Posted on 02/24/2005 12:32:34 AM PST by ijcr
A former colleague of mine was involved as an expert witness for the defendant in a civil case not long ago. A short time thereafter, he bumped into the judge at a golf clubhouse, who half recognised him.
"Are you a doctor?", he said.
"Yes", replied my colleague.
"And weren't you a witness in a case recently?"
"Yes".
The judge then asked him what he thought of the outcome. My colleague replied: "I think that the defendant would have received a fairer hearing in a kangaroo court run by generals in a South American military dictatorship".
I need hardly say that this remark brought the conversation to a close. But as reported, it set me thinking about the nature of our own freedom: how much freer are we than the citizens of a South American dictatorship (in the old days, where there were such things)? How free, exactly, are we?
I don't want to indulge in any self-pitying false comparisons. We have neither Gestapo nor Gulag, and it is an insult to all those who have experienced such things in their own flesh and blood (or bone, as they say in Spanish, perhaps more accurately) to compare our small tribulations with theirs. Irritations are not tragedies.
Nevertheless, I think we are less free than we used to be. The weight of the state is making itself everywhere felt. In my former professional life as a doctor, for example, I was obliged more and more to obey the dictates of ministers, rather than those of my medical beliefs.
Whereas when I started out on my career all that was necessary to continue in practice was that I should be qualified and that I should refrain from behaving in an egregious or outrageous manner, by the time I retired this year I had to fulfil all sorts of requirements, all of which (in this age of evidence-based medicine) were quite without evidence of use or efficacy. But that is not the real point of such requirements: they are not there to improve the quality of medical practice; they are there to let us all know who is boss. And even if they were effective, which is intrinsically very difficult to prove, they would still represent a loss of liberty.
The fact is that the requirements laid down by ministers and their bureaucrats now take up fully half the time of senior doctors, when they could be doing clinical work, and this at a time of shortage of medical manpower. Most doctors, except for the apparatchiks among them, are profoundly unhappy about this, and are taking retirement as soon as possible.
An increasing proportion of medical graduates never practice medicine, because the career is now so deeply unattractive to them, and they can do better elsewhere. Having brought this situation about, the government has launched its Improving Working Lives initiative, still failing to realise that it is the sinner, not the saviour.
There are other ways in which the state (by which I mean all agencies vested with public power) weighs increasingly heavily upon us, quite apart from the fact that we spend nearly a half of our working life paying for it. Here are a few random indicators:
1. The other day, at dawn, a large council vehicle parked outside my house with a very tall crane-like attachment, from the top of which photographs were taken of the neighbourhood, including my house. No one had felt obliged explain why, or for what purpose the photographs were to be used. The city is the council's and the fullness thereof.
2. Once a year, I receive through the post a letter marked with the exhortatory words, "Don't lose your right to vote – register now". Added to this is the warning, in case I don't feel like exercising my right, "Failure to comply could lead to a £1000 fine". This is like being accosted by a beggar in the street who simultaneously appeals to your charity and menaces you if you don't cough up.
3. Every few months, I receive a letter from the TV licensing agency, who do not believe that I do not have a television. Once again I am threatened with a £1000 fine, and also warned that my house will soon be spied upon unless I buy a licence.
4. When I drive out in my car, I am immediately in the presence, every few hundred yards, of cameras. (The British are now the most heavily surveyed people by CCTV in the world. There were more than fifty CCTV cameras in the hospital in which I worked, most of them hidden.) I don't want to drive like a lunatic, and in fact conduct on the road is the one aspect of British behaviour that is still superior to that of most foreigners, and was so even before the cameras were emplaced. Even if they are effective, and reduce accidents, they add to the pervasive feeling of being spied upon by the state.
5. Our police now look more like an occupying military force than citizenry in uniform. They are both menacing and ineffectual (quite an achievement), and even law-abiding citizens are now afraid of them. If you want to ask the time, don't bother a policeman. I know from medico-legal experience that the police are far more interested in preserving themselves from the public than from preventing or investigating crimes, up to and including attempted murder. This is not because, as individuals, they are bad men and women; it is because of the same kind of bureaucratic regulation imposed on them as it has been imposed on doctors and other professions.
6. I own a flat in London and have recently learned that I must replace a boiler, not because it does not work or because it is dangerous, but because the regulations have changed, for reasons that it would be impossible to discover, except that they obey the rule of Keynesian economics to stimulate demand and keep it stimulated. And this in practice would mean that, if I still want gas heating, I have to put a new boiler in my living room.
And so it goes on – and on. Very rarely nowadays do I feel myself free of the state. Its power has increased, is increasing and ought to be decreased. But I am not the man to do it. By retiring, I have withdrawn myself from it as far as possible. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
** "Dude, I don't give a s**t about that list."
Please refrain from profanity of here, it upsets some folks and is against the wishes of the founder/owner.
Aside from that, you should care because it was compilled by a conservative American organisation and you as a conservative American should concern yourself with the fact that your country is not among the freeest in the world.
** "I don't need a license to:
own a tv; you do.
own a gun; you can't."
Granted, but there are things that we in the UK can do, which you can't. Cross the road and sip a beer in a public place being two of them. I'm sure there are others.
