I read Erik Best's Final Word every day yet it doesn't happen that often that it would ignite a need for comment. But this time the "ignition" was pretty quick. Read his text first.
Michal Horáček, a hard-working Czech entrepreneur and lyricist, told MFD that any progressive tax is a terrorist act. He wasn't entirely serious, of course, but he was onto something. Governments have so overused the threat of "terrorism" to deprive us of liberties and waste our money that it's time to fight back. If terrorists are those intent on destroying our way of life, today's politicians and other public officials qualify in many cases just as much as the inmates at Guantánamo. Instead of resolving the world's problems, public officials are amplifying them by making decisions that miss the mark or that benefit a chosen few. Budget-skimming has become the biggest growth industry. Just read the newspapers: Czech ministers, lawmakers,judges and mayors are making decisions on a daily basis that resound like small weapons of mass destruction. Time to add them all to the terrorist watch list.
In the row (30s' fortificationi in Krkonose Mountains)
I would not agree with Horáček about his parallel between increasing taxes and terrost acts (even though it is something worth deeper thinking) but what Best says is right. I highlighted the sentences I found most striking.
What you may find a little bit abstract can be pretty clear when presented in real-life examples: money lost in unclear (due to corruption) public tenders or non-sense measures (due to ideology and party's politics) could be spent on the most expensive and sophisticated treatment of some of the most difficult to fight diseases such as cancer. Then you could quickly count the number of deaths.This kind of calculations can easily be suspected as being tabloid like but the point is there: on hand hand we are spending lots of money on fighting people who fight our way of life, on the other hand we elect people who do their best (sometimes intentionally sometimes unintentionally) to corrupt the way we are supposed to live (from inside).
The obvious question is: what could be our Special Forces to fight this? To be honest - I am not sure. There is probably no Special Force out there but only our voice and activity. Let's look for the contact information of candidates to the Parliament. And ask questions from whaveter field to find out whether these people are those who are supposed to represent your thoughts, wishes, and believes or - weapons of more or less mass destructions.
I will do that.
Posts
2 comments:
This solution could make sense, if only we actually voted for people, not parties. And no, so called "preference votes" do not count. It is not us, but rather Mr. Topolánek and Bém, who decide who will sit in the parliament. Do the MEPs take an oath to vote according to their "best knowledge and conscience"? They do, but then they immediately start ignoring it. Having said that, in the October election I might finally have once again a chance to vote for names, not party (you can probably guess which party I mean).
Sorry for the (slight) off-topic.
I am also strongly opposed to converting money lost due to corruption into potential lives saved. Yes, you can do such a conversion "quickly and easily" (see similar operation, recently made famous, converting fine per song downloaded into the number of air crash victims), but that still doesn't make it into anything more meaningful than just propaganda. IMHO there is no easy AND correct way to do this; all you can say is "there is a waste, which could perhaps be used better". No calculations like this, please, not even to prove an otherwise correct point.
Well, I understand your point that this can be marked as propaganda. But this always depends on the context.
Using air crash victims or patients suffering cancer in this kind of "equations" can be pretty close to cynicism BUT if you want to mark something as totally wrong / disgusting etc. (which you didn't do but implicitly it was present in your words) you need to start with the cause - which here are the incorrect or criminal decisions.
The reason I talked about this in respective way was that sometimes you need to use "colorful" examples to show the nature of some features. And using this kind of calculations "corruption = x of deaths" is something very straightforward that basically every body must understand. Even though those who make "that" decisions. Or not?
Anyway, thanks for your comment.
P.S. I may come back to the first part of your comment later.
Post a Comment