2 forms of ID – this is about the cards

Are the letters ID inherently evil in that specific combination? They form an acronym for two of the main topics that spark up rants here – Intelligent Design (the belief that everything except evolution is so complex that God must have planned it in detail) and Identity Document (the UK’s psychiatrically-certifiable ID card scheme.)

It’s been a while since there was any complaint about the ID card scherme here. However, far from vanishing when it’s not in the news, it’s been creeping towards existence. THe BBC put up a page in December with arguments for and against. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/A2319176  The Fors basically consist of  “there would be less illegal immigration, benefit fraud , ID theft and crime in general.” None of these arguments are convincing. Nor, even if they were all true, would they seem to constitute enough of a public good to justify the full-scale imposition of  such constraints on traditional freedoms. Surely benefit fraud is the responsibility of DWP, Immigration of the Home Office, crime of the police. Aren’t they up to doing their jobs any more? The truly comical argument for ID is this, though.

Enhance sense of community: The government believes that identity cards would create a sense of shared citizenship, belonging and security

(I wondered what that lovely warm feeling I get from my bus pass was.)

If you don’t even need to know what the BBC gives as anti-ID arguments, you have probably decided a long time ago that the whole plan is both silly and dangerous. (See http://www.no2id.net/IDSchemes/faq.php if you want to read the arguments and find out about campaigns.)

You have probably heard people saying “But it’s inevitable.”  You almost certainly feel that it doesn’t matter what you think about what the government does because it never makes any difference anyway, look how mass protests stopped the Iraq war involvement (not)

Well, there is actually one way you can let the Government know that it is a deeply unsavoury plan. Go to http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/IDcards/ and sign the online petition against ID. I normally regard petitions as utterly pointless but there are reasons why this may have some impact. It’s on a site set up by the government itself to get input. If they can be made to see that this is no vote-winner, even a potential “poll tax” issue, they are going to step back sharpish.

The fiasco of the government’s current IT systems is already a scandal. Every IT project seems to cost untold millions; comes in millions over-budget; leads to civil service redundancies so services get worse;  and it doesn’t work properly when it’s finally implemented. The ID card scheme requires a huge outlay on even more new systems. A minister would need to have either some very powerful friends who needed an IT contract or a strong ideological commitment to the idea of ID to want to keep pushing this expensive and unworkable plan in the face of serious evidence of opposition.

The Government had to give way on the medical records plan to the extent of allowing us to refuse to have our medical records open to any NHS employee (or journalist, nosy neighbour, private detective, etc.,  who knows an NHS employee). They may indeed give way on this scheme. Just wait till the cost to individuals sinks in to those people who don’t think ID is a bad thing in itself. We’d be doing the Government a favour by stopping them  pushing the ID plan through.


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Posted in Rants, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Zoos

Why do we still have zoos? They must make make some visitors feel really uncomfortable. From reports of a zoo visit that I heard today, the big cats have nothing like enough room to move. As big draws for the paying public, lions and tigers have to be easily visible, from the zoo’s perspective, I suppose, so they need to be in enclosures where they can be seen. And I guess that few people would ever have other chances to see the amazing variety of wild creatures that live on Earth. And it’s better to live in a zoo than a lab, from the point of view of the animal. And zoos have breeding programmes that may keep the genes of some threatened species alive, and so on ……….

At Chester zooStill, zoos may be OK homes for lizards and prairie dogs, when these can be provided with reasonably convincing habitats. Otherwise, it’s very hard to see why we are still keeping animals in living conditions that must be hell for them. (D’oh, I forgot about factory farms.) Do we still feel that Man should have dominion over the animals, so it doesn’t matter what we do to them?

Most of the zoo’s positive objectives (education and scientific work) can be met by safari parks, in any case. Obviously, these are not ideal for wild creatures, when compared to a natural life in their own place of origin. However, sometimes, this is no longer an option for creatures who have lost their habitats and/or been captured. Safari and wildlife parks let visitors see exotic creatures in circumstances that are very much less stressful for the animals.

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Posted in Philosophy, Rants, Society | Tagged , ,

Guns and kicking

Fights with kicks rather than punches are very much more likely to lead to serious injury or death, according to a pathologist I heard on TV the other day but can’t find a reference for. (Thank you, Google….) Anyway, with or without scholarly support, simple logic suggests that most of us can kick much harder than we can punch, because a kick engages the whole bodyweight. If you kick someone or stamp on them, there is a good chance you will kill them.

