changed? For the better?
The announcement from Gordon Brown, that he supports the principle of 'Deemed Consent' to organ donation has brought out the predictable set of responses, ranging from the demented (New Labour New Cannibalism), through the only slightly less barking (although the discussion remains surprisingly thoughtful in the main) to the surprisingly unthinking.
Starting with the mad we have this amazing outburst:
When the law allows organs to be harvested from the bodies of the dead without the explicit prior consent of the dead, or the explicit consent of the next of kin, the State becomes effectively a cannibal.
and:
...presumed consent really is only the beginning. Let this through, and it is only a matter of time before blood donation becomes compulsory. After cannibalism, after all, vampirism is very little.
The trouble with this absurd hyperbole is that no one will listen when you make a serious point and there is a serious point to be made, even from this rather crazy perspective. Do you really trust NHS bureaucrats to get it right? After all one of the reasons for the decline in donors is the Alder Hey and associated scandals, the roots of which go back to 1948.
As Chris Dillow points out, one reason for making the change is the assumption that many people will fail to do so through simple inertia. It is not proposed on the grounds of being more rational but simple expediency.
...the way in which choices are presented to us can affect what we choose - a fact which is awkward for conventional conceptions of rationality.
This outburst from Sean Gabb is totally irrational. It is playing directly and explicitly to the 'yuk' factor and is as nonsensical as the tabloid garbage on which it is modeled.
Moving on to the slightly barking, we have an argument based in part on property rights but also implicitly on the concept that any action is permissible so long as it causes no harm to others.
...the State's plan to assume default ownership of my mortal remains is wholly and monstrously unacceptable. I reject the claim of the State to own my body just as I reject the legitimacy of its various claims to own my person whilst I am alive.
The second aspect is easier to dismiss.
Despite 3, I don't think an argument against opt-out based on harm to others can be made.
The issue of ownership is harder to deal with. We accept the disposition of property after death, although of course unless you are an anarchist or minarchist, the state will often set limits on that, for example through taxation. We do not generally accept that people can be owned even by mutual consent, (although there are some who argue otherwise). Can the body therefore be owned after death and on what terms?
It seems to me that this is easier to deal with from the atheist perspective. To an atheist, the body after death is just a collection of bones and tissue and has no intrinsic worth. Even atheists however recognise that to their friends and value their body does have meaning, if nothing else as a symbol of the person they were. This is of itself an important aspect in deciding on the disposition of one's body after death. In the extreme case of leaving one's body to medical research, you have to make specific provision. You apparently cannot simply write it into your will. Even here of course the 'yuk factor' comes into play, both for the owner of the body when making provision and of course for relatives.
For those of a religious bent, there will be other considerations. They are not considerations I accept, or even really understand, but it is your body and your beliefs and neither the state nor anyone else should be able to override those beliefs, even though it appears that the proposals will allow for opt-out.
On that basis, the proposals boil down to the state dictating how you should dispose of your body after death. The third posting I have picked out (cross posted from here) ignores this aspect almost entirely (although it is picked up in the comments) in favour of a rant about the right. It largely ignores the impact of death on the family and those around them - an attitude to a degree retracted in the comments. It simply assumes that there is no acceptable objection to the proposals.
Libby Purves puts it a little more rationally in The Times:
In any legal change, it must be acknowledged and accepted that some of our compatriots have powerfully superstitious beliefs about bodily parts: we are not historically far from the age of relics, and some of the Alder Hey parents held repeated funerals for recovered microscope slides. You may not think that way, I certainly don't; but nobody has the right to gainsay those who do. Not in the “public interest”, not using state authority. Your body is your own.
She also deals with the issue of implied consent:
My main caveat is that with presumed consent the opt-out should be staringly visible. It should be offered in a way nobody could fail to notice, and cost no time, stamps, visits or call centres. Perhaps a tickbox at 16 when you get your national insurance card; then every year a renewable consent box, maybe on your tax form (though given the Revenue & Customs' inability to handle data responsibly, perhaps not). But the opt-out must be unavoidable, universal, not in the small print.
There is no doubt but that people die every week because of the lack of a suitable donor and almost always that lack arises because the person who could have helped didn't get round to it and because no one had the nerve to ask the bereaved. Opinion polls actually show a high level of support for organ transplantation, much higher than for xenotransplants, held out by many as the ultimate solution.
The problem as ever is complex. There is no point in behaving as if there is one answer and ranting about the stupid behaviour of those who don't agree with you. At its centre are multiple moral and philosophical questions to do with our sense of who and what we are and about our place in the universe. Of course it would be nice to have a neat simple solution - but it isn't going to happen. We will have to carry on muddling through, making decisions that please no one.
Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act as if there is some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.
Terry Pratchett Hogfather
Michael Walzer in Reset Magazine
What should Western leftists be doing with regard to Islam today? We should be strong critics of jihadist radicalism—and since we are, most of us, infidels and secularists, we are bound to be disconnected critics, focused on issues like life and liberty, which have universal resonance. We should befriend Muslim critics of religious zealotry, both inside Muslim countries and in exile, and try to understand the reasons for their critique and the experience out of which it comes. We should be happy to talk to Islamic intellectuals and academics—though we are not bound to “dialogue” with people whose public position is that we should be killed (or who make apologies for the zealots who hold that position). We should be tolerant of Islam in exactly the same way that we are tolerant of Christianity and Judaism—even as we maintain a general critique of, or skepticism about, religious belief. We should be connected critics of Western intellectuals who make excuses for religious zealotry and crusading fervor (Paul Berman provides an excellent model of how to engage in this critique). And we should defend leftist principles of democracy and equality on every possible occasion. Of course, we should also try to understand the material conditions of democratic politics, as Nadia urges, but we should not neglect the importance of polemical engagements with the defenders of oligarchy and clericalism. Democracy in Europe depended on engagements of that sort, and so does democracy in the world today. I don’t see anything intolerant or Manichean in this political position.
