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Europe’s Entry/Exit System (EES) will become fully operational from April 10, 2026, replacing passport stamps with digital records and biometric checks.
EU countries are now collecting the fingerprints of all foreign travelers. They are also taking photographs of travelers' faces. The result so far is that 2 hour lines are common for entry into the EU.
I'm generally opposed to this. For one, I'm libertarian in that I oppose most international borders. The reason is that it violates human rights for very little justified purpose. There are ways to justify borders, but no country or entity on Earth is in the position to do that at the moment. The EU does not have a moral right to do this when it won't stop 99% of the harmful immigration into the EU, which is all legal.
This measure is offensive to people with legitimate rights to travel, while not significantly affecting those coming in immorally but legally, for the maybe-upside of catching a few more street criminals trying to come in on a fake passport. Is the point of this that cocaine prices should go up even more in the EU? Why? What is the point? Who is vulnerable to cocaine addiction? Why does money need to be spent on protecting them from their own decisions?
I'm predicting this will spread, too. If the EU is collecting fingerprints of all of country X's citizens that go to it, then country X will want to collect fingerprints for all EU citizens that come into it. Otherwise the EU has an advantaged biometrics database. As a proponent of free travel, every little tin-pot government collecting vast biometrics sounds like it will chill the ease and personal security of traveling. How long until it's DNA?
I never failed to understand how libertarians could think like that. Human rights are fiction created by the state and existing only trough the state.
And it is easy to prove - take any human, do the thoroughest possible vivisection on them and you won't be able to find a single right.
This applies to a ton of things though. Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, mercy, fairness, god, faith, happiness, race, love, LLCs, etc. The list goes on. Not everything is a physically existing element.
A strictly materialist viewpoint of reality is likely insufferably bleak to the point that no one alive would want to live it.
Dangit, now I'm embarrassed that you got to the Pratchett comparison before me.
haha, it is definitely my favorite quote of his. It has made a tremendous impact on my views.
It is probably my least favourite Pratchett passage - it may not be objectively the worst, but I think it's a terrible argument, and people citing it as inspirational drive me crazy. I want to yell, "It's not inspirational! It's stupid! It's very, very stupid!"
But I might be a little unfair.
Oooo, this might be an interesting conversation, because I like the general outlines of the whole passage. I think it fits well with the general idea of humans as a social, story-oriented species whose need for belief drives our psyche. I think looking through humankind through that lens is very illuminating. Idk about it being aspirational, I take it as cutting, disrobing, shedding of our delusions of rationality.
But I'd be interested in hearing why you think its stupid and a terrible argument?
I'll take this as an opportunity for a longer effort post, so pardon me if I go a bit beyond the brief.
I think Terry Pratchett is the atheist version of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien.
Lewis and Tolkien are authors that young, nerdy, or fantasy-inclined Christians, especially those from an English cultural background, read while growing up. They often make a very strong impression on us. I know that I was moved and a lot of my worldview, as an adult, was shaped by these two seminal authors.
Sometimes atheists read and appreciate them as well, and with all appropriate grace and charity, while I'm glad that others read them too, I don't think they make as much sense for atheists. The Christianity is too foundational - too much of Lewis and Tolkien's writing is impregnated with faith - for them to make sense otherwise.
Pratchett, however, was an atheist, and I think his work is, just as much as Lewis' is with Christianity and Tolkien's is with Catholicism, impregnated with atheism and skepticism. Pratchett is in his own way a very cynical author. Yes, there are gods in Discworld, but they are not particularly worth worshipping, and the religion he is most sympathetic to, the Omnians, are portrayed as nice but nonetheless engaging in a kind of sympathetic self-delusion.
Pratchett's real heroes are existentialists, like Sam Vimes, or Granny Weatherwax, or Death. Death admits openly: "There is no justice. There's just me." Vimes is a man who is fully aware that the society he lives in is corrupt, unjust, and miserable, and yet, grumbling all the while, refuses to submit to nihilism, and makes the world a bit better. Weatherwax is a woman who dismisses religion and faith with, "I've already got a hot water bottle", and yet nonetheless spends her life trying, in her own irascible way, to make the world a little better for the people who live in it.
Often I find, when I read a lot by an author, that author has a kind of general tone or mood. Lewis has an erudite yet common-sensical decency to him. Tolkien is wistful, and lost in memory. Chesterton is delighted by paradox. Adams is wrily amused at the absurdity of the world. The mood I get from Pratchett is, surprisingly for a comedian, anger. Pratchett writes with this white-hot anger at injustice, at unfairness, at a world where stupid bullies tread all over ordinary people just trying to enjoy the good things this world offers. More than that, I think Pratchett has a kind of moral outrage at God. God refuses to even do us the decency of existing so that he can be properly accused of neglect!
Lewis or Tolkien look at the world and they see something there, a divine wellspring to creation, a loving creator who fashioned us, in whom we live and love and have our being, and to whom we will return. Pratchett looks at the world and sees none of that. It's not there. The world may be full of powerful beings separate from us, but they don't really care, and they can't give meaning to life. So what do you do?
I think Pratchett's Discworld books are, in their core, about how to be moral in a godless, meaningless universe.
Yes, he writes comedy. That's the other big difference between him and Lewis/Tolkien. The Christian authors are funny sometimes, but they're saying something sincerely. Pratchett is trying to make you laugh, but he's always, I think, got this really sharp bite aimed at all the absurdities and injustices of the world. Pratchett thus has sympathy for the idealists - consider Sergeant Carrot, or the good Omnians like Brutha or Mightily Oats - but ultimately he's closer to Vimes or Weatherwax or Susan Sto Helit. The world is frequently garbage and disappointing. There is no avoiding that. But this is the one you've got and it's up to you to do your best anyway.
