It’s “Freedom of Expression day”, organised by Reporters without borders.
To my shame, I don’t even understand how to take part in the cyber-demonstration, so I can’t really do that. But I’ll post a link to the Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents..
Are teenagers really just lab rats to be exposed to whatever crackpot experiments politicians want to try? Last week, we learned that they were the intended guinea pigs for the “benefits” of ID. Now, there’s yet another dubious initiative targetting youth – maybe because it
would get laughed out of existence by the adult population. There’s a plan for UK schoolchildren to swear an oath of allegiance.
This strikes a particular chord with me, as I remember being a rebellious uprooted-Brit 7 year-old who hissed “Oh Canada, our home and hated land” under her breath when we had to do the incomprehensible “singing the Canadian national anthem and saluting-the-flag” stuff.
So from my own experience, I know that – despite what religious leaders and heads of state seem to assume – making people mouth adherence doesn’t actually make them believe what they have to say. It may just give them another reason for disliking and distrusting you. It certainly makes a mockery of the concept of sincerity.
The BBC says:
School-leavers should be encouraged to swear an oath of allegiance to Queen and country, says a report commissioned by Gordon Brown on British citizenship.
Report author, ex-attorney general Lord Goldsmith, says it would give teenagers a sense of belonging.
Council tax and student fee rebates are suggested for people who volunteer – as well as a “Britishness” public holiday.
Point by point, in a pointless refutation:
A loyalty oath is already being made by new British citizens. At least, these people have volunteered for UK citizenship, so it’s reasonable to expect them not to choose to engage in treason. But, imagine you are hellbent on the violent destruction of British society. If you are the sort of person who thinks human life is less important than whatever your religious/political goals are, are you going to balk at mouthing a few words that you don’t mean?
There is an incredible naivety in assuming that people cannot mouth words expressing loyalty and still be disloyal. Most of us know from our own lives that the people who speak the most flatteringly are the most likely to stab you in the back. Are politicians and Lord Goldsmith actually that much stupider than the average person on the bus? Don’t bother to answer that.
Rapture-enthusiasts are using Google Ads. (I will, of course, be too polite to mention the irony that people who think everything true was written down a couple of thousand years ago will happily use the fruits of godless Science to spread their ideas.)
I found this ad link idly googling rapture. As you do. Well, you may do if you want a cheap laugh, anyway.
2008 is the big year now. Wow. It’s March already. There’s barely 9 months left. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. First, the “demise” of the United States is going to take place, according to Ronald Weinland, who “has been sent by God as His end-time prophet.” (It says so right there on the page.)
So, how does a country die? I am briefly distracted by this idea from the rapture talk. The US is huge. Maybe the US will just break up into 50 separate states. Or decide to join Canada or Mexico. It would take some serious Godly smiting to even do noticeable physical damage. A monster collection of tsunamis and few major earthquakes couldn’t do much more than dent the US landmass. An asteroid strike, maybe? Well that could do it, but I fear I’m putting ideas into Ronald Weinland’s mouth here.
I admit that despite the site’s offering a free download of this insightful work, I am completely unwilling to download and actually read it. So I can only go on the spoiler bit. This shows the book isn’t meant for me anyway.
This book is primarily directed to the people of the three major religions of the world (Islam, Judaism and Christianity), whose roots are in the God of Abraham. Ronald Weinland has been sent to all three.
The message is – US destroyed, last world war, over religion.
Billions will die! This time will far exceed even the very worst times in all human history.
Is there a hint of unseemly relish in that exclamation mark?
Well, I’m actually going to give this man the benefit of the doubt to some extent. There will certainly be wars over the next years. Religion will certainly feature in them. So far, so Dawkins.
How prophetic is the book of Revelations if it can be used to predict wars happening? Answers to that question are both “100% accurate” and “not very predictive.” I can’t believe there’s been more than a couple of years since the rise of the Abrahamic religions, in which there hasn’t been a war somewhere in which religion was involved. Other Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Famine, Plague, Death? They have been ever-present in human history too.
I follow the links to the Church of God PKG . That’s Preparing for the Kingdom of God, by the way, in case you thought it was short for Peking airport. (It’s Beijing now, anyway. I know.) The Ronald Weinman chap is its divinely appointed leader, of course.