So, even in unarmed combat, the feet are deadlier weapons than the hands. The likelihood of death depends on the power of the weapon. To take up on points in the guns-and-crime blog, fights in which feet are used will be deadlier than those in which punches are traded. Where the protaganists have knives or guns, there is always more chance of death or serious injury.

So, the often-expressed argument that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” falls down here. For a given level of aggression, the chance of death rises the easier the access to deadly weapons.

This isn’t the whole issue, of course. Every Swiss citizen is required to hold a gun. I doubt if the Swiss murder rate is even equal to the UK’s, let alone the USA’s. (Except, obviously, the murder rate in the English village, Midsomer Norton, which must put Baltimore in the shade) Baltimore has the highest murder rate in the USA (genuine thanks to Wikipedia ) but lower rates of non-fatal violent crime than the next highest contender in the murder sweepstakes, which is Detroit.

With no local knowledge of US cities- beyond what’s provided by the supreme TV show The Wire, of course – this is just speculation. Maybe guns are just easier to get hold of in Baltimore than Detroit? So any crime is more likely to end in a death?

There has got to be more to it, of course, given the Swiss example of a country with lots of guns and few murders. Social and cultural factors can provide an explanation. The social divisions in American cities are huge,. They are made more painful for those at the bottom of the racie and class heap by a context of values that regard those without money as worthless.

It’s common for ministers (BBC ) to blame hiphop music for the spread of gun crime in England. The glorification of guns and money in gangsta rap lyrics is indeed often ugly. However, it reflects values common in American society. These may be attractive to young men around the world who feel unmanned by the options open to them. However, it isn’t likely to influence fulfilled and optimistic young men, beyond a fantasy level. This is like blaming heavy metal bands for teenage suicides.

And in any case, it comes back to the avilability of guns. There are always dangerous and violent people. If you have the misfortune to come up against them, you had better hope they don’t have guns. (And that they don’t know about the feet thing either.)


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Posted in Rants, Society, Technology, Wire | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Technorati goes mental again

Trying to use Technorati, I get this bizarre message,

Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again.

We’re scouring the blogosphere attempting to find it. Back in a flash!

This was after looking at the “Blogs that link here” link to the right of this page and getting only linking blogs that had expired 200 odd days ago. Technorati apparently then decided to give up the unequal struggle to provide a service at all. Monster? Yuk and argh.

Why I am I even bothering to tag this?


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Posted in Rants, Technology | Tagged , , , ,

Great anti-Celebrity Big Brother invective

Apparently having become obsessed with the Celebrity Big Brother racism (Help me, please, quickly), in common with the rest of the country, I have been really impressed by the capacity of bloggers to express creative rage.

Here are a couple of quotes from blogs that I enjoyed for the viciousness of their invective.

Seriously though, a ‘Lord of the Flies’-style gang of filthy dimwitted scrubbers, jealously attacking a successful and beautiful Indian woman over her ‘filthy’ eating habits (i.e. eating with her fingers), calling her ‘the Indian’ and telling her to “get back to the slums”, to “fuck off home” on the grounds that “she can’t even speak English properly” : THIS is something that a national television channel is airing, and defending as NOT being racist? (from http://godfreylazarus.blogspot.com/2007/01/more-big-bitch-nonsense.html)

I want to expand on this point, since this year the cruelty behind reality television has been clearly demonstrated by the racist remarks directed at Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood actress whose main crimes appear to be “being a bit snooty” (no surprise, she’s the only person left in who’s actually famous somewhere in the world), “eating with her fingers” (apparently the complainants have never eaten a burger in their life), “talking in a funny voice” (according to a Scouser and Jade Goody) and being a “Paki bitch” (in the charming words of Goody’s boyfriend Jack Whohe? There has been some debate over whether he actually said “Paki”, incidentally – the first word was bleeped out. Channel 4 somewhat unconvincingly maintain the bleeped word was “cunt” (http://parma-violets.livejournal.com/192564.html) The rest of this blog article is dead funny and true.

There were lots of other good rants, mostly by people who don’t actually watch Big Brother, but that category must include most of the non-medicated population between the ages of 18 and 85.


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Posted in Rants, Society, Television | Tagged , , , , , ,

Blair’s aide arrested

I’n not hundred percent sure what constitutes an “aide” to Tony Blair, but the woman who fills this helpful role has been arrested in the ongoing “cash for honours” investigations. 

