Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting and horrible story on war crimes: “Russia Turned a Bucha Building Into an Execution Site and Underground Prison,” by Thomas Grove. My advice is on a related but different issue and, don’t worry, it is directly related to America!
A broom is made of a long handle and a brush. If you find a long handle lying around, you should say that you found a long handle, not a brush. Similarly, a cartridge is made of (1) a primer affixed to the bottom of (2) a casing which is filled with (3) powder, and of (4) a bullet at the other end of the casing. If you find a casing on the ground, you cannot say (as states a caption under an accompanying photograph, a detail of which is reproduced below) that you have found a bullet. (The journalist is probably not the one who wrote the caption.) The bullet is the part that went through somebody and is most likely stuck into some object tens or hundreds feet away.
Perhaps it should be a condition of the job, even in America sadly, that journalists and their editors own and shoot guns. Similarly, a newspaper should not hire a journalist or an editor who cannot distinguish between a handle and a brush.
The same story confirms a different and (perhaps) more substantive idea. The journalist reports on a Ukrainian arrested by Russian soldiers and later detained in an infamous jail and torture center:
Mr. Zakharchenko said he wasn’t fighting and handed over his phone, a late-model iPhone his son had given him, so that the Russian soldiers could check the contacts and photographs. He watched a Russian soldier download the contents of his phone onto a computer and then look up his domestic identity number. The Russian officer then asked him about time he had spent in the Russian city of Tula as a welder in 2018.
Encapsulated there is one major argument against ID papers and “domestic identity numbers” (like on your driver’s license, passport, or social security card): they too easily allow the agents of a foreign or domestic tyrant to find information to persecute those they don’t like.
Details of a photograph in the Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2022
READER COMMENTS
Mark Brady
Apr 23 2022 at 8:09pm
Pierre, why should you (and your fellow writers on EconLog) be concerned that your (their) posts be directly related to America (by which I assume you mean the United States of America)? Some of the best posts on EconLog have nothing specifically to do with the USA.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 23 2022 at 9:12pm
Mark: I totally agree. I have noticed though–or I think I have noticed–that my posts that ostensibly deal with foreign issues don’t get as many comments, like when I talk about the war in Ukraine. So I was telling my potential readers with a wink: “Read this and comment: it is about America!”
steve
Apr 24 2022 at 7:38am
AFAICT the drive for national ID is driven by the desire for voter ID and immigration concerns. First, the kind of voter fraud that would be stopped by voter ID is rare it basically does not exist. Lots of politicians have spent a lot of our money looking for it but they cant find it, yet they claim it still exists. While we can argue the risk rewards of laws/regulations I would hope that when the reward is zero we would all agree its a bad idea. Spending time and money to stop a non-existent problem leaves it open to abuse. Employers are already pretty good at getting around rules to hire illegals. I find to hard to believe that this one more thing solves the issue. Just one more hassle for me.
Steve
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