Ronald Weinland, who is the pastor of God’s Church on earth, has also been appointed by the God of Abraham to be His end-time prophet to the world, preceding the return of Jesus Christ.
(I am distracted again, by the guy’s name. Even my rusty knowledge of German makes that definitely “Wine Country”. He’s pissed, isn’t he?)
Appointed by the God of Abraham? Did Yahweh advertise in the Times, pore over a pile of resumes, run some pseudo-psychological tests and hold a few gruelling interviews, then come up with this dude? Well, what’s the salary? So far, every book I can see for sale on this site is free. So, the income doesn’t come from book sales.
But, I read Ronald’s personal blog and he seems to be doing very nicely out of the enterprise, in terms of travel, at least.
Laura and I are about to return from a very successful trip to Europe. Last Sabbath we were in the Netherlands, and at that time I had to cut my sermon a little short as I was pretty worn out from the pace of activities I have been keeping ever since we returned from the New Zealand/Australia trip. As a result of pushing my voice in the Netherlands on Sabbath, I developed laryngitis and completely lost my voice for a couple of days. By Sabbath yesterday here in the United Kingdom, I was doing much better, but not well enough to give a sermon, so Wayne Matthews in Australia was able to fill in for me at the last minute.
Blimey, most Americans don’t even have passports. The Upcoming Trips aren’t as exotic but still barely a week goes by when he’s not off somewhere. You could probably cut half of the carbon emissions from flights just by keeping this man in one place.
Most of the areas my wife and I will be visiting will be in the U.S., but some will be in Canada and Europe as well. New areas will be posted when the scheduling has been fully set.
(Look, Ronald, I want your job. I can spout all the millenarian rubbish you want. Just give me the plane tickets and hotel reservations.)
He’s got to do this frenetic world-travelling, though, because:
“…. the 1335 days before the actual day Jesus Christ returns began on February 2, 2008.”
What a baffling way to express a period of time. Who measures time in 1335 day segments? Maybe that’s how Yahweh’s calendar works. It’s hard to translate into human. However, by the grace of Microsoft Excel, I can reveal to you that that makes the ACTUAL date of Jesus’s return …… 29/09/2011.
I am tempted to see if Weinamn has any US dates scheduled for 2009 -which would be a bit of problem as the US wlll apparently no longer exist then – but the schedule only goes ahead a few months.
I am now getting seriously interested in how much money they take. All this travelling must need some seriously big financial resources. I trawl the sites looking for instructions to send cash but it’s all about things like how to get your high-tech sermons on the Sabbath, if you are unlucky enough to live in Europe or far away from a church group.
All the same, there must be big money in there somewhere, but, worry not, Ronald is making sure it’s not misused… Look at his track record.:
Candidly, the largest scattered group, which is the United Church of God, is one that Ronald Weinland joined from its beginning and continued for nearly two years. But after exposing the misappropriation of $4.5 million by its leadership, the political practices of much of the leadership, and doctrinal laxity, he chose to resign.
By Zeus, it must be time for me to kill myself. I have obviously suffered some kind of brain injury and am clinging on to reality by the thinnest of threads. Today, not only did I actually buy the Mail on Sunday (*), but I found myself agreeing with the obnoxious Peter Hitchens’ commentary. I will report to the euthanasia centre forthwith.
In a piece titled “Nothing to hide, but plenty to fear from Ms ID Card“, Annoying Hitchens makes some actually good, valid points:
She says we “need” to “prove who we are”. But mainly we need to do this because the Government has spun a spider’s web of silly rules, which snags the law-abiding and spares real troublemakers.
I agree. Hitchens continues by identifying some of the future strictures ID cards will place upon us then the bit I agree with most:
These precautions are useless against real money-launderers, paedophiles, gangsters and terrorists, who laugh at them. But they make people like Ms Smith look and feel as if they are doing something.
This is the whole problem with the idea. The implementation of ID cards is useless for its stated aims — criminals will not be inconvenienced by them in anyway. It is a shame I agree with Hitchens on something, but for now I have just put it down to his rabid hatred of the Labour government — if ID cards had been a Conservative party idea, he would be behind them all the way.
Back on the subject of ID cards, proper though — another point I neglected last time I ranted is the madness that ID cards can work if less than every member of society carries one. As long as they are optional, they are pointless for pretty much any of the ideas Ms Smith suggests they could be used for. If an immigrant is challenged and they say “I am not an immigrant” what could the government do about it? As they claim to not be a non-EU migrant, they wouldn’t be expected to carry an ID card therefore you can’t demand to see their ID card…
What passes for Logic in Ms Smiths world amazes me.
