National ID cards are a hit with conservatives. They just love the idea of creating big databases that would allow the government to just know who everyone is to make everything "safer" and more streamlined. It's too important to worry about whether or not the potential for abuse is worse than the current situation. This blows the lids on the arguments that Michelle Malkin and her ilk have used to in defense of such proposals here in the states:
The security breaches occurred at the Identity and Passport Service, which is setting up the National Identity Register to provide access to individuals' health, financial and police records as part of the £8billion ID card scheme scheduled to begin in 2008.
Personal information about every British passport holder - including their date of birth, mother's maiden name, address and photographs - is already held in the IPS computers.
A Home Office spokesman last night confirmed the IPS security breaches. He also confirmed that three staff involved had been sacked and a fourth had resigned before disciplinary procedures had concluded.
The spokesman said none of the security breaches involved'hacking' by outside criminals, and a 'whole range of protocols and procedures' were in place to protect Home Office databases from unauthorised staff use.
Think of all of the cases you have read about people being abused by the government, now imagine those abusive people who are protected by that bureaucracy having direct or indirect access to every possible bit of official information on everyone. Even if they don't have access rights to the system themselves, they are close to the people who do have them. Just go ahead and say, "here's everything you could want to know that we have access to, now please, don't abuse it."
All of the arguments in defense of this sort of thing are built on naivete.
Conservatives don't mind totalitarianism, I guess, so long as it is efficient. They always fail to realize that no matter what safeguards they put in place, the only way to protect from themselves is to not collect the data in the first place. Of course, they never believe that the public needs to be protected from them.
I run a government database filled with all manner of private info, including Socsec numbers. I'm actually in the process of trying to get them out of the database - deleting them entirely - ostensibly because they could conceivably be hacked. Yes, I have considered how easy it would be for me to make an Excel spreadsheet with 80k names, birthdates, and Socsecs (it would take all of 5 minutes) and the real danger is from me and those have access like me.
Getting rid of the info is the only way that the data is perfectly safe...you cannot steal what does not exist...
One tiny quibble, Mike. Since true conservatism entails limited, small government, I think it's eminently debatable that champions of national ID cards are conservatives--wolves in sheeps' clothing is more like it.
Other than this, I agree w/ ya.
Wes,
You will have to count me among those who are skeptical of that. I keep seeing "true conservative" this and that online, but I have noticed that there is nothing even remotely unifying about conservatism. In fact, all it seems to be is a general disposition to leave things as they were for tradition's sake, not because they genuinely believe they should be positively asserting something.
Why else would so many conservatives have made peace with the welfare state on some level? They have reached the point where it is something to "conserve."
See, I think it's a matter of there being a healthy bit of room between "conservative" and "libertarian" where people like you fall in on the spectrum.
I think each person should have a barcode tattooed on the back of their necks or just below the wrist, or a microchip implanted in the hip.
Hey, I'm all for that as long as every cop, judge, prosecutor and politician has a quarter gram of C4 placed at the base of their brain stem and the codes to remotely detonate the C4 are public knowledge.
Libertarianism and "paleo"conservatism are more-or-less the same thing. Both seek the contraction of federal government to enumerated powers. Even the argument of "But what about social issue?!" isn't even a practical line of demarcation, because both would seek the nullification of the 14th Ammendent and the restoration of the 9th and 10th Ammendments. "Get in where you Fit In", as Too Short tells us, is at the heart of both conservatism and libertarianism. This is where the twain would depart in peace. Conservatives would probably go back to "No Horses in City Square" era of state constitutions, with morality codified with laws such as "No Sodomy" "No Adultery" and other laws today more honored in the breech than in the practice. Libertarians would simply ommit these kind of laws all together. Much more philosophical half-brothers than rivals.
Neo Cons, and Classical Conservatism (in the text book sense), believes Freedom is a "means" and not an "end". They make the abject fallacy of believing a void/negative space (freedom) can be wielded like an object/positive space. Hence the Third Way's variant of the fallacy of Socialist Calculation.
The decreasing influence of religion has had a deletrious impact on the right as well, abe. A lot of social conservatives are only minimally religious in their outlook on things and tend to be much more willing to just say "it's the right thing to do!"
I've noticed that there also seems to be a lot of people who identify with the right, even though they don't really know why. They're not pro-capitalism, religion or anything else. It's like they're just united in common cause out of a hatred for elitist leftists rather than much of anything coherent and worthwhile.
I think people intuivitely see the decietfulness of the dialectical thinking shoved down our throats. It's so pervasive that unless you're lucky (as we are), you'll never be given the words to clothe-in-concept what your mind understands intuitively. As I type this, it almost seems "conspiratorial" to talk about it these terms. But what's arcane about the fact the revolutionary left cinched onto higher education and the dominant media nearly a century ago? It's outright celebrated by them.
Dialeticism presupposes arbitrary struggle between oppressor and oppressed. This arbitrary inherent nature renders morality absurd because of the inherent polylogism of the two sides. People feel that amorality of "enlightenment" and revulse against it.
The visceral revulsion seems to drive people towards conservatism, which spells out wrong definitively, satisfying the visceral instinct for first principles. The rational revulsion drives others towards libertarianism, which demands philosophical concinnity.
Personally, I see morality as a means to an end (relationship with God). To me it is nothing more than a way to meet God's requirements, and I see no inherent reason why society needs to engage in "complex morality" (victimless crimes, moral issues that require "social engineering" or crimes that cannot be quickly suppressed by the government) Given the record of all societies to deteriorate, I don't see there being anything that can be prevented, only forestalled.
Would you say that dialeticism is responsible for the dichotomatic thinking of most Americans? That seems to be the case to me.