Category: Politics

Sticking it to China

Being someone who hasn’t let the fact that china has the world’s fastest growing economy distract me from the fact that it also has one of the most repressive systems of goverment*, I am mighty pleased to see this article in slashdot, which talks about a new piece of software which passes encrpyted packets to allow people in china (and other countries that monitor internet activity of individuals who want to read about such subversive ideas as “freedom” and “democracy”) to read pages that would otherwise be blocked by government firewalls, and to read them in a way that is theoretically undetectable.

Here’s hoping it works, and that it inspires others to release other pieces of subversive software to encourage freedom of information.

*which of course sets me apart from numerous other people, companies, organisations and governments who seem happy to turn a blind eye if there is a profit or advantage in it for them (microsoft, google, US government, we’re looking at you…).

Stroke ignorance

All the TV coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hospitalisation after his stroke has been something of a depressing reminder of the general ignorance within the average population of health matters.
Journalists, politicians, and well-wishers alike have been commenting on his condition and recovery progress as though they expect him to be back leading the country in a few weeks or months.
What they seem blissfully clueless about is that people who have major bleeds into their brains (and Sharon has had at least two from what I can tell from the new reports) are generally lucky if they return to being able to tie their own shoelaces, let alone leading a country.
The statistics on stroke alone are depressing enough: 1/3 die in at the time of the stroke, 1/3 die within 1 month, and overall only 10% return to living at home.

What’s so bad about torture

In what is becoming an depressingly common manifestation of both general populational ignorance and an infuriating tendency by many people to unquestioningly accept as gospel whatever tripe the government spouts I had to listen this morning to a generally well respected morning television show host ask a question to the effect of “But these are terrorist we’re talking about here. What’s so bad about torturing them?”

I can’t understand how people are unable to work through in their heads the following train of thought:
(1) Terrorists are bad (because they seek to deny people life, liberty and freedom without the foundation of laws, or recourse to a legitimately appointed judicial system to argue their case(s).)

(2) We are good (because we base our actions upon universal laws and protection of human rights)

(3) If terrorists do bad things we arrest and imprison them, both to protect ourselves, and to illustrate that we have retained both our moral superiority and the moral justification for our actions by:

a) Allowing the terrorists to defend themselves in open court against defined charges under defined laws
b) Finding them guilty of a those defined crime based on evidence and due process
c) Imprisoning them in a way that punishes them while still protecting their human rights (which, by their nature, every human retains regardless of innocence or guilt).

(4) When we act this way we also protect those who are genuinely innocent, those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or those who the government may choose to label terrorists simply because it does not like them (eg. Political opponents, common criminals, racial or religious groups).

As such, if we fail to do any of the above (for example by torturing them to confess to a crime, or by torturing them as part of their eventual punishment) then we become no better than the terrorists, and cannot claim that we are justified in our outrage at their “terrorist” acts, or in our reactions to those acts.

We also leave ourselves open to having the terrorists say “such and such a nation summarily kills and tortures us, so we are quite reasonably justified in defending ourselves by summarily killing and torturing them back…”, which is what is happening to America at the moment because they refuse to conduct either their interrogations or their military tribunal trials in an open and fair fashion. They may not actually be doing anything wrong, but their unwillingness to be open makes it look very suspiciously as though they have something to hide.

What’s so bad about torture?

In what is becoming an depressingly common manifestation of both general populational ignorance and an infuriating tendancy by many people to unquestioningly accept as gopsel whatever tripe the government spouts I had to listen this morning to a generally well respected morning television show host ask a question to the effect of “But these are terrorist we’re talking about here. What’s so bad about torturing them?”

I can’t understand how people are unable to work through in their heads the following train of thought:

1. Terrorists are bad (because they seek to deny people life, liberty and freedom without the foundation of laws, or recourse to a legitimately appointed judicial system to argue their case(s).)
2. We are good (because we base our actions upon universal laws and protection of human rights)
3. If terrorists do bad things we arrest and imprison them, both to protect ourselves, and to illustrate that we have retained both our moral superiority and the moral justification for our actions by:

a) Allowing the terrorists to defend themselves in open court against defined charges under defined laws
b) Finding them guilty of a those defined crime based on evidence and due process
c) Imprisoning them in a way that punishes them while still protecting their human rights (which, by their nature, every human retains regardless of innocence or guilt).

4. When we act this way we also protect those who are genuinely innocent, those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or those who the government may choose to label terrorists simply because it does not like them (eg. Political opponents, common criminals, racial or religious groups).

As such, if we fail to do any of the above (for example by torturing them to confess to a crime, or by torturing them as part of their eventual punishment) then we become no better than the terrorists, and cannot claim that we are justified in our outrage at their “terrorist” acts, or in our reactions to those acts.

We also leave ourselves open to having the terrorists say “such and such a nation summarily kills and tortures us, so we are quite reasonably justified in defending ourselves by summarily killing and torturing them back…”, which is what is happening to America at the moment because they refuse to conduct either their interrogations or their military tribunal trials in an open and fair fashion. They may not actually be doing anything wrong, but their unwillingness to be open makes it look very suspiciously as though they have something to hide.

Discrimination

On the way to school this morning I was once again dumbfounded by the sheer blinding cluelessness of politicians on multicultural issues. This time it was the New South Wales backbencher Bronwyn Bishop proposing that the government ban moslem girls from wearing head scarves in schools.
Coming a week after the government ran a meeting with Moslem leaders to promote dialogue and understanding this comes out as promoting the exact opposite.
Now although I don’t agree with it at all, there is nothing legally to stop the government saying that you can’t wear religious symbols to school, but any rule has to apply to everyone, not just muslim girls wearing head scarves. It has to be an equal opportunity opression, stopping christians wearing crosses, catholics carrying rosaries, jews wearing a kippah, and so on. The fact that she was focusing on only one group shows that it is not a matter of opression, but simply a matter of racism, which is far far more disgusting in a supposedly human rights embracing parliamentary democracy.
Subsequently the PM came out this afternoon and quashed the idea, although his reasoning was because such a ban would be “Difficult and rather impractical” to enforce.
I think that Greens senator Kerry Nettle was wholely correct when he made the observation that: “The right to wear a headscarf if you are a Muslim schoolgirl is surely a matter of cultural and religious freedom, which the Prime Minister appears not to understand. Freedom of religion is an Australian value – that is the message John Howard should be sending – not that banning headscarves is simply impractical.”
As a side note I’ll also be interested to see what comes of the law suit that the 10 year old imigration detainee has filed against the government, especially given that the Australian Human Rights Commission ruled that his continued detention was unjust 3 years ago.

Political classics

After Tony Morris publicly criticised Queensland Health‘s 1 million dollar sponsorship of the Brisbane Broncos (saying, quite rightly, that the money would be much better spent shortening surgical waiting lists) the government today announced that the sponsorship deal had been cancelled.

What was classic was where their explanation of where the money had been redirected to:
“Funding health services for children in the bush” (ie. Rural Australia).

That combination of political interest is so blatant that I’m surprised that there isn’t an election on at present, because those kinds of vote buying absurdities don’t usually pop up at any other time of year.
Frankly, it’s almost on par with that other classic political amalgamation: Land rights for gay whales…

The domino effect

Having learned all about the Domino effect in high school history, with the US’s paranoid and probably unjustified fear that another form of government (ie. Communism) would grow in popularity and leave America without allies, I find it interesting that the current US administration seems so surprised that the Russian Leadership is a little cagey about George Bush going around actively encouraging all the countries surrounding Russia to adopt American style democracy (yes, there is a difference, and just because it’s American doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s any better than the other flavors of democracy out there) and to become American allies.

Really it’s just the same situation reversed, with overwhelming economic pressures being used to promote government change, instead of the militaristic approaches used in the 1960’s. As such it seems that the Russian response, while being perhaps a little paranoid (like the historical response by the US), is not exactly surprising or unreasonable.

It also seems a little two faced of the Americans to go around saying “We’re good friends with the Russians” on the one hand, while at the same time saying “We think that the Russians were bad in the past for the way they treated the Eastern European states which fell under their influence after WW2, and we think they still are bad for not admitting it”. It’s not as if you couldn’t make similar accusations regarding the USA’s treatment of a number of countries in South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Medical Student Debt Case Book

On March 31 the New Zealand Medical Association, in conjunction with the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association, the New Zealand University Students’ Association realeased a publication entitled “Doctors and Debt: The Effect of Student Debt on Doctors“. It was a cohort study of first year house officers (interns) in New Zealand, and outlined the impact that high university fees and correspondingly high student loans have had on the members of the cohort, both individually and on a statistical level within the entire cohort.

For New Zealand Students (medical or otherwise) it serves as a depressingly predictable validation of the claims that have been made since the begining of the student loan scheme about the detrimental effects of such debt on young graduates, and the subsequently the economy and infrastructure of the country as a whole.

For my australian readers it’s worth a read, as it is a stern warning of the effects of allowing such policies to be implemented, because while Australia is currently benefiting from the immigration of NZ doctors into higher paying locum positions within Australia, the current push by the federal government to allow full fee paying medical school positions, to increase the fees attached to government subsidised HECS medical school places, and the failure of certain states to maintain competitive (ie market driven and realistic) award pay rates for junior doctors could combine quite rapidly to leave Australia in the same medical staffing crisis that New Zealand is increasingly experiencing.

Perversions

Does it strike anyone else as more than a little perverted that the Republican controlled (and generally conservative) ligislature in the US they are pulling out all the legislative stops to try and keep alive one woman who wished to be allowed to die, while at the same time they appear to be doing nothing whatsoever to implement controls over the swathe of guns that are at the exact same time killing dozens of innocent people who don’t want to die at all…

The FBI’s “Crime in the United States” estimated that 67% of the 16,503 murders in 2003 were committed with firearms – for those of you who don’t want to do the math, that’s 11,057 people shot and killed in 2003 in the United States, and still the government(s) appear reluctant to do anything serious about it, and as the Terri Schiavo case illustrates, it’s clearly not due to a lack of ability on the legislature’s part (after all, they had sufficient numbers voting for the bill in both houses to make the Schiavo bill an amendment to the constitution if they had wished). They just had a lack of inclination. Sick really.

A little gem from Phil

My mate Phil, who some of you may know, and who is always full of entertaining little oddities, sent me this the other day:

It’s a Maoist review of Alpha Centauri
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bookstore/vgames/alphacentauri.html

(Alpha Centauri is a computer game and if you don’t know anything about it you should firstly ask James, Phil or I what it is, and once we’ve finished our rant you should go out and buy a copy and prepare yourself to loose the next 18 odd hours (at least) to playing it).

Anyway, the review is quite a funny read.