Monday, August 18, 2008

So what's all this got to do with human rights?

Now, finally we come to it.  Perfect example has come to my hands from Lorne Gunter at the National Post.

In our previous examples, we have seen some interesting stuff.  Starting waaaay back here, we have seen that many Canadians, as exemplified in this case by Jason Cherniak, believe there are some things you should not be allowed to say, and that government is the tool of choice to be used for making sure you don't say it.
Here, we saw that restricting the use of force against criminals to government agents results in increased criminality, even given ubiquitous surveillance unprecedented in human history.  They ain't gettin' it done.
Here we saw how amazingly radical it seems when official sanction to use force is distributed rather than restricted.  Armed teachers?  What if one of 'em shoots somebody?!  Holy crap, man, that's nuts!
The tale of the five toilets shows us what happens when people keep restricting the use of force to police, even when they know its a stupid idea.  Armed business owners chucking small time hookers and hoods out of their own store bathrooms, without calling the cops?  Insanity!  You can't trust those guys to do that!  Not even if the cops are not getting it done, and it just cost the city five million smackers for hood&hooker vandalized super-shitters.

Right on.  You can't trust teachers or store owners with guns, they aren't government.  They aren't qualified, specialized, screened, trained, tested and watched.  They'll surely screw up.

Ok, well then lets ask, who can we trust?

How about doctors?  Could we trust doctors to be able to do the right thing?  Your doctor is probably the most highly qualified, most stringently screened and tested, most fiercely trained individual you know.  He or she is the end product of the toughest education process we've got, and is highly motivated to do what's right by their patients.  Not what is expedient, or what is least expensive, or politically correct, or easiest for the doctor and staff of the hospital.  What's right.  Given what they go through to get that MD license, if they don't know what's right nobody does.

Enter the CPSO.  Check this out:
If the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) gets its way, Ontario's doctors will soon be stripped of their right to follow their moral convictions or religious beliefs when treating patients. In other words, doctors will risk losing their licenses if they run afoul of Ontario's human rights police.
...

The key passage in the CPSO's seven-page proposal states that a "physician's responsibility is to place the needs of the patient first, [so] there will be times when it may be necessary for physicians to set aside their personal beliefs in order to ensure that patients or potential patients are provided with the medical services they require."

Not just actual, real patients mind you.  Potential patients.  Hypothetical patients.  People who do not in fact exist, but might someday.  Maybe.

So the answer to the question "Can you trust doctors?" is NO.  You can't.  They might decide to do something other than what has been deemed acceptable by certain minions of government this week.  The details of what they might decide are irrelevant, what matters is that they are not trusted to decide.  They cannot be allowed the freedom to decide. 

This is the end-game of Progressive thought as currently formulated.  There is no one who is trusted other than government employees to decide or to do anything of any importance without strict supervision.  People are stupid and must be controlled by duly constituted authority.  No matter how expensive it is, no matter how futile it is, no matter if it is counter productive to the desired goal, no matter if people die of it. Central control must be maintained or chaos and destruction will result.

And that, my friends, is what Human Rights Commissions in this country are all about.  They decide what you will be allowed to say in public, because YOU, bumpkin that you are, might decide incorrectly.  Even doctors ate too immoral, venal, deluded, brainwashed, stupid, all of the above to get it right, what possible hope could there be that you will?  You morons!

Is there any faint chance that this belief system will turn out well for Canada?  Going by the historical record, no.  All centrally planned, centrally controlled societies have ended badly to date.  Even large companies have a habit of ending badly when they have too much centralization, too much bureaucracy and micro-management.

There is even evidence that what we see from history is something approaching a mathematical certainty.  Complex systems in manufacturing have a tendency to go out of time and devolve into chaotic uproar no matter how stringent the timing and control of each individual part is.  This Aug 9th-15th New Scientist has an article (Law and Disorder by Mark Buchanan, pg 30) on precisely this type of problem.  One example used was painting robots at GM.  When managers tried to schedule to robots the result was inefficient and costly.  When the robots were set up to schedule themselves using a simple algorithm running on each machine, the line schedule could not be predicted.  But GM saved a million bucks in paint alone that year.  Freedom to make decisions, when distributed among nodes, increases efficiency.

That's in dumb robots.  Ants don't have any central control at all, just basic programing to respond to pheromones and the rest is adaptive neurology.  Ants do pretty well, they've been around in their present form for a couple million years.

What chance is there that humans are going to respond well to rigid central controls?

And that is why I disagree with Mr. Cherniak on human rights commissions.  People can't be controlled.  Its impossible.

The Phantom

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