This rant is from an email I sent on May 6, 2009. Was I over the target?
In Canada there is no right to own property. (You can own it in name, but the government tell's you how to use it. It seems to me there is not much point in being the "owner," if you can't decide how to make use of your property.)
The only people standing up for property rights in Canada these days are the socialists! That may seem ironic to some of you but it's so true. No one is more adamant about the right to property than the socialists... so long as it is property belonging to someone else.
In Canada there is no right to privacy. (If you don't believe me try telling the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency to mind their own business when they demand you reveal your income to them.)
There is no right to freedom of association in Canada. There are many laws now which force you to deal with other people even if you would rather not. And if you disobey any of these laws, you can get into a lot of trouble.
Freedom of speech is severely restricted in many ways. It is illegal to advertise certain legal products. Through the CCRT, Canadian radio and TV stations are required to air a lot of home grown crap regardless, even, of whether their Canadian audience wants it. Various, so called, "Human Rights Commissions," in Canada have launched serious attacks on free speech in recent years as Ezra Levant (see link) and Mark Steyn, among others, have painfully discovered.
I think it goes without saying that if you are not free to say what is on your mind then you are not really free to think.
Hmmm... but no matter how the minutiae of our lives become ever more a matter of government control we can always derive some comfort from knowing, "Die Gedanken sind frei."
Well, that's how it worked for millennia. I am not so sure even this last refuge will remain secure.
If I go into sci-fi mode I see this: there will come a day when we won't need keyboards, mice and screens etc. to connect with the world wide web. Our minds will be directly connected somehow... maybe with some micro chip. (I think something like this is already happening.)
It will be great! We will be able to have instant, real-time chats with the billions of other web users. We will be able to check the spekking of words, (sic - he he, I meant spellig.) not that there will be any need to spell. If we want to know if there was a lot more asteroid activity before life appeared on earth, all we will have to do is wonder... and the best answers available will be right there in our mind, courtesy of googleneuron.com. The cyber-sex will be awesome!
Forget about sticking those earbuds in.... just close your eyes and listen to The Doors man! (or mon, depending on your era... maybe also "dudes," or "buddy," or "bro.") Wanna watch a movie? No problem. Just make sure you are not driving a car. (car?) Certainly, if the technology advances this far... the communication highway will be a two-way street. At first it will be voluntary... like the first ISP you signed up with. Then it will become a Human Right.
"today, there is a big push by the United Nations to make internet access a human right." -- source.
Oh no, not another human right! "Right's imply responsibilities," say the statists.
The connection between socialized medicine and the loss of personal liberty ought to be well understood by now. He who pays the piper calls the tune. Increasing political involvement in the provision of health care has gone hand-in-glove with increasing control of personal behaviour, from the wearing of seatbelts and helmets to the enjoyment of tobacco and the pleasure of pizza and burgers.
The same thing will certainly apply once the government starts pretending that it is supplying people with cerebral content via the internet.
And again, being a two way street, those in authority will come up with a million very persuasive reasons as to why they should have access to the content of your mind, just as they now have access to the content of your bank account.
Internet connection will become mandatory ... just like government funded education.
Most people won't have a problem with this. Why should we expect them to? They already bend over, without question, at the demands of the income tax man. (Who would build the roads and "educate," our children?)
And most of them won't have to worry because, the government just won't have enough resources to monitor every thought of every single human being, just as today they don't monitor every single bank account... unless the transaction involves more than $10,000 or whatever it is right now.
No, the thought monitoring will concentrate more on keywords.
We already have a pretty good indication as to what some of these keywords might be, courtesy of our Canadian Human Rights commissions and the DHS. They would be words like,
- Ron Paul
- libertarian
- Islam
- Constitution
- global warming is a scam
- mmmmm Marlboro!
Keywords like, "He shoots, he scores!" will be ignored. Or "nice boobs," wait... no that one might offend feminists.
How about, "I could go for a nice juicy steak right now." Well, this one would depend, not so much as whether the Greens object to it, as to whether their agenda has been met and we are all living (dying) in caves, eating raw meat (uhm, I mean vegetables.... unless the new group PETV has also sprouted up.) No, if the Greens finally prevail we'll be back to communication through smoke signals (Ooops... fire... CO2) ... make that drum beats (so long as the skin is not made from an animal or a petro-chemical.)
Well, we can always eat bugs. Pesticide bans will ensure there will be lots of those around. Yum.
"None Are So Enslaved as Those Who Falsely Believe They Are Free."