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(*) In my defence it did have a good “free” music CD, which is the real reason I bought it. Odin only knows why I actually opened the “newspaper” (in the loosest sense of the word) and read anything.
We have a new winner. Not just one winner but several. Plus, an introduction to the most enticing product you have ever seen: The Playmobil Security Checkpoint.
If you’ve never seen them, Playmobil are sort of like cuter and better-designed bendy Lego figures. They are usually dressed for work, directing traffic, on construction sites or fighting fires. At the more esoteric reaches of the Playmobil world, you can find them doing more interesting jobs as knights and pirates. Now you can find their busy plastic bodies scanning your luggage….
This new set of toddler role models was first spotted in the Register, from which we’ve borrowed this picture:
The comments are on Amazon, The product sadly isn’t available. (Well, yes, pedants, they are reviews rather than comments, but I reserve the right to define “comments” as whatever I choose the word to mean, in an Alice in Wonderland style way. It’s my ceremony.) There are a few and they are all brilliant.
Snips from Amazon’s featured pro and anti reviews are:
Educational and Fun!
Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it’s a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times….. (By zampano)
Great lesson for the kids!
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up…. (by loosenut)
Read the rest on Amazon, plus the other comments, most of which will have you giggling helplessly and/or will restore your faith in human nature.
No fancy icons for today’s winners, just another picture, taken from the Playmobil site.
Well done, all round.
Some more ranting time, sorry. Today must be a slow news day in the UK and obviously we are no longer interested in international news. As a result, one of the prominent news items has been a “Row over military uniforms in public [also on BBC News].” Shocking really. Not the “row” but the fact it has made headline news.
Basically, the Station Commander at RAF Wittering has banned personnel working at the base from wearing uniform in public because they have had some abuse from locals (while in uniform) in Peterborough. This has caused a bit of a row because recently the government were very keen to push forward plans to encourage service personnel to wear uniform in public (and get some free advertising for the military, I presume). That is it. That is the sum total of the news. It is borderline news for a local weekly rag, let alone pretty much every national news outlet. How in Zeus’ creation this has happened is beyond me.
Well, I have a few ideas but I will leave that for the conspiracy theorists….
Now, before I settle into a rant about how apparently stupid people are there are some salient points you might want to be aware of. First off, the military have been banned from wearing uniform in public for almost longer than I have been alive. For most of my life they were viewed as legitimate targets for Catholic Terrorists and to a great extent treated with disdain by the general public. Dislike of the military is not new. This is what the times has to say about the current situation:
The Prime Minister is to be presented this month with a report that will call for the widespread wearing of military uniforms to engender respect and appreciation for the Armed Forces. In the US service personnel wear their uniforms off-duty. This was banned in Britain in recent years because of the IRA terrorist threat.
“recent years” here means since about 1974.
Secondly, the station commander of RAF Wittering, Group Captain R L A Atherton , is female. You may see why this is important later.
Last but not least, remember what quality media outlets we have:
This is the BBC news explaining what triggered the “ban”:
The guidance was issued in January 2007 advising personnel to wear civilian clothes in certain areas for fears of abuse. It followed a verbal incident in December 2006.
No, seriously. The guidance was issued over a YEAR ago. Really. This is what passes as “news” today… To support this, this is how the Times (normally one of the few quality papers left) reported it:
Group Captain Ro Atherton, the RAF Wittering station commander, took advice from RAF Police before ordering his personnel to keep a low profile.
Hmm. I wonder is this an example of poor research, intrinsic sexist assumptions or lazy journalists – or all three? This mistake is repeated throughout the reporting on lots of different media sources, which largely goes to show that they are all lazy and copy of each other. No one cares about such trivia as “facts” any more. In fact (all puns intended), if they can’t be arsed checking something as blatant as this out (a quick visit to the RAF Wittering web page told me she was female in about 10 second), can we trust the veracity of anything else they report?
The Times Online piece has zillions of comments. Largely from the idiotic, ranting, racist fools who always seem to comment on this sort of thing. I wont make you endure each one, have a look and see what I mean. The general theme of the comments is that this “abuse” has come from immigrants and “ethnic minorities.” This is strange given that the normally racist Daily Mail had this to say:
However sources close to the police and RAF said the biggest offenders had been thugs from the local white community.
