thessalian (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thessalian) wrote2005-08-02 02:15 pm
thessalian) wrote2005-08-02 02:15 pm
Education, Education, Education
The Americans are tagging their visitors now. Except for me, 'cos I'm Canadian. I don't like the idea that I might go to SF for JTAF and they'll tag ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dodgyhoodoo but not me. It seems stupid, and as he rightly says, friends don't treat friends that way, and the same should go for friendly nations.
verlaine discusses the idea of pre-emptive justice. This, for those of you who don't want to click the link, basically involves the use of computer profiling (in this case, apparently prompted by a sci-fi setting in which AI is far superior to what we have at the moment) to predetermine who's likely to commit a crime, yanking them out of society and sentencing them to ... well, I'm not really sure what verlaine is proposing. Re-education programmes, perhaps. And there are a few reasons that I think this will not ever work.
First off, remember that most countries are unwilling to invest in rehabilitation on any reasonable scale. They try a method, find it isn't working fast enough, decide it's cheaper to just incarcerate criminals or put them on probation (at which point, they have more opportunities to commit crimes by violating the terms of their probation and get thrown back in jail quite quickly, I'd imagine), and do that instead. Governments aren't even interested in seeing that the youth of the nation gets educated properly the first time, and apparently, neither are the parents. So why in the hell should they try re-education for someone who's suspected of being a nascent criminal?
Then there's the fact that we don't have the technology, and probably never will. And frankly, even if we develop AI that'd be capable of that level of prediction, I still wouldn't trust it. Why? Again, it's because of government skinflint tendencies and the unwillingness of the vast majority of people to pay more taxes. In short, any piece of technology is only as 'intelligent' as the least intelligent person involved in its creation or use, and people are fallible. I wouldn't trust any machine coded by some caffeine freak graduate and used by some white-collar peon to decide who goes to prison and who doesn't.
Besides, it's an obscene violation of privacy. For this to be effective, you'd need a lot of background information on everyone. Not just general things like height, weight, socio-economic background shit, either, but things like psychological profiles, spending trends, hobbies and interests. That's if you want to be sure. And you know what? With pre-emptive justice, I bet you anything you like that I'd be locked up as a suspected murderer quite quickly. A lot of this would be about locating deviancy and fitting it into a criminal profile, you see, and I'm socio-politically deviant, if you set me next to 'normal society'. I don't feature going to jail because of my beliefs, thanks.
Elsewhere,cholten99 posts a link to a debate on radical secularism versus radical multiculturalism. First of all, I don't think radical anything is the solution. Even if it was, I'd throw myself in with multiculturalists, mainly because I don't think that abolishing foundations that some people actually rely on for mental, emotional and spiritual comfort is a good thing. Besides, abolishing the C of E might reflect badly on the Protestant branches in other countries who based themselves on that line of the faith -- the only one I'm sure of are the Anglicans, though I think Episcopalians are in there somewhere too. First off, any religion that can free an entire Canadian province from a total Catholic stranglehold is okay by me. Secondly, if you're going to target a religion, target the whole damn religion; don't just pick on one branch that's only known as Church of England in England and that mainly because some king thought it up so he could get rid of wives by means other than beheading them. Besides, it's not as if C of E really has that much of a deadlock in this country. Yes, the Royal Family are C of E; that's to be expected. Your PM's a Catholic, for crying out loud; he just keeps it quiet to keep religion out of government, if I heard it right. I see Baptist churches and synagogues and mosques and moots and even, Deity help us all, Scientology franchises. We do live in a country of religious diversity, and if there's a predominance of Christianity, or specifically of C of E, that's just tough on the people who don't like it for some reason. After all, who are we to dictate how someone expresses their faith?
