The Great Joke Formerly Known As Great Britain.

Great Britain has been turning up in blogs a lot lately. And for good reason. The sheer jackassitude they seem to have been in command of for the past, oh, decade is absolutely mind-blowing. So much so that I think they're in need of a name change. Verbally, they shall be referred to as, "The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain;" however, they will formally be known only by the symbol:

From Real Men Have Beards, Read the rest here.

No Really, do it.

Ill Wait.

Back?

Good.

While our author here had many great links, some of which i have been collecting myself, for a post very similar, it is not an exhaustive list, as i also remember about reading about banning palm trees, and about permits to show affection to a child.

This is just scratching the surface of an ideology that says it is not only the states responsibility to protect society from the individual, but that it is also the states duty to take all potentially harmful power away from its citizens. I would like to remind you that the very existance of liberty and freedom are power, and stand in the way of the very notion of a nanny state. This is all very real, and very may well happen here if people dont realize what I first figured out when i was a child, when I read the book Fahrenheit 451, and realized that while there is no need to unduly offend someone, if you were to ever forbid offending anyone, you would would in fact have to police everyone, and ban ALL expression. The same ballance exists when you start to decide to tell people that they cant do this, or cant do that, in the interest of public safety. You would, at the campaigns end, in order to "guarantee a safe country", police everything, outlaw everything, and bann ALL activity of any sort. Then we might be safe, maybe. Might just be me, but I really dont think thats a decent trade off. The book demonstrated that pretty easily, and if you havent read it, you might want to check it out, or buy a copy for a child you know.

To borrow from a very famous Ben Franklin quote, Those who would trade health and safety for liberty, deserve neither. In A world that still retains a 100% mortality rate, there will always be room for more and more regulation In the interest of Public Safety, ad infinitum, forever. And i dont trust any politician or policy maker that says that he has the ability to ballance that concern for public safety with "reasonable measures of control". If he has any concern it is to be able to discern between more control and thus more power, and less control, and thus less power.

While things here in Yanktown arent quite as bad as they are in the UK. (I havent seen anyone chasing eachother down the street with a hammer, as my roomate did on a recent visit to London) we do see a number of warning signs. Not only does our federal government move almost daily to more closely regulate what and how Individuals lives our lives in the interest of public safety, it also marches foreward with inteligence programs to know every detail of our actions. State and City governments install traffic and pedestrian cameras to allow police where their are none, to generate revenue, and to fight crime. Phily alone purchases $10 million in CCTV cameras this year. Here in my city, i see more traffic cameras put in almost every week. New laws are passed every day, too numerous to count, let alone to know the contents of. There's a war on drugs and a war on poverty and a war on crime, and war on obesity and now a war on terrorism (individuals).


When you look at all these wars you might start to see the real war is with an idea, the idea that you cant help yourself, that you arent responsible enough, that your personal beliefs dont matter. That your government doesnt trust you, and yet, REQUIRES you to trust it. And if that wasnt enough, we have dozens and dozens of American't activist groups lobbying for more laws, to take away more rights from decent hard working Americans. MADD says they want a total prohibition on alcohol, Brady wants to ban all firearms, Local groups campaign for more laws to prohibit everything from sex toys, to porn stores, to selling ice-cream without a permit, to selling food containing trans-fats to selling puppies near a roadway.


And then, in the interest of consolidating all power in the state, as one giant collective reasuring being, keeping the lowly citizens it feeds off of from either stepping out of line or hurting themselves, we become a joke, a mockery of every priciple this country was founded on.


Personaly, If I have to die anyways, I'd rather die with my hat on. Its the American way.

Or maybe its the Human Way, and some of us have lost that, as Virgil wrote in the Aenid, in the first century BC:


Moriamur et in Media Arma Ruamus

Una Salus Victis Nullam Sperare Salutem

let us die even as we rush into the midst of battle

for the one hope of the doomed is not to hope for safety