So, like every other city there are thugs who hurl abuse at people. Is this new? Did this happen 10 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago? Yes. The idiots don’t care about this though, they see this as a great chance to spout their racist BNP ideology – for example:
Those who have encouraged this cancer within our midst must be made accountable for their crimes . This might encourage future generations of those who govern to be more circumspect in the care for the ancient inheritance to which they are entrusted . For one thousand years the peoples of these islands have sacrificed life to deny those from outside who sought to subjugate them . No government or people has the right in any circumstance to forego this heritage . paul, london, uk
Sounds familiar. It is nonsense, but it carries the weight of history that the BNP love to throw around. White thugs throw abuse at the military so it must be immigrants who are to blame. What amazing logic. Sadly there is more:
The problem is that Peterborough is over-run with immigrants. They speak for their immigrant communities not Britain. When the election comes the B N P is going to be laughing. Decent people don’t want to vote B N P because of their past associations with racism and violence but there seems little choice left as the major parties are too scared of losing votes to tackle this issue head on. White middle class people are leaving the U K in droves. We are not allowed to push back to reclaim our Country from these foreigners who have ousted out the indigenous population. When are people going to take to the streets and say ‘Enough’? There are lots of Ex-pats like me who want to go home but just don’t recognise the U K anymore and don’t want to live in a country that is even more foreign to us than the countries we moved to. But – If it ever came to violence in the streets I’d go back and fight – and I bet I’m not the only one. Riley, Kiev, Ukraine
Oh Dionysus, the Irony. Still, it is nice to think that such die hard BNPers are out of the country now. God bless ’em all…
[snip] If you don’t support our government, troops or way of life, it’s time you found yourself another country to live in. [snip] Tam o shanter, Glasgow , Scotland
Oh dear, I didn’t think the Times’ comments would manage to avoid a nugget like this. Damn democracy, if you don’t do what you are told leave the country. And I thought it was only the US that came up with this line of nonsense. Again, this poster misses the irony that he is disagreeing with a lot of the governments policy and our normal way of life…
I will stop here because it becomes depressingly similar. Almost every comment is from an idiot who says something along the lines of they are being forced to leave because there are so many migrants coming in, or how dare people have the cheek to not bow and scrape whenever a military person is in their vicinity. There are a few redeeming comments, but not enough and double sadness comes from the fact lots of the “other side” comments are equally idiots who just want to slag of the government at every chance.
For some reason, I was under the impression that people in the UK were, on the whole, sane and balanced. It seems I am massively wrong. Every day, I have listened to the radio interview a collection of retards from different cities who have no idea what they are talking about, but still feel the need to rant about immigrants, law, values etc. Today, the interviews about the RAF were so depressing I nearly crashed my car to put myself out of any misery the future must hold for our once-great nation.
Maybe it is time for me to migrate – does anyone know a nation where sanity remains? Can anyone afford to pay for my family to get there? (All donations welcome…)
Well, Orwell is still spinning in his grave. Despite some apparently premature optimism, it seems that ID cards are very much on the government’s agenda. Today’s news headlines have been very much about the “ID Card Rethink [bbc as example]” and how we are all going to end up with one.
This is all despite the House of Lords “setback” and the massive online YouGov poll that showed a significant percentage of the population were against the idea. To me, in addition to the hateful ideas of forced identity documents, the fact the government is able and willing to completely ignore over a million of the electorate’s opinions speaks volumes for how modern democracy works…
In a token gesture to people’s opinions, the government is planning to bring ID card by stealth in a phased manner. I assume the thinking is target the least popular / most vulnerable parts of society then, in a few years everyone will have come round to the idea and we will all carry one. Distasteful is an understatement.
In her speech announcing the new Identity Card plans, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith made the following statements:
I start from the premise that the National Identity Scheme is a public good.
Starting from a false premise is never going to lead to anything of value… This is largely, Smith saying the assumption was always we were going to have Identity Cards, like it or not.
As citizens, it will offer us a new, secure and convenient way to protect and prove our identity.
What is new about it? How is it more secure than, say, a passport or driving licence? Equally, how the **** does the existence of an ID card protect your identity?