[via Norm]
Part of a wider debate
It’s Shane’s Teeth That Are Scary, Not What Passes Between ‘Em
Shall we be pedantic for a moment? A song like “Fairytale” is tantamount to a fictional narrative. It’s about a brawling, fractious relationship between two Micks* in Gotham. MacColl and MacGowan were never romantically involved in real life — thank Christ — and so her playful mockery of him as part of a working-class domestic routine should not be seen as her, or the songwriters’, actual mode of tabletalk. And even if it were, the fact that such tabletalk exists means that art has a moral responsibility to represent it faithfully
Libertarians often argue - I think with good reason - that the arrangements people make for marriage should be nothing to do with the state. However as this post from the Australian site Catallaxy demonstrates, defining marriage is not simple...
One area where the LDP is different to other parties in the current election is same-sex marriage. During the course of the current election, both the ALP and Liberals have reaffirmed their opposition to same sex marriage.
By contrast, the LDP has highlighted it’s supports for permitting same sex marriage and devotes an entire section of it’s web site to explaining it’s policy position and the principles behind it. In brief, the LDP position seems to be that marriage is a private matter between those involved and that the government’s role should be to register the marriage, and not to dictate it’s terms or who may marry.
If this is the principle for the LDP’s support of same sex marriage, one may ask wether the LDP is also prepared to recognise the right of people in polyamourous relationships to engage in multiple simultaneous marriages. In short - is there room for Poly folk in the LDP bed?
Norm writes on how a concern for 'good citizenship' and democracy can become in itself anti-democratic and illiberal.
...by the very principle I'm discussing here, the principle of freedom of speech and opinion, anyone is free to say what they think the requirements of good citizenship are. That includes people running educational programmes. But decreeing the competencies of citizenship sounds rather more oppressive. It needs to be said that the principles of free speech and opinion protect a space for individual dissent, including for views that are utterly repugnant - and whether just to some people or to the vast majority - and if they are made subject to the supposed demands of citizenship or of what is democratically decided upon by some collectivity or other (however well-meaning), they cease to be principles of free speech and become simply what your fellow citizens, or someone claiming their authority, will permit you to say. They may still then count as norms of citizenship or democracy, but that will be of a coercive image of citizenship and an illiberal model of democracy.
Norm's post is a good demonstration incidentally, why the green ink brigade who infest the comments at the likes of Samizdata, really need to get out more. After all here is Norm, a man of the left by any description, nevertheless concerned for individual freedoms and the right to defend and hold those freedoms against
the collective imposition of a particular political position. But since the loony tunes right-libertarians believe the left hates liberty I don't suppose they will be reading Norm anyway.
I just liked the quote
Some lawmakers are calling for a fence 10 feet high to be built on the US-Mexico border. That means the illegal migrants and their coyotes - or human traffickers - will just buy 11-foot ladders.
In an article in the International Herald Tribune, Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie describe teh plight of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, after the Dutch Government reneged on a promise to protect her.
As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world.
The details of her story have been widely reported, but bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West.
...
It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society, and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, "Infidel," has been an international bestseller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, "Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him."
...
There is not a person alive more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience we take for granted in the West, nor is there anyone making a more courageous effort to defend them.
Some time ago, (2003 in fact!) I posted asking for information about the economic impact of markets fairs and festivals. Some time later, (2006) I made a separate post about so-called Anti-Social Behaviour, that touched in passing on a phenomenon known as Charivari. I was intrigued therefore to discover a research project at City University in London, that focussed on economic outcomes from such events, but in one of the academic papers linked also to some of those other ideas inherent in Charivari.
Throughout the academic literature, carnivals and festivals are associated – by historians and anthropologists alike – with altered social forms, excitement, even danger. Opinion is divided over whether the carnival is a locus for radical transgression, or simply an escape valve for revolutionary energy, which acts to reinforce the status quo (Cohen 1993; Waterman 1998; Webb 2005). Either way, attention is drawn to the tendency for popular festivals and carnivals, in many parts of the world, and in many historical periods, to be characterised by risqué reversals of hierarchy, ludic mimicry, flamboyant and celebratory cultural expression, and a sanctioned overstepping of conventional rules and norms of behaviour. Arguably, carnival is also associated with spontaneity, and with a sense of being carried away by the momentum of the event through improvised action and kinetic excitement. Although many carnival arts involve meticulous attention to form, structure, even ritual, there remains a strong feeling that participation is more than can be conveyed through an account of moves, music and costume. The element of risk, of unpredictability – not, in any sense, of anarchy, but of an altered understanding of authority, whether actual or imagined – is at the heart of the experience of carnival.
There are also links here with the idea of the feast of the Lord of Misrule
This is misnamed a feast, being full of annoyance; since going out-of-doors is burdensome, and staying within doors is not undisturbed. For the common vagrants and the jugglers of the stage, dividing themselves into squads and hordes, hang about every house. The gates of public officials they besiege with especial persistence, actually shouting and clapping their hands until he that is beleaguered within, exhausted, throws out to them whatever money he has and even what is not his own. And these mendicants going from door to door follow one after another, and, until late in the evening, there is no relief from this nuisance. For crowd succeeds crowd, and shout, shout, and loss, loss.
This fear of the reversal of power, of disturbance of the common good runs deep. After all, we can't have public officials made fun of can we?
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