If you don’t know what this is about,  some millionaire donors to the New labour election campaign were given peerages. This sparked an investigation when it became too obvious. This was an activity undertaken at the highest levels of the party, without even the knowledge of the financial controller. The investigation has been going on for months.

More information on http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6279729.stm according to which, another three people have been arrested so far:

But until Friday only three people had been arrested – Lord Levy, the Labour Party’s chief fundraiser, Labour donor Sir Christopher Evans and head teacher Des Smith, who was involved in the government’s City Academy programme

The investigation has apparently widened to take in the other two main parties. The ex-Tory leader Michael Howard was also questioned. According to a BBC page

Tony Blair has been accused of selling peerages after four businessmen who gave Labour £4.5m in unpublicised loans were subsequently nominated for peerages. Labour went on to reveal it had been secretly loaned nearly £14m ahead of the last election. The Conservatives borrowed £16m from 13 wealthy backers. The Liberal Democrats have said they owe £850,000 to three backers. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4812822.stm)

At least it’s nice to see that the extra £2 million didn’t help the Conservatives, so maybe democracy is not yet completely for sale.

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Posted in Society | Tagged

Jade out-voted. Wahay.

Hopefully, the last word on the Celebrity Big Brother garbage. I see from the BBC site that the unpleasant Jade Goody has been voted off. Well that’s one good thing. (I had imagined hordes of racist morons voting for her.)

Is it too late to say that scapegoating someone like her doesn’t actually address the fact of endemic racism?


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After the Thor’s day storm, rack your fear up a notch

There is a really good but chilling Hungarian website that will add to any stress you may be feeling after the storms that harrassed Western Europe in the past couple of days.

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/woalert.php?lang=eng

This shows all disasters from around the world and is constantly updated. For a start, it is quite a shock to see how many and how ubiquitous they are.  You can also see themes devloping. Two days ago, there were lots of earthquakes. Yesterday, there were several volcanoes. Today, the planet seems awash with diseases.

Have some patience with the site. It may be slow on some networks. If you click on one of the disaster icons, it should show you some text and figures and provide a map. It has a few of the problems that you associate with Ajax maps. (It’s odd to find that an earthquake at the tip of South America was said to be in the USA in the text.) It’s well worth persevering with. It’s a great web page.

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Posted in Raves, Science, Technology | Tagged , ,

Celeb Big Brother and UK policy

The Celebrity Big Brother “celebs” didn’t even realise that anyone would find them to be wrong. Well, OK, this blog has already insulted their intelligence levels enough. ( 1st 2nd ). Government policies are made by people who have usually spent a good few years at private schools and Oxbridge. Do they have any decent excuses?

A few local and national institutional policies that aren’t addressing the CBB worldview:

  • Not mentioning racism. Government now focuses on “diversity.” Institutions like the Commission for Racial Equality are being shut down.and replaced by an umbrella organisation that lumps together all the institutions that were set up to challenge discrimination. It doesn’t distinguish between different forms of social injustices. It jumbles them up in a way that will weaken all of them.
  • Buying the votes of the religious through supporting “faith” schools leads directly to social division. Kids who grow up exposed to only one set of people are not too likely to learn to see other people as equals.
  • Giving support to housing associations that carry out racial zoning policies in a belief that they are meeting the needs of communities.
  • Buying the support of “communities” with financial incentives, such as business loans, to “community leaders” who are often first identified as “community leaders” by the people who are funding them. Access to funds targeted at particular ethnicities and religions can raise a community leader’s status pretty quickly from “self-appointed”

This approach is an updated version of the “Lugard” system adopted in the period of British colonialism- picl local leaders to control the territory for you. . It may seem to work in the short term from the official standpoint. However, the very same people whose desire for power and funds makes them so easy to corrupt co-opt are, almost by definition, hardly the people you would trust to control your community.

The latter approach causes resentment from rival “communities” and “leaders” who aren’t from currently fashionable ethnic/religious/racial group and fosters enmity.Activities such as providing “females-only swimming, for Muslim women” – that you might suspect would contravene a good few anti-discrimination laws – are encouraged. The sorts of things that may sound progressive and “inclusive”, until you think that these are facilities to keep Islamic women secluded from the rest of society.

