Finally a good bit of common sense coming from the offices of the European Commission:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6194492.stm
I am staunchly against any prospect of entry of Turkey into the European Union. Leaving aside the religious and geographical debates, which bear great significance nevertheless, Turkey's bid to enter the European club is abhorrently arrogant.
We have seen Turkey in action right before the beginning of the membership talks, claiming aggressively that it would settle for nothing less than full membership. We have seen it in action again, when it expected to negotiate with the EU while treating Cyprus as a non-existent state.
These are the same guys that claim they did nothing wrong when massacring and torturing Armenians.
Religion bears no significance in this debate. The EU was founded as a Union of countries with a common objective and common fundamental aspects of culture.
The latest enlargement was a big enough shock for the core values of the Union, transforming it into a big charitable organisation acting as a big moneybag for anyone who isn't too lazy to stick his hands into it. Bulgaria's and Romania's accession later this year will be another rushed mistake.
The EU doesn't even know what it wants right now, all thank to saboteur Prodi's tenure as President of the European Commission. History shall judge him harsher than his peers. This weakness is open for exploitation by such countries like Turkey, who want to join on their own terms, giving the least possible and gaining all that's available.
Today's Turkey does not belong in Europe, nor will it in a century according to my instinct. It needs deep reforming and radical change, from a State founded on everything but the principles for which Europe stands for.
They came to us shouting and screaming, thinking they could dictate the course of action to be taken. Let us all show them the door.
Wednesday, 29 November 2006
Tuesday, 28 November 2006
Veritas sucks
The motion was defeated, as was obvious from the very beginning. I appreciate debating society are very professional, but really why would anyone in their sane mind invite Veritas to speak in favour of such a delicate motion? Those guys are quite unpleasant, and I really didn't feel like speaking in favour of this motion at all. The only reason why I decided to was because the chairman allowed a last round of speeches and no-one wanted to speak in proposition so, well, I decided to give it a go.
Needless to say I cocked it up because the point I wanted to make got tangled up in my mind and I didn't sound persuasive at all. Hell, who would WANT to sound persuasive with Veritas next to you? They emanated a negative aura that would have scared even the "Exorcist" star.
On the contrary, the Prison service people were very down-to-earth and really knew how to address the audience. I am not a trade unionist and neither am I a fan of such institutions, but I never deny anyone my respect based on political colour. I had a pleasant conversation with one of them afterwards in the pub, and he was an extremely insightful person and despite his approaching 60 years of age he was energetic as some 20 year olds can only dream of being.
What this world needs is less Veritas and more down-to-earth people who can argue a point without trying to hit delicate nerves by mentioning "murderers" and "rapists" when talking crime. I went in desiring to vote in favour with all my heart and ended up abstaining. This is what bad speakers bring to the political debate.
Why can't people stop using rhetoric and playing on people's fears? I talk individual rights, society, State, freedom, but I don't go into trying to promote my ideology by playing on people's deepest uneasiness.
Veritas should spend more time in the pub and less time in politics.
Needless to say I cocked it up because the point I wanted to make got tangled up in my mind and I didn't sound persuasive at all. Hell, who would WANT to sound persuasive with Veritas next to you? They emanated a negative aura that would have scared even the "Exorcist" star.
On the contrary, the Prison service people were very down-to-earth and really knew how to address the audience. I am not a trade unionist and neither am I a fan of such institutions, but I never deny anyone my respect based on political colour. I had a pleasant conversation with one of them afterwards in the pub, and he was an extremely insightful person and despite his approaching 60 years of age he was energetic as some 20 year olds can only dream of being.
What this world needs is less Veritas and more down-to-earth people who can argue a point without trying to hit delicate nerves by mentioning "murderers" and "rapists" when talking crime. I went in desiring to vote in favour with all my heart and ended up abstaining. This is what bad speakers bring to the political debate.
Why can't people stop using rhetoric and playing on people's fears? I talk individual rights, society, State, freedom, but I don't go into trying to promote my ideology by playing on people's deepest uneasiness.
Veritas should spend more time in the pub and less time in politics.
Monday, 27 November 2006
Should we deport foreign criminals?
This is a speech I will try to make at tonight's Debating Society event, where the motion to be debated is "This House would deport all foreign criminals immediately".
-----------------------------
First of all, why is there a State? It is not a god-sent overlord that came to rule over us. It is the institution called to deal with matters that individuals and associations can't deal with on their own. One of the most important of these is the protection of people's rights from abuse by others, and the removal from society of such abusers.