That's the other thing -- terrorism is not about faith, or even religion. No, shut up, it's not. The Muslim faith does not condone murder. If people were a little more educated about religion, they'd stop thinking that this was some Muslim thing. More to the point, when the leaders of the Muslim faith turned around and said, "This is not a part of what we believe and I excommunicate these heretics", it would carry some actual weight. This isn't about total bans or total acceptance by segregation; this is about education, and about learning to function within a multi-faith community. Of course, we can't even seem to function in a multi-racial community without some bunch of skinhead yobbos behaving like arseholes, so it goes back to education again. When New Labour took their first term at the elections, Blair said that there were three priorities in his party: Education, education and education. Funny from the man who introduced university fees, abolished the grant and does nothing to address the depths of ignorance that cause hate crime in the first place.
At the end of the day, the point is this: this kind of talk is what terrorists want. They want us scared enough and pissed off enough to change our entire way of life so that they can point to us later and say, "Look at what we made them do! Look how powerful we are!" Identity cards that have been proven to be more trouble than they're worth given the expense, tagging tourists like cattle, pre-emptive justice, abolition of one religion or segregation of another by sticking them in their own parliament; it all comes down to them showing terrorists that they have influence over our lives. Once they see they have that, you think they'll stop? Fuck, no. They'll just keep blowing up bigger things until we're all running scared and behaving like morons because of it.
So how much power do we want to give these people? For myself, I want to give them none.
dodgyhoodoo but not me. It seems stupid, and as he rightly says, friends don't treat friends that way, and the same should go for friendly nations. verlaine discusses the idea of pre-emptive justice. This, for those of you who don't want to click the link, basically involves the use of computer profiling (in this case, apparently prompted by a sci-fi setting in which AI is far superior to what we have at the moment) to predetermine who's likely to commit a crime, yanking them out of society and sentencing them to ... well, I'm not really sure what verlaine is proposing. Re-education programmes, perhaps. And there are a few reasons that I think this will not ever work.First off, remember that most countries are unwilling to invest in rehabilitation on any reasonable scale. They try a method, find it isn't working fast enough, decide it's cheaper to just incarcerate criminals or put them on probation (at which point, they have more opportunities to commit crimes by violating the terms of their probation and get thrown back in jail quite quickly, I'd imagine), and do that instead. Governments aren't even interested in seeing that the youth of the nation gets educated properly the first time, and apparently, neither are the parents. So why in the hell should they try re-education for someone who's suspected of being a nascent criminal?
Then there's the fact that we don't have the technology, and probably never will. And frankly, even if we develop AI that'd be capable of that level of prediction, I still wouldn't trust it. Why? Again, it's because of government skinflint tendencies and the unwillingness of the vast majority of people to pay more taxes. In short, any piece of technology is only as 'intelligent' as the least intelligent person involved in its creation or use, and people are fallible. I wouldn't trust any machine coded by some caffeine freak graduate and used by some white-collar peon to decide who goes to prison and who doesn't.
Besides, it's an obscene violation of privacy. For this to be effective, you'd need a lot of background information on everyone. Not just general things like height, weight, socio-economic background shit, either, but things like psychological profiles, spending trends, hobbies and interests. That's if you want to be sure. And you know what? With pre-emptive justice, I bet you anything you like that I'd be locked up as a suspected murderer quite quickly. A lot of this would be about locating deviancy and fitting it into a criminal profile, you see, and I'm socio-politically deviant, if you set me next to 'normal society'. I don't feature going to jail because of my beliefs, thanks.
