h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi PT
I finally got around to logging on to the hootoo (thought I was being rude for not responding) and it looks as though you're as busy as I am. Whew! So you probably don't mind that I've been nonexistant.

Hopefully you'll be able to get back among the land of the free and easy web time soon 'cause I miss y'all and want to chat about the elections, war, etc.

I too have made a big effort to log in today. How did the voting go. Were there any missing chads where you were? We had lots of laughs over computer programs that perported to be "Florida computerised voting machines" where the button for one of the candidates would always float away from the mouse (or if you cornered it, it would switch candidates)!

Not very serious I know...

Thanks for the effort. The elections went fine - at least the balloting did. I live in a very rural area so our ballots were paper forms where you filled in a circle beside the candidate you supported. Wisconsin went for Kerry but only by 13,000 votes. I wasn't as concerned about who won as much as I wanted the popular vote to match the electoral vote. I didn't want the people to feel disenfranchised the way they did last election.

Besides (in contradiction to lots of international opinion) what a president actually does can't vary too much between individuals. So while the international community might think Bush favors war too much, Kerry would not have been able to act substantially different in the same circumstances. (Despite his claims to the different.) The difference would mostly have been how he acted not what he actually did. Bush's swagger, that offends so many internationals, is very popular here. We are, after all, Americans. Why not swagger? (I know the reasons why not, but I think that is the attitude of many.) Besides, in the end, I think Bush should clean up his own mess.

I would love to see one of the voting machines you refer to. Are there any websites still live?

Have you had any recent political upheavals? I haven't seen any in the news but ours is largely focused on Iraq and Israel/Palestine.

There is a lot of discussion here about the right wing axis between Blair, Bush and Howard (Aus). The feeling seems to be not that the changes will be overt but that there is an understanding between all of these leaders about what constitutes minimal acceptable behaviour.

Australia has several detention camps - nothing as dramatic as the Bay of Pigs, but detention camps in a very real sense. Illegal Immigrants are put in them for several years until their refugee status is confirmed or not. One of the retired priests/pastors/whatever at my church is closely associated with the camp support group members. He told me today that one lady (of considerable local standing) tried to deliver cherries (which have just this week come into season) to the camp for those friends she has made there over the last few years. She gave them to the person she was visiting to be distributed, but the rules stated that these cherries might contain things that could compromise the security of the camp. What the two of them couldn't eat in the interview room she would have to take with her or leave them for the guards.

This is a silly story (despite the fact that it is true) but it shows how inhumane our government has become. The simple possibility that one might not be a refugee means that those who offer you fresh fruit are now suspicious. In this sad tail it was not the illegal immigrant who was treated as spy but the lady who visited him!

There is no real expectation that the people that she was helping are not refugees. It is a case of anti-terrorism thinking gone loopy. Perhaps it is xenophobia given a rationalist excuse? Certainly the maths doesn't add up in terms of risk management of detention camps.

As I see it, most educated people (i.e. not most people and certainly not me on my own) feel that the right wingness of all of the world's major governments means that there is no leaven in the bread and extreme levels of intolerance on the fringes is no longer in check.

The Register's comments on David Bluncket are scathing. However, I see that sort of abuse of regulatory thinking becoming the norm in Australia. I believe it is because the international context has moved in that direction.

By the way, I am not a bleeding heart liberal (you may have guessed). However I have been asked to write a critique of a Child Abuse policy put in place by my church (in an un-offical capacity). The breathtaking regulatory and policy abuse that underpins that document is a small example of what I am seeing nationally and globally: all in the name of protecting freedom. Whose? Yours, mine, theirs?

You piqued my interest with your church's child abuse policy. We too have drafted an extensive policy. Everyone who plans to work with children is expected to sign-off the policy and submit to a background check. The background check includes the regular public resources and a call to any former pastors. In addition, this year they added a mandatory video to the mix. Gordy and Sue were just subbing when there was a need. They signed the policy and submitted to the background check but for some reason the video just pushed them over the edge and they decided it wasn't worth it.

