For Jim Murphy and Vince Cable

But your are only giving parents the appearence of choice. The REAL choice is in the hands of the hierarchies. If you really believe in freedom of choice then try choosing Eton. This is bullshit, which serves nobody but the Established Order.

As for the wars  on criminal markets, they are both equally futile, equally costly and equally, by the end of the day, pointless. You would only have an argument if it were true that the war on child porn protected children. As the market is expanding via the internet, you cannot argue that. The only irrationality rests with those who tell us, on the one hand, that prohibition doesn't work and that going back to having multinational corporations distributing  45,000 tonnes of Heroin globally as in the good old days is far preferable to the 6-7000 tonnes confined to a tiny area like today, and saying of some other criminal commodity, that prohibition is a success when, clearly, it isn't. Besides Libertarians can only really argue against manufacture in the latter case, if they argue against possession they favour banging people up for being part of a crime that somebody else committed, possibly years ago.  Not terribly rational or liberal really. (After all the usual arguments concerning narcotics are always stressing that resources would better spent targetting the suppliers not the consumers.) 

The truly rational response to both is that it may not work totally, given the nature of supply and demand, but it does limit the production and does serve some kind of purpose after all.

I did miss out the best response though. I argued that as Hume argued that varying degrees of probability governed our concepts of reality, it was fair to prohibit items which we know from experience have a higher degree of probability of impacting negatively on society in general. I was met with the response, "Oh, well being born black is a  sure sign of probable later criminality, do you advocate locking them up as well, as a preventative measure?" That told me everything I needed to know. 

I am afraid that the notion of "choice" is dependent on who is actually making the choice. All you will create through "choice" is an uneducated underclass which no schools consider worth wasting their time on. To pretend that you are offering consumer choice when  good old nepotism, old boy network etc are what are really the detemining factors in so far as selection is concerned is pretty unfair.

Again the notion of competitive schooling is, to my mind, self defeating. As league tables appear to show nothing but the ability to pass exams, such schools would be so concerned at reaching the top position (to please shareholders and boost applications for the next year's intake) that what I would term "education" would quickly give way to purely Utilitarian teaching methods geared more around playing the system than educating. A return to the days of Gradgrind is not progress.  

I believe that everybody has a right to an education, whether they appreciate it or not at the time. There is always something that will plant a seed that may germinate later.I would have no objection to streaming between practical and academic subjects within given schools, but schools competing on that basis alone would be socially divisive.

Well I have very little time for the educational system anyway. I would have to argue whether "elitism" is a product of education at all or simply a product of a steady well equipped social ethos, alien to most council estates. If you are the son of a nuclear physicist, for example, then you are more likely to have somebody on hand to help with the examination process. I believe that is a motivational factor not covered by your ideas.

My own experience of grammar school was that I found myself flung into an alien world  where I was force fed facts that were of little interest or use to me and was spat out at the end of the process "intellectually"alienated from my family but equally not wishing to be a part of the world that was on offer. It wasn't because I was stupid, it was the method of teaching that brooked no arguments. Personally I would favour a system of voluntary education where people of any age can opt in or out as they want to. 

I just kind of sense that your solution would create forms of  educational apartheid. So wheras I agree that the system is lousy, I am not sure the creation of specialist splinter schools is the answer.

Historically an education was intended to be all embracing, to be learned was to have a good general understanding of specialisms beyond your own. Philosophers like Spinoza, Leibniz, Descartes et al were also engaged in scientific and mathematical work as well as their philosophical one. I would tend to oppose any system that would work against that possibility, especially if the only aim of it was to generate some economic miracle or other.

Although I would favour such a system, I am not certain it would fit too well within the context of our "success" driven careerist culture. The emphasis on winning or losing and the general pressures to conform to such a narrowly defined pathway would win out.  

I am also unconvinced by the idea that following a specialism neccesarily leads to a broader educational experience later on. I tend to find that careerist notions and the neccesity to make money work against the idea of learning for its own sake. People seem more concerned with ticking the right examination boxes to enable themselves to earn big bucks rather than having a real interest in acquiring an intellect. To a certain extent I blame consumerism and its related ethos which seems to be the rooting of your ideas. I remember reading James Kirkup writing that he found his time as an English Tutor profoundly depressing as his students were not interested in deviating from the examination curriculum which meant that any extraneous ideas or authors he tried to introduce them to were met with indifference. There were one or two people who shared his passion for learning but the rest were there to tick a specific box. 

As I say, these factors not only depend on the schooling you receive but also your social background and the support structures you have socially, not to mention connections.

My nocturnalism is a result of five years working nights not the result of gunfire, whether it be drugs or child porngraphy the issue is over. 

It is what comes of ass kissing the corporates and allowing market forces to dictate educational policy for its own ends.

Whoa!  The corporates' ability to influence policy is nothing to do with market forces and everything to do with centralised government power.