There is no justice other than what we make happen ourselves. So we had best get to work.
Put charitably, this is what I think the "atom of justice" speech is trying to say. Justice isn't a metaphysical constant; it's not out there, it's not written into the fabric of the universe, and there isn't a god coming to make it happen for us. We have to do it ourselves. If stories about gods or spirits or hogfathers have any virtue, it's that they train us to believe the impossible, to go on seeking justice, despite the emptiness of the universe we're in.
Suppose you were a young, teenage atheist, and a fantasy fan. You like people like Lewis or Tolkien, or even their lesser imitators like Robert Jordan, or Weis and Hickman. However, you cannot share their faith, or make that connection. What can you do? Pratchett comes along and writes equally entertaining stories, in an equally expansive mythos, that addresses this question for you. Here's what you do if you share these values, but can't believe in their metaphysical commitments. You acknowledge this godless universe and then set out to make justice happen anyway. More than even that, Pratchett's theory of "the little lies" actually helps contextualise the Christian authors - perhaps Narnia or Middle-earth are lies, but they are lies that help prepare you to believe, and fight for, the big ones.
(Compare Lewis' Puddleglum: "...I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.")
So, all that said, why do I hate the "atom of justice" speech?
Well, mainly just for the reason I said. I think it doesn't work because it's a straw-man. Nobody believes that justice comes in atoms, or mercy in molecules. Things that aren't elemental particles are not lies, or any less worthy of being valued or loved. Death's rebuttal of people who believe in justice does not land, and because I know Pratchett was a brilliant author and extremely capable fantasist, I believe that Pratchett could have come up with a metaphor that worked. It is not beyond his imagination to make the same point in a more artful way. After all, most of his other books make the same point, often more successfully.
Maybe I am just an intolerable pedant. But I hope it comes through that I'm saying this from a place of appreciation for Pratchett.
This was well written and definitely insightful. Allow me to mirror with an equally broad interpretation. I am however, much less eloquent, hopefully my ideas will make it through my torturous use of the English language.
Your conception of Terry Pratchett as this ex-theist, now atheist author, angry, shaking his fist into the sky at the injustice of existence. Wishing such a god of his youth would exist, so that he could to be taken to task for the cruelly of the world, is pretty close. But I think your view misses a core piece, though I think you touch on the penumbra's of it. Pratchett is at his core a cynical humanist. He might rage against the absence of the divine but he more rages against the follies of mankind.
One of those follies, is our penchant for delusion. We lie to ourselves a lot. We delude our selves into believing we are nobler, better, purer than we are. We divide ourselves along arbitrary boundaries, other each other, create monsters in the guise of man and justify it with copious amounts of bullshit. We call upon gods of every shape, size, and creed to justify our actions, our lies. We pretend the world is complex and complicated, that there is so much grey.
In this vein, Pratchett positions himself as the magnifying glass, the pickaxe. He does what many comedians of the more cynical bent do. He pulls at that edifice of delusions. He constructs fantastical worlds that at the same time mirror our own, and he uses them to speak truth about the human condition. Sure there is that anger you see, but there is also an unburdening, a liberation to the authentic human experience. I agree Pratchett might have favorites characters like Carrot, and that he really speaks through characters like Sam Vimes, Granny Weatherwax, Havelock Vetinari, and Death. But those characters all to a tee, see through the delusions of mankind.
In a different psychology profile of a section of readers, put yourself in the shoes of a young high-functioning Autist, of agnostic religious belief. Your world is one of lies, people say one thing and mean another. Everyone is constantly claiming this or that faith or creed is perfect, but not that piece of it, that gospel, that word, the "situations" is different, the rules need to be bent, "stop trying to make everything so simple", "can't you see the world is more complex", "stop being so rigid". But in comes fantasy literature. At first: Tolkien & Lewis, their worlds are so much more pure, the good, are noble and good. Evil is bad. The world is black and white, and simple. Complex in its expansive history, its cohesive world, but fundamentally an honest world, full of wonder, and symbolism. More than enough for your extreme pattern-recognizing brain to fall in love with. Then Adams, with his absurdism, you can't help but relate because the real world is so absurd, there is so much bullshit, so much fakery trying to dress itself up. Then you discover Pratchett, cynical, humorous Pratchett. Nobody in Narnia or Middle earth pretends the world is more complicated. Sauron never tries to sell you the "its complicated" argument, Aragon isn't genociding Haradrim while acting like he's a noble king. Gondor's economic policy is not discussed. Discworld however feels closer to reality, it feels more representative of the IRL delusions. And Pratchett peels back the curtain, shows that yes, even the more "complex" world really is simple. In that sense, the fantasy is realer, it requires less make-believe, less suspension of belief, but is still full of wonder and whimsey. It helps that Pratchett is clever and funny.
Of course then in my case, I went onto the darker side, AGoT, Black Company, Malazan, Gene Wolfe, R. Scott Bakker. They help kill the child and prepare you for the cold reality of adulthood in a world filled with the nasty little monsters we call humans.
But the "atom of justice" quote from this lens is not about making our own justice in the world, or even that they train us to believe the impossible in the empty world. It's about the epistemological idea that not all lies, all delusions are bad. There are very real, very important things, to mankind that are not elementary particles. Collective ideas that we have dreamed up. That are core to what makes us human. The unfiltered truth of reality is not some moral bedrock that should be aspired to. It should go without saying, but in case it doesn't, people might not literally believe that justice comes in atoms but they absolutely believe in concepts that don't actually exist in physical reality and they treat denial of those, very not true things, as massively transgressive. So young Autistic child, be less like the Auditors, and more like Death. It is to me, a wonderful expose on how flawed humanity is, how there is beauty in that flaw, and how that flaw is what makes humans, humans.
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