  • Our government is happy to play on anti-foreigner hysteria whipped up by the press to gain support for its monstrous plans for us all to carry machine readable ID and to put all our personal details into interrelated interdepartmental databases. What powerful official body would challenge the demonisation of specific groups of foreigners and lose such a reliable source of support?
  • They then cover everything with a layer of hypocrisy. Politicians are falling over each other’s feet in the rush to call most loudly for a ban on the Celebrity Big Brother for its revelation of racist attitues in the very people who really might be too stupid to know what they are doing. Cover-up being apparently wiser than dealing with problems.

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Posted in Rants, Society

Casual racism exposed

The uproar over Celebrity Brother is fascinating in itself. It’s obviously succeeded in dragging back attention to a tv show that can yield several degress of watchability to the test card.

THere was a great blog from TW here about the Big Brother fiasco.  (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2007/01/17/racism-on-big-brother/) It says it all but I still feel like adding my proverbial tuppenorth.

I have actually watched one of these programmes. It does indeed reek of casual mindless racism. I  also watched a very old Celebrity Big Brother series (both in someone else’s house, I insist on adding, for the salke of my self-respect) in which  Chris Eubank, a black boxer,  was subjected to the same sort of behaviour, from people who were at least less blatantly moronic as these appalling women, no apparent outcry. Chris eubank was the first person ever to  to be evicted from CBB.

Ironically, in both cases the contestants who were subjected to this racially based exclusion behaved with an almost incredible degree of  forbearance. Chris Eubank seemed the only person in his house with any idea of a separation between a stage persona and a therapy session. He was calm and witty at all times. He wore silly outfits as a public-pleasing act. It didn’t work. He was obviously too sane for the house and must have struck a nerve with the largely moronic sector of the public who actually spend money on voting for these things.

These bitchy “celeb” women are not just morons. They were clearly threatened by a woman who is naturally beautiful,  seems normally intelligent. and appears to have done something (acting) to become a “celeb.”  The attackers have no claim on being known other than to have  copped off with a footballer to win a beauty contest or to have exhibit ed their awe-inspiring stupidity on national television.

However, their attitudes are not unique. Jade Goody’s boyfriend was  casually racist enough for a dozen wags in the bit that i had the misfortune to watch.  He didn’t even have the excuse of being a comically outclassed female.

I take issue with any approach that involves pretending that this casual racism is unique to these people and that hiding it will make it go away. If anything, this trash tv has done a service by showing the truly repulsive inature of British racism, which is unfortunately not confined to the people at the back of the queue when the mental and spititual gifts were being given out.

The very media that are now pillorying  a few backward  girls for giving the game away are the ones that are creating a climate of division. A trawl through the BBC’s own blog site about a woman wearing a burkha left me stunned with shock at the casually racist content of almost all the posts. 

Clearly our anti-racism strategies aren’t working. With apologies for pontificating, I’ll take this up in the next blog.


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Posted in Rants, Society, Television | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Blog News 18 Jan 07

Some early bird links to get things started:

I am sure there are many more good links out there, but these will do for now!


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Posted in Philosophy, Society, Technology | Tagged , , , , , ,

Racism on Big Brother

Loathe though I am to say anything about Big Brother, and I certainly don’t watch it, it has managed to force it’s way onto the nightly news as the “headline” item.

The crux as I see it, is that three or four of the morons Celebrity housemates have been racially abusing the Indian housemate. The news on now is talking about record number of complaints, questions asked at parlimentary question time and apparent outrage in India. (Read more on the BBC site)
Wow.

Madness.

This is undiluted madness. Yes, some of the retards in the house are racist. The clip the news has shown is (famous for little more than having an IQ on a par with a rotting tomato) hurling some abuse at Shilpa Shetty. Now, I am sure there are some people who live under a rock and I am sorry to have spoilt their impressions of the world, but there are racist people around. Most of them (sadly, not all) are the under-educated, low IQ denizens of high density housing estates. She fits this category perfectly and the only reason this embarrassment for the human race has ever come close to being a celebrity is because she has willingly demonstrated her idiocy on national television in the past.

One of the comments on the BBC amused me:

Housemates Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O’Meara have been seen making fun of Shetty’s accent.

Now anyone who has heard any of those three talk would be able to see the pure, unadulterated, irony in that alone.