The rules are very anti-guy. No guy can be alone with a child or group of children and no guy can change a diaper. (Of course once the kids turn 12, no woman can teach boys but that's for a totally different reason.) Gordy is exceptionally talented in teaching children. He has a ministry degree and minored in youth. In spite of that fact he will no longer be allowed to teach or serve with children because he chose not to attend the mandatory video.

Ironically, we've been at this church for 6 years and prior to that served in a paid position working with youth, yet we are still ineligible to serve in any child-related capacity.

It seems to me as though we are beginning to punish our volunteers. In that case, why volunteer?

The politics of conservatism are very weird. I too am conservative but I don't think the whole "security at any cost" idea is a particularly good one. What ends up happening is that governments regulate a lot of innocent people in order to catch people that have founds ways to avoid the regulations. I don't like many portions of our Patriot Act because I think there needs to be due process - even for terrorists. And our Digital Copyright law is extremely onerous. I'm not one for file sharing - I spend enough time at computers as it is - but I don't think it should be lawful for a copyright holder to demand lists of users from ISPs without a court order.

Suing 12 year olds may provide lots of publicity and even reduce illegal file sharing but I don't think it addresses the core issue which, in my opinion, is 1, teaching respect for intellectual property and 2, pricing intellectual property in a manner that encourages people to purchase it rather than steal it.

The Gates billions may be a shining example of capitalism at work but it also provides a huge incentive for theft. There is an entire generation out there that looks at the profits of major software and recording companies and thinks, "Enough is enough. I won't make a dent in their empire."

Back to political conservatism though, I know that we too have detention facilities for illegal immigrants in the US. Some illegals are even housed in prison facilities. They tend to be treated as criminals even if their only crime was coming to the US without permission. I've heard horror stories about illegals that have been held for years because the US doesn't want them and their country of origin won't take them back. I know we have that issue with Cuba, particularly, and I'd guess with other countries as well.

The paranoia seems to be worsening as we flounder in our "war on terrorism" and move toward global chaos. The isolationist in me wants to pull back from the rest of the world, build a big wall and live behind it. Of course I know that won't work and, for better or worse, we have a responsibility to the world to assist and, at times, lead in establishing order, but, grrrr. It is frustrating.

Well, may we all see better days.

I have a friend (she catches the train with me sometimes) who was a little girl in Nazi Germany. She recalls the time before the war ended as the most wonderful period in her life. I find this interesting - she isn't making it up and when I listen to her I can understand why she thinks so.

In the period before the war, any number of liberal ratbags ran loose on the street (the Weimar Era was not a particularly moral time) and the cities were percieved as dangerous places for women. The National Socialists made the streets safe: really safe. She could and did walk the streets after midnight in perfect safety.

The war ended, the American soldiers threw her and her family out of their house, trashed it, raped her friends (I don't know about her, but she said she grew quite good at hiding) and altogether made Germany a very unsafe place for young german girls. A before and after picture makes a stark contrast. I don't believe she is making it up - perhaps because of the difficulty she still has in avoiding spitting when she talks of Americans.

So what is my point? In practice, community enforced "anti-social behaviour orders" _will_ solve the issue of community safety but it will also lock up gays, jews, blacks, school teachers and single mothers as well. Blunket's Britain will be safer for the same reason Nazi Germany was safer: you arrest every one who is percieved as a threat to safety. You don't care if prisons are over crowded because 'You won't see me shedding a tear for criminals: we are tough on Law and Order' (quote of the year from our Attorney General!) You can set up effective concentration camps (without the gas chambers) as long as you make the streets safe.

It is great if you are a fourteen year old girl or you completely support those government regulations you mentioned in your post but heaven help you if you fall into a anti-social behaviour group! Hitler won his general elections fair and square - voter support was not a problem for him. Mob justice is great provided you are never targeted by the mob!

I am out of time to answer your post on this thread as well but I wanted to at least write a tiny bit. I just finished Herman Wouk's The Winds of War and it speaks to the same sorts of ideas you are mentioning. How do we know when we suddenly cross over into the "wrong" group? And if we were to suddenly become one of the bad guys what sort of protections would we want? Wouldn't we want an opportunity to plead our case? Or even to make sure that the case really involved us? What is fair versus playing the system? There's Law and Order but who is guarding the guards?
It requires greater brilliance than this cat has at the end of a long day.

