Re: [tlug] From an enthusiast TLUG follower

[Stuart Luppescu <lupp@example.com>]

On Thu, 2020-08-27 at 17:18 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> The difference between politicians and bureaucrats is not the absence
> of heart or presence of cruelty.  The difference is that the
> bureaucrat keeps her job by being honest and consistent about it, and
> the politician keeps his by being dishonest and inconsistent about it.

Yes, that's a reasonable point. But my objection is the rigid, inhumane
method of enforcing those rules, without exception. (You call it
"honest and consistent"; I call it "inflexible, inhumane and rigid".)
My wife and I returned to Japan together; I was turned away, she was
let it (because of her citizenship), effectively breaking us up and
keeping me away from our children as well. I admit that our thinking
that the immigration officials would not work to break up our family
was too much 甘え but still. When we arrived at Narita, they swabbed our
noses for the PCR test. My wife's test came back negative a few days
later. They didn't even process my swab. They didn't care about whether
I was positive or negative for SARS-CoV-2 or not, belying their claim
that the strict immigration rules come from a desire to not spread
COVID-19. I was willing to quarantine myself for the 14 days or
whatever, but they were more concerned with "honest and consistent"
enforcement of the rules.

> 
> If we want better bureacracies, we need to elect better politicians.

Yeah, right. Like that's ever going to happen.

-- 
Stuart Luppescu
Chief Psychometrician (ret.)
UChicago Consortium on School Research
http://consortium.uchicago.edu