** I know that if the governemnt comes through the door of my home they will have obtained a warrant from a judge based on probable cause. You don't because your government isn't so restrained.
Not true. Same applies here, our authorities cannot enter a private premises without a warrent. Our authorities are also not allowed to tap our telephones without special permission from our Home Secretary (whichnis rare) and they are also not allowed to use phone tap evidence against us in court.
You do not have this privacy.
** I have 10 very specific individual rights enshrined in a document - you don't.
We have the magna carta, upon which your rights (and most of the rest of the civilised world's rights) are based.
** "That (document is/those rights are) continuously under attack by people who say they want us to live under a governmetn like yours...and they are very anti-individual rights. What does that tell you?"
That tells me that you haven't done your research properly.
** "That said, I'm still a citizen and you're still a subject. "
Wrong again. We Brits are citizens. It says so on my passport.
U-huh. I see. So, you're one of THEM.
Here's something funny: You don't need a license to own a TV; you just need one to watch BBC. That's fine with me - there's a lot of great stuff on BBC.
Here's something even funnier: I, and most Brits, don't want to own a gun and couldn't give a sh*t about having the right to own one.
This one's hysterical: "I know that if the governemnt comes through the door of my home they will have obtained a warrant from a judge based on probable cause. You don't because your government isn't so restrained."
Actually, British police do need search warrants - you must have missed that during your research on the subject - and ever heard of the Patriot Act? They can enter your home, search it and never tell you about it.
"That said, I'm still a citizen and you're still a subject."
Wrong. Brits are citizens. This stuff about 'subjects' is archaic rubbish.
Any questions?
Awwww, that's so sweet.
oh yes, I wasn't suggesting it would happen overnight, but I think the signs are all there that the license is on its way out. The BBC staff needn't lose their jobs in one go. It will just be privatised or funded by central govt like PBS in the US. Also, we could have an embargo on hiring new staff - using freelancers instead. Just about everyone working in the media world in London is self-employed already.
Feel free to speak straight to me, if you've got the spine for it, ANYTIME. Or at least have the decency to *ping me to those posts to others that concerns a matter we've discussed in your absence, even if you haven't the belly for challenging something I've said in such exchanges head-on.
Indeed! You get the cigar.
bump
You tell 'em JC. You are such a cyberwarrior that folks are scared of you. You might shoot them with your big citizen cyber-gun. Heck, I'm scared posting this. Should I press the "post" butten? I might regret it. Here goes.
Many thanks for your kind words Greybeard.
And please don't think that I am in any way anti-American.
I like Americans very much on the whole.
I just object to the mindless anti-anything-not-American stuff that is so often posted on this forum, particularly when it attacks my own country.
But go right ahead....
Is that the best you can come up with?
Yup.
Do you want to know the real problem with endless sex? Ultimately, it's just boring. I love to read, and always used to be particularly fond of romance novels. Well, for a period of 15+ years I got more interested in non-fiction on various subjects, but in the last year or so felt ready to just read good, human stories again for a while. So, I picked up some contemporary romance novels at the library, and I couldn't believe what I was reading. There was no character development whatsoever, no motivation, no reason for these people to care for one another at all (other than that they were rich and physically attractive, of course)-- but nevertheless, it was just sex, sex, sex. After 20 or 30 pages of that, I just put the book down because I simply didn't care what happened to the people-- they weren't people, they were card-board cut-outs of people. The average cartoon-strip character has a better developed human soul than these pathetic excuses for characters. I tried a couple more but they were the same-- boring.
As for the so-called contemporary literary fiction (the stuff we're SUPPOSED to like), well, the characters there do typically have developed human souls, but they're such ugly little souls. I find that I can't care about them either. Moreover, while trying to read one of these depressing tomes, I got the sneaking suspicion that the central characters would make absolutely no progress at all-- they wouldn't learning anything, they wouldn't experience any moral development at all. So, I cheated-- I skipped to the end, read the last parts, and sure enough, I was right. Hadn't learned a damn thing. So I gave up on that genre as well.
All that I find left of interest are some of the mystery/crime fiction, and the classics. I'm reading through Anthony Trollope's wonderful oeuvre now, interspersed with an occasional new work from a favorite mystery/crime writer. And, occasionally I'll re-read a favorite romance from 20 or more years ago.
Sometimes I think civilization is falling into a new Dark Ages, where life is nasty, brutish, and short. What is there of value in that to make life worth living?
"I got a ticket from the city of London for driving through, forgot I needed a permit."
You don't need a permit to drive through London, but you are supposed to pay a fee (congestion charge it's called). This was introduced a couple of years ago by the rabidly left wing America-hating, Bush bashing, Jew baiting Ken Livingstone who is sadly and disgracefully still Mayor of London.
Conservatives hate and oppose this charge and conservative politicians in London have vowed to repeal it as soon as possible.
I'm glad you enjoyed your visit here.
You'all come back now y'hear!
LOL. Yeah that whole left-right thing can be confusing. I hired a car in LA a year ago and couldn't seem to get the hang of the idea that the steering wheel was on the left-hand side of the car... It was okay on the freeway but as soon I got off it I had to keep muttering under my breath to remind myself: "Drive on the right, on the right, on the right..."
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