And it will provide us with the reassurance we need that others who occupy positions of trust in our society are who they say they are as well.
This is odd, and the radio news made a big deal about this. What people who occupy positions of trust don’t already carry a form of ID? Lots of news sources go on about how Airport staff will be early ones to get them – oddly, you already need to have an ID card to get airside at an airport. What will have actually changed? Are the current procedures flawed?
Now, at this point I was going to do a line by line rebuttal of her claims but as they are all insane it will take much too long. Nearly every sentence she utters in her speech contains falsehoods and spin to trick people into thinking ID Cards will solve the worlds problems. They wont.
In an effort to be brief, I will try to address her main points.
Firstly, ID cards are supposed to be brought in to prevent crime and terrorism. Wow. If having to carry an ID card would prevent someone from being a terrorist, why are there still terrorists in the world? Same with crime. Neither activity will be deterred simply by the existence of a voluntary ID scheme. The best that could possibly be hoped for would be for a compulsory ID card, with fingerprint data, that may enable the police to catch people after a crime(*). In years gone by crazy ideas were often supported with a “wont anyone think of the children” (as parodied by the Simpsons), now we have Prevent Terrorism as the buzzword. If the government want to pass laws people will hate it is always linked to prevention of terrorism. Didn’t anyone watch “In the Name of the Father?”
Secondly they are supposed to prevent Identity Fraud. How this happens is never, ever, mentioned and, frankly, defies even the most cursory examination. Again reading through Ms Smith’s speech is an exercise in logical fallacies, there are more appeals to fear than I care to count. The phrases basically go along the lines of criminals steal identities so get an ID card. This sounds good and there is a half-hearted example of one person who defrauded the state out of £2.5m over five years. Compare this to Northern Rock who have taken over £100billion from the state in as many months. Who is the worse criminal? On a more personal level, ID theft is a terrible thing and I genuinely feel for anyone it happens to. Would the national ID card prevent it? Ninety nine times out of a hundred the answer is no, and in the other one is it a maybe.
For example, if some one hacks your Ebay account and runs up charges would an ID card have protected you? Same with anything online (where most ID theft apparently takes place) and in the offline world it only works when it interacts with the government. Someone can steal your ID and apply for credit cards, loans etc., and unless the issuing authority has access to the central database there is no way to find out.
This leads to the other problem. The database itself becomes a single point of failure. All a person needs to do is attack that to gain a legitimate, but false, identity. As recent months (and years) have shown, the Government is a largely inept organisation when it comes to protecting the data it holds. The news has covered dozens of “accidents” where huge amounts of personal data have been lost into the public domain. Do you feel safe thinking that a group with this track record will hold the gold standard of data about your identity?
Ms Smith has considered this and some reassurance is given:
Private firms will be encouraged to set-up “biometric enrolment centres” where passport and ID card applicants will be fingerprinted. [BBC news]
WTF! To make matters worse, this personal and private data will be collected by non-accountable organisations who have, by definition, their primary goal of making profit. By Toutatis this is madness. Here we will have the situation where staff on a minimum wage will be responsible for inputting your ID details and making sure no one else can get access to them. People who can be bribed with the price of a pint down the pub. Terrifying.
When Ms Smith talks about how they will protect the data the ID system will store, she manages to confuse me as to how it will work:
The way in which we are designing the National Identity Register, with separate databases holding personal biographic details physically and technologically separately from biometric fingerprints and photographs, will greatly reduce the risk of unauthorised disclosures of information being used to damaging effect. …(followed by)… I should make it clear that none of the databases will be online, so it won’t be possible to hack into them. [BBC transcript]
Now call me an old fashioned security professional, but there is a bit here that makes sense. By preventing people from getting access to the data you really do reduce the risk of unauthorised disclosure. However, and this shows more madness, if huge segments of society can’t access the data it is useless. The idea as I see it is that you go into the bank to open an account and show them your ID card. They scan it and compare it to the record of you. If it matches you get account. Seems easy, except now it looks like the bank wont have access and even if they did there is an air gap between the two technologies.
How is it supposed to work?