A genuine market exists when the supplier responds to the demands of the consumer, but in education, instead of responding to the demands of the parent, state schools respond to the demands of government, which will always be vulnerable to lobbying.  Take the government out of the equation and you reduce the power of the corporates too.

Paul Lockett's last blog post... Public Sector Spending is Regressive

I would also have to argue that your "rationality" is somewhat skewed. If you were to be rational about the topics, you would be saying of both: "Yes, these things are a reality, prohibition isn't doing an awful lot of good for either, perhaps we should accept the reality of both and seek to make harm reduction/damage limitation the main basis in regard to both."

The fact that you want to apply these "harm reduction strategies" to protect those who make a deliberate, individual choice to play around with toxic illegal substances and yet have no wish to make similar laws protecting children involved in child porn only indicates the one sided, corporate, profit based nature of your arguments.

Of course it suits me either way because it simply means that you believe prohibition is a valid option in regard to criminal markets.  

As is usual, when people run out of rational arguments, they resort to censorship.

It is hilarious to hear people shooting off their mouths concerning the "failures" of prohibition and trying to force and coerce public opinion to suit their ill informed, historically illiterate and morally dubious agendas suddenly go all quiet when their arguments are put into a context they don't like.

It is equally hilarious to watch them scurry like frightened mice into their mouseholes claiming that when they say prohibition doesn't work it wasn't really universal at all, and when they argue that a law's value can only be judged by its efficacy and that if it doesn't work it should be changed, it is also not to be taken as having universal application. It is even better that when they claim that having moral objections against certain propositions are invalid and that a rational scientific/economic approach should be used, it is also not a universal law.

So what are we actually left with?

There was an interesting 2 page spread in the Independent about the frontline of the "War" on Cocaine having now shifted geographical location to the Mexican border as the trade route has changed. The Mexican President was quoted as saying that the western media seems fond of exaggerating the realities of the "War" in general. No doubt because it suits some corporate agenda?

It is interesting that the activities of the groups of gangsters who trade in that particular criminal market get media coverage almost wall to wall, wheras the other criminal gangs involved with Child Pornography are swept under the carpet. Why is this? They are both realities. Or is it simply that the pharmaceutical industries pay big bucks to have their corporate agenda promoted in this way?   

As this has gone off topic, I'll wrap up with one last reply to:

The fact that you want to apply these "harm reduction strategies" to protect those who make a deliberate, individual choice to play around with toxic illegal substances and yet have no wish to make similar laws protecting children involved in child porn only indicates the one sided, corporate, profit based nature of your arguments.

Inadvertently, you've actually highlighted my reason for a difference of approach.  If an adult wants to take drugs and accept the consequences then, as they are an adult, I don't think it's any of my business to dictate their lifestyle choices.  A child being used to produce in pornography, on the other hand, is being subjected to harm either because they haven't consented or because they aren't mature enough to offer fully informed consent.  By the same token, I would want laws prohibiting the supplying of drugs to children for the same reason.

Of course it suits me either way because it simply means that you believe prohibition is a valid option in regard to criminal markets.

That's a tautology.  If selling an item wasn't prohibited, it wouldn't be a criminal market.  The question is whether or not a market should be criminal in the first place.

Paul Lockett's last blog post... Public Sector Spending is Regressive

Again you are missing the point. The issue is about supply and and demand and the exchange in commodities. The use of children in Pornography is going to happen irrespective of whether you have a personal moral objection to it or not. In that respect it is the exact parrallel of the narcotics issue.

Time and again we are told that one does not have to like narcotics to see the sense of legalisation and that objections are founded on little but emotion and "Daily Mail" consumerism. Yet, here we are, supporting prohibition of a commodity because we do not like it or because it makes us feel icky. Either you accept that personal distaste has the right to play a part in the legislative proceedure or you do not.

You say you believe it should be nobodies business whether somebody else turns themselves into a drooling zombie, yet you also argue that certain images and the consumption therof (NOT the manufacturing which is a seperate issue altogether) should be criminal. That seems to be far more intrusive to me. What I am asking for is consistency, unfortunatly consistency in this case would have to lead to the complete legalisation and commercial distribution of the animated/ virtual/even written kind of CP as no harm has been committed in its production and the decriminalisation of the rest of it. Somebody viewing images of a crime committed several years ago cannot be held any more responsible for it than somebody viewing cctv footage of a burglary.

So either you should face up to the realities of your anti-prohibitionist stance or stop lecturing/haranguing/attempting to coerce people to your way of thinking regarding narcotics.

Of course, the other big spanner to be thrown into the anti prohibitionist works, is Alfred Kinsey arguing that paedophilic relationships themselves were morally neutral up unless violence and coercion  could be proven to have taken place. So he would no doubt argue that the fault lies in the criminalisation, not the videos themselves. Mary Ruwart certinly seems to think that high prices for children related pornorgraphy offers an incentive for rhe abuser. But then she's a Libertarian so what do you expect?  

Now this is an interesting development.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/blog/talking_politics/article/10080/

Nice to see I have my finger on the pulse of things when it comes to the crunch.