In Australia we had an astonishing refugee manditory-detention stuff-up a few weeks' ago.

Essentially, if you are an illegal immigrant you are locked up and you must prove your right to freedom. This is the inverse of the law where you can only be held by court order (or for 48 hours by police prior to getting the court order - or something like this).

In this particular case, a girl who happened to speak fluent German had checked herself out of a Sydney mental hospital and wandered off into the tropics. Her family listed her with the New South Wales' police as a missing person but no-one knew where she was. She stayed with some Aboriginal communities in the far north until she was picked up by the Queensland police.

She didn't say who she was and only answered questions in German. The police handed her over to the immegration authorities who did the only thing their collective/government brains suggested and they locked her up in a detention centre. For months. They took her clothes away in case she used them to hurt herself and kept her in solitory confinement because she was loopey.

One of her family recognised her from a stray newspaper photo shot through the barbed wire and the story all came out (as did she).

The government keeps on assuring us that no stone is left unturned in finding out the real identities of detainees so that their imegration status can be processed quickly. This girl was an Australian citizen, on a missing persons list and was clearly insane - and for all of their assurances, they didn't even look in the obvious places.

Clearly the whole thing is totally illegal. But because the government has removed every shred of procedural oversight, there is nothing to stop this happening. The only good thing to come out of it was a national mental health policy: if you are barmey and in the middle of nowhere, then you get locked up without appeal in manditory detention. It will solve the administrative problems of what to do with the mentally ill (although it is unlikely to help the problems of those who are metally ill).

In any case we all now sleep safer at nights.



PS: The head of the Metal Health Service had sent any number of minions to get the girl out of the detention centre and into proper psychiatric care over the months she was there. But because he works for a state as opposed to federal agency he had faced continual delays and obstructions. He had formally notified the federal government that he was going to personally visit and remove her from the centre (as per his statutary authority) the day before this all came to light.

PPS: I changed jobs this week. My professional days will slow down at last.

Congratulations on your new job. I hope it was a desired change.

Your story sounds like an awful mess. Why would the mentally ill be incarcerated in a immigration detention-type facility? It seems as though they wouldn't be doing their own system any favors adding clinical mental illness to the already messy mix of a typical detention center.

A large number of our homeless people are mentally ill. I can't remember the statistic that I read but it is significantly more than half of them. In Wisconsin we don't have a lot of homeless people most of the time. They tend to leave the shelters and live outdoors only when the temperatures are bearable. I can't blame them. I'm sure the homeless shelters are nasty but I wouldn't want to freeze either.

I think, basically, if you aren't hurting anyone we pretty much let you be. Law enforcement will kick sleepers out of the parks in the morning and most places have laws prohibiting pan-handling but other than that I think that we don't do much to help the mentally ill that live outside of normal personal-family contact.

Mental illness is a really difficult issue. Another statistic I read is that more than 50% of people currently locked up in jails suffer from some form of mental illness. When I read things like that I get pretty sceptical about what they are classifying as mental illness. And I question what we are expected to do about it.

Speaking of mental illness, I'm reading Running With Scissors (Augusten Burroughs). It is the true story of a kid in totally messed up childhood. Somehow the author manages to make it funny in a biting macabre way.

I finished Running With Scissors last night. I'm not sure I'd recommend it. By the time I got to the end I felt sick to my stomach. While the author tries to laugh about the extent of the abuse he endured I couldn't see past the fact that he endured it and that those who should have protected him the most ended up hurting him the worst. I had someone recommend the book to me saying it was really funny and twisted. Had it been fiction I could sort-of agree with that assessment but it was real. Blech.

Now I've started the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It is supposed to be a book about the life of a boy in Afganistan -- fiction based on real life experiences. I think I'll be able to live with the hard parts better knowing that it is fiction.