Now this upset about racism, in itself, is not madness. If the programme offends you then don’t watch it. I doubt any one who is not already racist will be tempted to follow Ms Goody down that path because of the shining example she sets children. If anything from the bits the news has shown, the way Ms Shetty has handled the abuse is far more likely to work wonders in combating racism. The news clips have shown Ms Shetty in a very positive manner, she appears to always be calm, collected and rational – not to mention head and shoulders above her opponents in the intelligence stakes.

But, as with all things today, politicians are in on the act. As a result, common sense takes a little holiday and people start calling for madness. Throw in some Indian subcontinent rabble rousing and you get pictures of Indian protesters burning effigies (no idea what they are supposed to be of – they were all on fire).

The things which interest me are the demands that Channel 4 should have edited out the racism. Why? If Ms Shetty has to suffer it, why should her honourable behaviour be hidden from the audience? This would also have had the effect of masking the racist idiocy displayed by her detractors, meaning when it comes to the vote, the public would not be aware of how truly scum-like they are. Imagine the impact and opinion on Ms Shetty if, upon her release, she realised that this abuse had been hidden and one of her detractors was the winner! This is the problem with “reality TV” – it is sometimes too much reality for people. I suspect they only want the reality to be heavily sanitised where they only get the results of specially selected “zany” characters. Shame on the viewers.

More worrying are the politicians comments. Take this from the redoubtable Gordon Brown (as reported on the BBC site):

Mr Brown said that the issue had been raised repeatedly during his trip to the country, adding: “I want Britain to be seen as a country of fairness and tolerance. Anything detracting from this I condemn.”

I am concerned about this. It is not just Mr Brown who talks like this but pretty much all of them on both sides of the house. The emphasis always seems to be the country should be seen as one which is fair and tolerant. This heads back to the cries for censoring the outbursts. This strikes me as just trying to sweep the problem under the carpet. Let people admit that there are racist idiots in the UK and we can investigate how to deal with them and educate them. If we hide it and keep up the pretence that Britain is all nice and fluffy the problem will never go away.

On a similar vein, there are calls to boycott Carphone Warehouse (sponsors) and the program and the channel etc. All this is because people are suddenly ashamed to have to admit to the scum in their midst. I say dont boycott Carphone Warhouse (I mean, it’s not as if they chose the contestants) but certainly exercise your right to choice when it comes to the failed celebrities. If anything, say thank you C4 / Endemol / Big Brother / Carphone Warehouse for making “us” aware that these three failures were as racist as they are.


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Posted in Philosophy, Society, Television | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Site Traffic

Amazingly, even though this month is only just half over, this blog has generated 10,068 unique visits this year. Wow. To put this in perspective, while there has been a steady increase over the last six months of 2006, the highest monthly total was around 9,000 unique visits. If the current trend continues we should break the 20,000 mark before too long. Thank you to everyone who visits!


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Posted in asides, General | Tagged , , , , , ,

New Code Required

It strikes me more and more that is not really “cutting the mustard” with regards to how it aggregates blog posts and how it tries to represent the blogosphere. This is not a bad thing as such – it is more a case that Technorati seem to have bitten off a lot more than they can chew and it certainly is (as previously mentioned) time for a new site to take over.

Once upon a time Yahoo was the dominant search engine on the Internet, then after a while it bogged itself down and people migrated to the sleek newcomer of Google. Can Google do the same with blogs? Personally I hope not, but then I feel that Google is starting to fall behind in the search engine stakes (poor quality search results for example), so they may be better off concentrating on that more than anything else.

As an example of Technorati’s oddness, while I was trying to see if it was ever going to realise new posts had been made here, I was refreshing the page about this blog and I noticed the “posts per day” in the corner. The really odd thing was, each refresh made it alternate between two graphs that bore almost no relation to reality (as well as the most recent posts changing to be either days or hours old). Below you can see the first and second vesions. Do they look the same? (I am aware the scales are different).

Version 1 of the Posts Per DayVersion 2 of the Posts Per Day

For example, how many posts were made on 14 Jan? (hint 2) How many were made on 17 Jan (hint – not 19 yet!)

Will some one PLEASE come up with a site which does it better than Technorati.


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Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

More Technorati Oddness

For some reason, despite them being made hours ago now, and numerous pings, Technorati seems to have excluded the previous two posts from it’s index. The world (hubris? Me? never) is seriously crying out for a more workable solution than this and I don’t think Google Blogs is it. If I had my way, Compuskills would get it together and make one that really worked.


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Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$category_count is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category.php on line 379

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Posted in asides, Rants, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , ,