Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Maybe liberals aren't as worried about accuracy and plausibility.

Why write a fictional history in which liberal ideas are ascendent?
Mary Anne — (archived)

It's already there in real life.

The Reagan and both Bush administrations have been about undoing liberal domestic policies in place stretching back to the 1930s. Of course, undoing means that things were done in the first place. Our reality will always be influenced by people's knowledge of what those policies have accomplished, for good and ill.

The historical fiction would allow you to erase all that and speculate what a world cleansed of liberalism would look like.

Interesting that many of those who bleed from the ears at the idea of the Patriot Act seem to have no problem at all with the current uses of our Social Security number--"never to be used for identification."

Oh, I remember, about 15 years ago, an incoherent 50-page collection of documents being distributed that included the dire prediction that, thanks to public education, soon all the children would have barcodes tattooed on their bodies, like the Number of the Beast in Revelations. The number would, of course, be the SSN.

This was part of a push to discredit "outcomes-based education" in public schools, which proposed to make a student's advancement depend on the mastering of a set of skills rather than achieving a certain age. (This evil idea is now enshrined in "No Child Left Behind", but of course it could never be implemented by public schools...)

The document was being distributed by our State Representative's office. It took many years, but he's been replaced.

Re: Social Security numbers and the Patriot Act:

Maybe the reason SSNs are not under such protest is because, when someone fills out a form that requires a social security number, the theoretical choice is still there to decline to do so, except in the case of things required by the very government that issues the numbers. We can know what we have put our social security numbers on and what we have not, if we keep records. So we can, at least nominally, and in many cases truly, give permission for an agency to have that number. It's realistically possible to know to whom we have given the number and why.

The Patriot Act requires no knowledge by or permission from the subject of the surveillance. In fact, such knowledge is expressly forbidden to be given to the subject by express provision of the law, along with severe punishment for disclosure of any kind to anyone. Permission is a non-issue if notification is forbidden. It requires a measure of trust in unknown others that I, for one, am not willing to grant.

You don't seem to like the fact that the IRS knows all about your personal finances, and I understand that. I even agree that some things should be none of their business. Well, I don't like it that the Justice Department can potentially know all about the intellectual interests of everyone in my community without any explicit and specific purpose. If they have the need to know something specific, let them prove it to a judge, rather than merely adding ever more data to the files kept on private citizens -- files, I emphasize, that we may not access. Protection of the individual is not just about banking.

It's not so much that people are being watched, but that no one knows who is watching the watchmen.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (96 posts)