The State has prisons, which serve the purpose of isolating an offender from society. If the offender is a citizen of that State, he or she will be released on completion of the prison sentence back into society because the State cannot deport its own citizens. But the State has no such obligation towards foreigners who have broken the law.
By coming as a foreigner into Britain you agree to abide by British laws, further your interests and by doing so contribute to the progress of British society. When you infringe on the rights of others, you break this agreement and have no right to stay.
I therefore find it ludicrous that we debate this issue while good old common sense would tell us that who has come here and broken the law has no place in this country any longer.
---------------------------
If I get the chance, then I'll post the reactions. If not, then you know my view anyway!
-----------------------------
First of all, why is there a State? It is not a god-sent overlord that came to rule over us. It is the institution called to deal with matters that individuals and associations can't deal with on their own. One of the most important of these is the protection of people's rights from abuse by others, and the removal from society of such abusers.
The State has prisons, which serve the purpose of isolating an offender from society. If the offender is a citizen of that State, he or she will be released on completion of the prison sentence back into society because the State cannot deport its own citizens. But the State has no such obligation towards foreigners who have broken the law.
By coming as a foreigner into Britain you agree to abide by British laws, further your interests and by doing so contribute to the progress of British society. When you infringe on the rights of others, you break this agreement and have no right to stay.
I therefore find it ludicrous that we debate this issue while good old common sense would tell us that who has come here and broken the law has no place in this country any longer.
---------------------------
If I get the chance, then I'll post the reactions. If not, then you know my view anyway!
Friday, 17 November 2006
On education and freedom
As John F. Kennedy once said, Liberty without Education is always in peril, Education without Liberty is always in vain.
What did he mean? Does it imply that we shouldn't teach people in undemocratic countries, or that in countries where education is failing liberties should be taken away out of fear of misuse?
Totally oppositely, as you might have guessed, JFK merely meant to express in simple terms a very straightforward truth: we need to be free to learn, and we need to learn to be free. The world has been driven by two powerful forces: Man's desire of freedom and Man's desire to know.
How do these two forces interact? The possible interpretations are as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert, but let me pick one of them and look at it in detail.
Education is not all about mnemonics. You might learn whole books by heart and still never understand how to apply the general knowledge you have acquired. Whether you know that 2+2 is 4 doesn't mean you grasp the principle behind addition.
Education is the development of a human mind into something unique, powerful and independent. The whole purpose of teaching children to read is to enable them to acquire further knowledge later in both academic and independent study. A teacher's purpose is to teach students to ask themselves questions, and seek answers.
But what happens when you ask yourself questions, and seek answers? You don't think just about the elementary things in life; you might wander into the abstract realms of philosophical thinking, taking human nature and the world to bits in order to analyse it.
Here's where liberty becomes essential. Philosophical and independent thinking in general require no boundaries for it to be set, to foster exploration and discovery of new concepts and doctrines. Had the ancients surrounded their lands with walls assuming there was nothing beyond, Columbus would have never been an explorer.
Free thinking, independent philosophical analysis and knowledge development occur only in those societies that are prepared to accept or debate the new findings in order to establish their validity. Where this is not the case, human beings drift into a state of idleness, performing only subsistence tasks without challenging the marvellous ability given to us in the form of critical thinking.
What is then the purpose of breeding new thinkers and educated people if we will deny them the right to develop their thinking talent and share their findings with us? Whereby we deny the liberty to think in a novel way, we take all purpose away from education beyond the level needed to carry out basic subsistence tasks such as counting the money at a rural market stall. This is unacceptable and is an insult to the human nature of Man.
Taking a look at the problem from the opposite direction, we notice a different focus. Whereby we have the freedom but not the infrastructure to deliver education and knowledge, people find themselves in an awkward situation of handling the precious gift of freedom without knowing even which way to hold it. We witness this situation in recently freed countries such as de-colonised Africa. Leaving aside the many responsibilities of the colonising powers in creating today's problems, we notice a particularly worrying trend.
Sub-Saharan Africa's crippling or non-existent education is an endemic problem brought by many factors such as unrest and poverty, and there's a vicious circle which makes these countries spiral deeper into trouble. Let us take a part of this chain, lack of education.
