Jonathan

In a classroom exercise tonight, the instructor in my community-college Spanish language class read to us, from a text, a couple of paragraphs in response to which we were supposed to ask questions.

The passage the instructor read was about immigration. It asserted that immigrants come to the U.S. because life is easy here due to material abundance, and because our relatively strong economy makes for more opportunity than exists in most immigrants’ countries of origin. It also asserted that many Americans oppose immigration because they don’t like or understand the foreign ways of immigrants (or words to that effect). It did not mention that some foreigners might be attracted to the U.S. because of its freedom. Nor did it suggest that some Americans might object to immigration for reasons having nothing to do with disliking them there furriners – e.g., because they object to transfer payments generally, and particularly to taxing U.S. citizens to subsidize indigent non citizens.

Is this kind of subtly anti-American multi-culti bullshit typical of language texts nowadays? I guess I know the answer. It doesn’t make me feel any better that the chapter from which the offending passage came is titled: “Los Estados Unidos: Un pais multicultural.” Of course it’s true that American culture is an amalgam. I just wish the multi enthusiasts would, for once, pay as much attention to such essential parts of that culture as personal liberty and representative government as they do to material wealth and the supposed provincialism of our native citizens.

UPDATE:I don’t think the students in my class, who are mainly mature adults, or the instructor, who is an immigrant, actually believe the snake oil or even pay attention to it. I’m just taken aback by the casual attempt at indoctrination on the part of the textbook author. Maybe, to get a more balanced idea about American culture, we should ask immigrants, as Joanne Jacobs did.

Imagine you just got onto a bus and the only empty seat is next to some self-absorbed slacker who’s plugged into an iPod, eyes closed, rocking back and forth and singing loudly to himself. Now you know what it feels like to watch the new TV commercials for Apple’s online music service.

Via the Politech list comes notice of an FBI pilot program in which emergency-room physicians report to the feds suspicious injuries or illnesses that might have resulted from terrorist activities.

We’ll have to wait and see how it turns out, but from the article’s description of the program there appear to be some potential pitfalls. The program’s use of non-police agents raises the same questions as did the now-defunct homeland-security plan to deputize meter readers and cable-TV installers to report suspicious activities. The incentives in such schemes tend to be for massive over reporting. Given that there are probably very few terrorists among the population that uses emergency rooms, the odds of a very high percentage, and high absolute number, of false positives seem significant. The cost to the people who are incorrectly fingered will be high, and nobody knows if any terrorists will be caught. There will also be a temptation, as Declan McCullagh notes, to expand the program to report drug use and other activities that are unrelated to terrorism.

This program is a bit like the system for reporting child abuse, except that there are probably several orders of magnitude more child abusers in the health-care-seeking population than there are terrorists, and deciding which medical problems result from terrorist activity is probably much less clear cut than deciding whether a child has been abused. I don’t know if the FBI is up to the task. (The Bureau is still trying doggedly to make a case against Steven Hatfill, for supposedly mailing the anthrax-laced letters that to some of us seem more likely to have been sent by the Sept. 11 hijackers.) It’s difficult for me not to be skeptical that the benefits of this program will exceed the costs even if it does catch the occasional terrorist.

There is also the matter of the spirit in which this program is being promoted.

That approach, Allswede acknowledges, sometimes raises issues with the constitutional right of being presumed innocent until proven guilty.

“That was in the days of our founding fathers when the worst thing that could happen to you was your horse was stolen,” he said. “We were willing to give up a few horses in order to prevent innocent people from going to jail. But in the era of bio terrorism, when you could lose a city, the threshold has changed.”

This is the new justification for government snooping and bureaucratic empire building: with the existence of WMD, the stakes are so high that safeguarding the rights of individuals (life, liberty, and property are contemptuously dismissed as “a few horses”) is secondary. This is a dangerous idea.

I’d like to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt but I can’t. It never accounted adequately for its abuses at Waco and Ruby Ridge; its leaders stymied proper analysis of pre-Sept. 11 intelligence and didn’t take responsibility for their failure (they still have jobs); it has bungled major investigations and covered up malfeasance (the Crime Lab). Its competence is questionable. This snooping plan deserves more scrutiny.

Remember William Pitt’s apothegm:

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

Here’s a tricky situation. It reminds me of this.

Amazon should make it possible to link easily to individual posts in book- and product-review threads. Some of these review posts are great, easily the equivalent of high-end published reviews. Others are merely greatly entertaining. It isn’t currently possible to link to these posts except by linking to the poster’s “about me” page (which is cumbersome and not quite specific enough) or to a book’s main review page, which is almost useless for books that have lots of reviews. Real permalinks for individual reviews would have no downside for Amazon but would greatly facilitate the use of Amazon’s substantial online content in blog posts and other online publications. Whatever happened to “viral marketing”? Permalinks should be a natural for Amazon.

(Thanks to Val for sharing his Amazon knowledge.)