It probably seems like I read more than I work. Hmmm... well, close. I just love to read and have a passion for stories of most any kind. - I particularly like SciFi but have been trying to expand into more "quality" books. I just finished *all* of the Dragonriders of Pern books so I thought I'd better up the difficulty level a bit a read something that society considers meaningful.

Not that you asked...

The new job is fine - it was more important that I got out of the old one (I had a change in boss).

My story was about an awful mess. Arguably, the problem lies in the Government's objections to independent oversight and costs implicit in assuming innocence. If immigration had to prove to a court or competent tribunal/commissioner that the girl was likely to be an illegal German immigrant then the problem wouldn't have occurred. Placing a burden of proof on those seeking to detain her would also give her basic human rights.

This comes back to the hoary question: should the US constitution apply to the US government or only to its citizens. I would argue for both and I believe that the founding fathers would too. In fact I suspect Jefferson would do his 'nana if anyone suggested otherwise.

So why do all of these governments committed to freedom refuse the basic rights propounded by the constitutions on which they are founded. Beats me. I suspect that the power hunger that drove Hitler, Stalin and Lord North (PM of England during the War of Independence) drives our governments too. The continued existence of the government has a higher priority than continuing the society and humanity of people - all people.



PS: Happy Easter.

Happy Easter to you as well.

When I look at the US record for human rights I'm concerned but then I look at some other countries and I wonder how I could expect the US to be better than it is. It goes back to your post about the benefits of order outweighing human rights. It is a balancing act. Is one mentally ill woman whose rights were absolutely trampled worth the gain of a safer, more orderly society? Our governments would say, "Yes."

We the people are horrified at the mistreatment and say, "No." - Until it is our child that is molested because notifying a community of a child molester living there violated his right to be returned to a normal life after serving out his sentence. Then that molester's completion of his punishment is irrelevant. We should have been notified that he was a threat. The assumption that someone has paid their debt to society must be weighed against the likelihood that they will commit another crime -- and who can know?

Who is God that they can see the future and recognise a real threat? I understand both sides to this argument as do you. I imagine that my standard of rights vs security would be a violation of someone else's idea of liberty.

Governments err on the side of the individuals giving them money. The disenfranchised will always get the short end of the stick. Curbing the most excessive abuses of government power is possible within the US judiciary system but that takes more time than some people have.

I look at the cost of keeping a premature baby alive in a humidi-crib and the cost of providing basic human rights to manditory detainees(e.g. presumption of innocence, the right to know of what you have been accused or the right to be tried by jury/due process). Given many of the babies saved by humidi-crib will turn out to be total ratbags who paint rude words on bus stops, why is there is there this squewed sense of the cost of human dignity?

I am all for humidi-cribs, but if you can spend several hundred thousand dollars on each prem baby then that means that society has placed a fairly clear value on human life and dignity. That means we should be prepared to follow through to all people in our juristiction even they turn out to be ratbags.

We know people who are accused of being serial child molesters are, often, really nasty people. That does not mean we should suspend the Constitution/rule of law. If there is a constitional right to justice then I don't believe that a government should waive it simply because it gets expensive.

The Australian consitution had an extraordinary provision that explicitly excluded native Australian's from its protection. This was repealed in the 60's - not least because it was offensively racist. We don't have any protection of rights in our constitution (it is much closer to the unamended US constitution) but the High Court has said it implicitly does guarantee broad and basic freedoms that are a pre-requisite to free elections.

Indeed who is God? The recognition that no-one is, must be I think, one of the great philosophical underpinnings of the US constition. However "Governments" like to weild the power of God even if God's wisdom is beyond them - and they always have done. It is called tyrrany because ultimately such power will be capricious.



PS: I have been rereading the US constition in spare moments since your last post in the other thread. I will be eating humble pie over there sometime later this week!

Did the Terry Schiavo case ever make the news in Australia? This was a right-to-die/authority-to-terminate-life issue. I was very interested in it because it dealt with the question of who decides when the person doing the dying has not left any formal instructions. And, more importantly to me, if starvation was an acceptable means to "allow someone to die naturally".

In this instance Terry Schiavo was basically brain dead down to the stem. But the stem still worked so her body functions still worked. She didn't have the coordination to chew and swallow or drink so she had a feeding tube. Other than the feeding tube she was on no additional life support.

