On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.
We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694 – 1778), Letter to M. de Grenonville (1719).
Author: Editor
Governments want us to install apps on our mobile devices that would track our movements.
If we do not do so, politicians say, they cannot ‘re-open’ society.
Better idea: nix the stay-at-home orders and entice us to use your Little Brother apps, you intrusive, over-stepping tyrants.
OK. I confess: they are not called Little Brother apps. Declan McCullagh, writing in Reason, calls them “contact tracking apps,” and notes that, while American states consider them, Australia’s and Singapore’s prime ministers are really pushing them.
And are complaining that voluntary adoption has been lackluster.
As for those low adoption rates?
Huzzah!
For a variety of reasons, I will be resisting this new tech.
“Different strains of contact-tracing software are emerging,” explains McCullagh. “All of the more prominent systems rely on a centralized server of some sort, either to perform matching of COVID-positive identifiers or to distribute lists of COVID-positive identifiers for matching locally on your device.” The idea is to notify us when coming close to an infected person.
Further confession: my relationship with computing gadgets being so fraught with … tensions … that such an app would no doubt seem more a Big Bother.
Note the lack of an ‘r.’
It is one thing to offer a new service for our benefit. It is another thing to hold our freedom of movement in hock — install our apps, say these pols, or no return to normalcy!
Bothersome Big Brotherish attacks on our privacy get their biggest boosts from governments.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Jane Jacobs
Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn’t be relied on to guard henhouses.
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Cinco de Mayo
In 1862, troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza stopped a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla in Mexico — an event leading to the popular “Cinco de Mayo” celebration.
No cause for celebration, however, is the bicentennial of Karl Marx’s birth.
“Democrats and NeverTrump conservatives across the country freaked out,” writes David Byler, a data analyst and political columnist for The Washington Post.
Why?
Last week, Rep. Justin Amash (L‑Mich.) became the first official Libertarian member of Congress and, more importantly to those hyperventilating, also announced he was seeking the Libertarian Party nomination for president.*
Already the horserace handicappers of politics are galloping ahead. “[T]he only real effect Amash could have in this campaign,” NeverTrumper George Conway tweeted, “is to enhance Trump’s chances.”
A Detroit News poll conducted last summer in the crucial state of Michigan showed Amash “luring independent voters” away from Democrat nominee Joe Biden. The surprised pollster suggested that while “conventional wisdom would say he would hurt President Trump by taking away Republican votes,” Amash may instead “give independent voters … an outlet to not vote for the Democrat.”
In 2016, younger voters were especially interested in an alternative to Trump — but not Hillary Clinton. At 40 years of age, Amash’s youth could be a distinct advantage over President Donald Trump, 73, and former Vice-President Joe Biden, 77.
Speaking of older — though still active politically — happy birthday to 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark! He turns 90 years of age today.
“Clark’s name appeared on the ballot in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and Guam,” David Boaz remembers at Cato.org, “the first third-party candidate” to be “on every possible ballot since Theodore Roosevelt in 1916.”
Ed Clark did not win, but he put Libertarians on the map. And I got to cast my first vote for president — proudly.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Not only do I share Amash’s basic political philosophy, I very much applaud his conscientiousness in publicly explaining his thinking behind every vote cast.
Note: I petitioned to put Ed Clark on the ballot around the country and, at 20 years old, served as campaign chairman in Arkansas. Years later, Ed would testify on my behalf at my draft registration resistance trial.
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George F. Will
A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
George F. Will (born May 4, 1941), quoted in A Ford Not A Lincoln (1975), Richard Reeves, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ch, 1 ; as cited by The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), ed. Robert Andrews, Columbia University Press, p. 707.