What happened? With de-colonisation, peoples who were used to some sort of domination (foreign, tribal or other) were bestowed with a precious gift which was independence and freedom to run themselves as a country. However, their critical thinking had not been fostered (full blame goes to the colonising powers), thus the newly-acquired freedom was squandered by loyalties arising along ethnic, religious or other lines instead of becoming a loyalty to the newly-freed community. As if this wasn't enough on its own, unscrupulous (and frequently uneducated but ferocious) leaders indoctrinated their people to believe that the only way to settle a dispute is to kill your opponent.
We left these populations at the mercy of unscrupulous warlords, unaware of how precious independence and liberty were to give them away. Had we educated these populations and opened their minds to the vast ocean of knowledge that centuries of civilisations have helped to fill, the value of freedom would have been much more appreciated.
All this serves to prove one essential point, grasped fully by Kennedy. As much as we need to set no boundaries to human thought and independence, we also have a moral obligation to empower people to cross known boundaries and explore the world outside their mindsets. Miss out on one of those commitments, and all your efforts are vain and result in nothing but waste and disaster.
What did he mean? Does it imply that we shouldn't teach people in undemocratic countries, or that in countries where education is failing liberties should be taken away out of fear of misuse?
Totally oppositely, as you might have guessed, JFK merely meant to express in simple terms a very straightforward truth: we need to be free to learn, and we need to learn to be free. The world has been driven by two powerful forces: Man's desire of freedom and Man's desire to know.
How do these two forces interact? The possible interpretations are as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert, but let me pick one of them and look at it in detail.
Education is not all about mnemonics. You might learn whole books by heart and still never understand how to apply the general knowledge you have acquired. Whether you know that 2+2 is 4 doesn't mean you grasp the principle behind addition.
Education is the development of a human mind into something unique, powerful and independent. The whole purpose of teaching children to read is to enable them to acquire further knowledge later in both academic and independent study. A teacher's purpose is to teach students to ask themselves questions, and seek answers.
But what happens when you ask yourself questions, and seek answers? You don't think just about the elementary things in life; you might wander into the abstract realms of philosophical thinking, taking human nature and the world to bits in order to analyse it.
Here's where liberty becomes essential. Philosophical and independent thinking in general require no boundaries for it to be set, to foster exploration and discovery of new concepts and doctrines. Had the ancients surrounded their lands with walls assuming there was nothing beyond, Columbus would have never been an explorer.
Free thinking, independent philosophical analysis and knowledge development occur only in those societies that are prepared to accept or debate the new findings in order to establish their validity. Where this is not the case, human beings drift into a state of idleness, performing only subsistence tasks without challenging the marvellous ability given to us in the form of critical thinking.
What is then the purpose of breeding new thinkers and educated people if we will deny them the right to develop their thinking talent and share their findings with us? Whereby we deny the liberty to think in a novel way, we take all purpose away from education beyond the level needed to carry out basic subsistence tasks such as counting the money at a rural market stall. This is unacceptable and is an insult to the human nature of Man.
Taking a look at the problem from the opposite direction, we notice a different focus. Whereby we have the freedom but not the infrastructure to deliver education and knowledge, people find themselves in an awkward situation of handling the precious gift of freedom without knowing even which way to hold it. We witness this situation in recently freed countries such as de-colonised Africa. Leaving aside the many responsibilities of the colonising powers in creating today's problems, we notice a particularly worrying trend.
Sub-Saharan Africa's crippling or non-existent education is an endemic problem brought by many factors such as unrest and poverty, and there's a vicious circle which makes these countries spiral deeper into trouble. Let us take a part of this chain, lack of education.
What happened? With de-colonisation, peoples who were used to some sort of domination (foreign, tribal or other) were bestowed with a precious gift which was independence and freedom to run themselves as a country. However, their critical thinking had not been fostered (full blame goes to the colonising powers), thus the newly-acquired freedom was squandered by loyalties arising along ethnic, religious or other lines instead of becoming a loyalty to the newly-freed community. As if this wasn't enough on its own, unscrupulous (and frequently uneducated but ferocious) leaders indoctrinated their people to believe that the only way to settle a dispute is to kill your opponent.
We left these populations at the mercy of unscrupulous warlords, unaware of how precious independence and liberty were to give them away. Had we educated these populations and opened their minds to the vast ocean of knowledge that centuries of civilisations have helped to fill, the value of freedom would have been much more appreciated.
All this serves to prove one essential point, grasped fully by Kennedy. As much as we need to set no boundaries to human thought and independence, we also have a moral obligation to empower people to cross known boundaries and explore the world outside their mindsets. Miss out on one of those commitments, and all your efforts are vain and result in nothing but waste and disaster.
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