Her parents wanted her to be fed. Her husband said that she would never want to live this way and that she should be "allowed" to die.

This case really bothered me because she wasn't on any form of life support. In reality they probably could have fed her through her mouth it just would have taken a lot of work and been very messy. So, instead they fed her through a tube and, by removing the tube, they allowed her to dehydrate causing her organs to shut down. That is just icky.

There were all of these argument about her quality of life and that she would not want to live this way. I question how anyone can know her quality of life. Perhaps living with just your brain stem is like a perpetual high -- nothing hurts, everything is fine. In which case dying might very well not be better. On the other hand maybe it is a perpetual scream of pain. No one knows.

I don't think the quality of life argument is valid. The fact is, she would have lived had she been fed. The same is true of infants and many other invalids who have loved ones who are not willing to starve them to death. How then can the decision to "let her die" be right?

I did see something about it - although I learnt more in your brief synopsis than from the telly. I am against murder: be it of someone paralysed or simply young and dependent. However, someone who needs a feeding tube would not normally survive outside of a society that has a good supply of them.

I don't know but I suspect my real objection is that it is newsworthy. For the people involved it is a big and painful decision. For the rest of us, it is an intellectual exercise of the sort that Bart Simpson would enjoy rather too much.

I was re-reading this conversation. Had you not read the Pern novels before. The concensus here is that the Dragonsinger and Dragonsong books totally justify all of the books before and after. I just finished "About a Boy" by Nick Hornby which was very fun. The book I am 2/3s through is "Eliot to Derrida: The poverty of interpretation" by John Harwood which fascinating and seminal but not particularly fun!

The issue for me with the Schiavo case wasn't so much that they removed the tube as it was that they removed the tube and did not attempt to feed her or give her water any other way. In fact they prevented the nurses from performing normal end of life care like moistening her lips as she dehydrated.

I can understand someone saying that they do not want to be hooked up to a machine in order to live. What bothered me about this was that feeding her normally wasn't impossible it was inconvenient and when they removed the tube they chose not to attempt to feed her at all.

That is why I likened the issue to an infant. She was capable of ingesting food the normal way -- it was messy and time consuming as it is for an infant. In fact if she remained the same as the was with the tube in, she would also eventually die from malnutrition and dehydration from oral feedings just as she did from the removal of the feeding tube. But, the parents claim that she wasn't as disabled as the husband said, so what if she were able to develop the ability to swallow more efficiently?

She wasn't given the opportunity to survive. No one tried to bottle feed her or anything. That is the part that most bothers me. Maybe it is splitting hairs but I see a huge difference between electing to remove the tube and opt for more "natural" care and eliminating care all together.

I do think it is newsworthy but not for the reason our press chose to make it newsworthy. It isn't only about the battle for who controls the destiny of people incapacitated without a will it is also about actively withholding care. We need to ask the question what is life? And what is quality of life? (Though I seriously doubt I would like the answer that most Americans would give.) Okay. End of rant.

I had read three books of the Pern series before. Gordy gave me the rest of them for Christmas so I read them all in chronological order. I enjoyed it. Lovely mindless diversion.

I've been reading a lot of Ann Tyler lately. She wrote The Accidental Tourist, A Patchwork Planet and such. I love the tone of her books. I also read Running with Scissors by Augustin Burroughs. It has been pretty highly acclaimed her and I talked to a few people who described it as very funny. I would describe it as wrenching. Maybe if it was fiction I would have dealt with it better but knowing that a child actually lived through the experiences in that book is horrifying no matter how witty the prose is that describes the events. On a more uplifting note I read the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini which I thought was incredible.

From this list you probably get the idea that I rarely read anything other than fiction and that is true. I vastly prefer fiction to the real world.

Has the Hitchiker Guide to the Galaxy Movie come to Adelaide? It's pretty much run its course here and I went to see it a few weeks ago. I loved the way the Zaphod actor spoofed Bush. I thought the rest of the movie was pretty much just okay. It would be very difficult to live up to my imagination. I guess I expected too much.