Elsewhere,
cholten99 posts a link to a debate on radical secularism versus radical multiculturalism. First of all, I don't think radical anything is the solution. Even if it was, I'd throw myself in with multiculturalists, mainly because I don't think that abolishing foundations that some people actually rely on for mental, emotional and spiritual comfort is a good thing. Besides, abolishing the C of E might reflect badly on the Protestant branches in other countries who based themselves on that line of the faith -- the only one I'm sure of are the Anglicans, though I think Episcopalians are in there somewhere too. First off, any religion that can free an entire Canadian province from a total Catholic stranglehold is okay by me. Secondly, if you're going to target a religion, target the whole damn religion; don't just pick on one branch that's only known as Church of England in England and that mainly because some king thought it up so he could get rid of wives by means other than beheading them. Besides, it's not as if C of E really has that much of a deadlock in this country. Yes, the Royal Family are C of E; that's to be expected. Your PM's a Catholic, for crying out loud; he just keeps it quiet to keep religion out of government, if I heard it right. I see Baptist churches and synagogues and mosques and moots and even, Deity help us all, Scientology franchises. We do live in a country of religious diversity, and if there's a predominance of Christianity, or specifically of C of E, that's just tough on the people who don't like it for some reason. After all, who are we to dictate how someone expresses their faith?That's the other thing -- terrorism is not about faith, or even religion. No, shut up, it's not. The Muslim faith does not condone murder. If people were a little more educated about religion, they'd stop thinking that this was some Muslim thing. More to the point, when the leaders of the Muslim faith turned around and said, "This is not a part of what we believe and I excommunicate these heretics", it would carry some actual weight. This isn't about total bans or total acceptance by segregation; this is about education, and about learning to function within a multi-faith community. Of course, we can't even seem to function in a multi-racial community without some bunch of skinhead yobbos behaving like arseholes, so it goes back to education again. When New Labour took their first term at the elections, Blair said that there were three priorities in his party: Education, education and education. Funny from the man who introduced university fees, abolished the grant and does nothing to address the depths of ignorance that cause hate crime in the first place.
At the end of the day, the point is this: this kind of talk is what terrorists want. They want us scared enough and pissed off enough to change our entire way of life so that they can point to us later and say, "Look at what we made them do! Look how powerful we are!" Identity cards that have been proven to be more trouble than they're worth given the expense, tagging tourists like cattle, pre-emptive justice, abolition of one religion or segregation of another by sticking them in their own parliament; it all comes down to them showing terrorists that they have influence over our lives. Once they see they have that, you think they'll stop? Fuck, no. They'll just keep blowing up bigger things until we're all running scared and behaving like morons because of it.
So how much power do we want to give these people? For myself, I want to give them none.
no subject
To an extent, it seems like a useful idea. A little swipe-card that contains all the necessary border-crossing crap would probably speed things up and de-inconvenience people. It would make law enforcement feel a bit better, because like American driver's licenses, it'd give them something to reference quickly if a foreign national were to commit a crime (or need help, for that matter!). But oh, wait! None of that requires wireless access!
That's just stupid. We've spent the last 10 years learning that wireless devices aren't secure. Totally aside from government privacy violation issues, what keeps some random yahoo from snagging all the information and committing identity theft? The news article says, "a UHF freqency that makes it impossible to locate a specific person." Okay, in that case, why bother? Is that not the point? Is this gizmo not meant to bleep the information to the border guards so they don't have to haul you aside and make you fill out questionnaires? What do these things do: blip the number and locations of non-Canadian visitors in a 30-foot radius?
Obviously that's the fear, and it seems to be the only logical conclusion. I really can't decide whether the US actually means to be that insidious, or if they're just being stupid and completely disregarding the problem of how these things actually work. Either is quite possible.
If they do mean to be insidious, then I'd imagine that the idea is to have devices planted on government buildings and stuff that essentially tell security guards, "There's an international tourist in the building," at which point they can look them over and decide if they've got a bomb.
The only comfort I can offer (and it's a frigid one) is that they're really not after your average Frenchman on the street. The government is worried about 'homegrown' Muslim radicals coming into the country by exploiting their 'safe country' citizenship, and then blowing themselves up along with the Superbowl. In our usual inimitable style, the US manages to offend everyone else whenever we broach the topic of dealing with this concern, so we've obviously decided to wire up visitors like endangered bears as a stop-gap measure.
And I'm really sorry about the Scientology.