2010-12-14

Why the public fear of democracy? Why the defence of Big Brother?

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by Neil Godfrey

User big brother 1984
Image via Wikipedia

Strange how so often I read public indignation over WikiLeaks comparing what Wikileaks has done with having their own personal files being hacked and made public. The presumption is that the government has all the rights of a private person. It’s as if many people really want their government to have all the privileges of private individuals. Many seem to think that unless the government has such personal privacy rights then it cannot protect their — the public’s — interests!

What happened to the presumption that governments are accountable to the people? I used to think of governments as public bodies. There was something called the “public service”. We used to speak about the “public interest” and the public’s right to know. Democracy itself was predicated on a free and open information society.

So when someone in that public service leaked a document to the press and the press published it, the scandal that would ensue would be over what the government had been up to in secret for fear of those to whom it was accountable.

The turn around from all of these values and assumptions staggers me somewhat. What an amazing turnaround that so many people now seem convinced that a government really should be treated like a private brother, only a bigger one.


Let Christian ID’ers join forces with their Moslem counterparts and prove BOTH the Bible and the Qur’an

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

In following up why there has been a sudden strange peak of hits on my post about Adam’s rib really being a penis bone I find that the post was linked in the course of a creationist or ID discussion. However, the focus was not on the usual Christian fundamentalists, but on a Moslem scientist having articles arguing that the failure of geneticists to resurrect dead cells or create life proves that the Qur’an (why don’t we spell it Koran anymore?) is inspired by God or Allah.

The first post, the one worth reading, is Genomics is All Wrong. At least here in the post and additionally in the comments one learns what the actual arguments of geneticists are.

The second post (and the one including a link to my Adam’s rib post) is less savory in its tone (Wahid is Back).

I wonder what Christian fundamentalists think of Moslem fundamentalists using much the same pseudo-scientific arguments to prove their respective holy books.