Lastly (phew, I hear you cry), the introduction by stealth. This shows the government KNOW this is an unpopular idea and it would never get off the ground if they tried to roll it out now. Instead they are going to play on the “white working class fear” of the Evil Immigrants by making them carry ID cards (why not force them to carry a sign round…(**)). What effect this will have is beyond me because if I was an immigrant and challenged by “authority” I would simply say I wasn’t an immigrant. Prove me wrong. Next come the “UK citizens and EU nationals who work in ‘sensitive’ airport jobs” who already carry ID cards and aren’t likely to complain, but again the question is “why?” Finally in 2011 it will be an opt-out option on passport renewals. Passports already have biometric data and are acceptable as proof of ID the world over. Why do we need another form of ID?
That is it in a nutshell, though. Why on Earth do we need another form of ID?
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(*) remembering to account for the error bars of partial fingerprint matches when you have a database of 60+ million entries, and hoping the criminals are too stupid to wear gloves…
(**) Hmm. This seems familiar. I wonder why…
The BBC is running adverts for a series of programmes on white people, specifically white working-class British people. These adverts (and the programmes I will definitely not watch) might score low on my personal exponential scale of media-generated rage, when compared to the ID cards news item, but they still make me really angry.
The television adverts show a homely white male, whose face is gradually overwritten with phrases in other languages, such as Urdu, until his face becomes well nigh invisible. There’s an image on the website. Someone from the BBC was (ineptly) justifying this, on BBC Breakfast, against a reasonable complaint that it was using images designed to promote the idea that allowing non-white people to express themselves was wiping out white British people.
My problems with the way this image is used include:
It seems that the spirit of the execrable Powell is indeed alive and well at the BBC. The web page presents the results of a poll that is supposed to show the “despair and fear among white Britons.”
IMAO, if anything has caused “despair and fear” among the white working class, it is not “immigration” – which seems to be the underlying message of this BBC nonsense – it is a combination of the following circumstances :
Marginalising “whiteness”, my arse.
In pursuit of its dubious sensationalist ends, the BBC ran a blog post on the Whitest Place in Britain. Well, this is apparently the whitest place in Britain because it was destroyed when the British coal industry was destroyed, in the 1980s (under Tony Blair’s apparent role model, Margaret Thatcher.) Nothing took its place. So, unsurprisingly, it didn’t prove a big draw for immigrants or Britsih people of any “race”.
If you want to find out what the English white working classes think, then this area of the country is a pretty good place to start.
Well, no. It isn’t. It might be a good place to look at the social impact of shutting down the industrial capacity of a town. But that’s about it. These people aren’t marginalised because they are white. They are no more white than working people who live in more prosperous parts of the country. Indeed they are about equally as white as the great majority of the people in the House of Commons, for example.
So, discussing them as if they are badly off BECAUSE they are white is nonsense. Seriously irresponsible and dangerous nonsense.
Some Jewish girls, plainly prevented by the nature of their social values from asserting their religious and cultural identities by just wearing a veil or a promise ring or whatever, have achieved this seemingly fashionable goal by boycotting Shakespeare in their GCSE exams.
Because of his anti-semitism, it appears…..
I assume they are thinking about the Merchant of Venice. Even if you choose to ignore the fact that Shakespeare actually gave Shylock some of the most stirring anti-bigotry speeches ever written, Shakespeare’s views on any topic (if you can deduce what they might have been) were the views of a sixteenth century playwright.
Should we only read or listen to or look at works of art if we agree 100% with the worldview of their creator? In that case, we had better get really brilliant at writing and painting and making music, because, for each of us, there is only one person that we will ever agree with completely. Even then, we must be careful not to change our minds as a result of experience, because we won’t be able to use even our own creations then.
Why stop at works of art? Can I live in a house built by people who are on the other side of the political spectrum? Wear clothes when the person who made them might not agree that we are heading straight towards ecological disaster? My Freya, I suspect that the person who made the cup I’m drinking from didn’t believe the Wire was the best TV series ever made.
Discussing the school students’ absurdity in the Guardian, Seth Freedman argued that this sort of religiously-inspired intervention in education is inherently dangerous.
Policy makers should be joining the dots and realising that they have a tough choice to make when it comes to appeasing religious minorities on the one hand, and making Britain a country that opposes fundamentalism and extremism on the other……
The reluctance of religious institutions to pay heed to secular teaching methods can be found right across the spectrum of faiths in the UK, as well as abroad. Devout Christians are just as unlikely to force their children to learn how man descended from monkeys as ultra-orthodox Jewish parents are, and so too is the case with strict adherents of Islam.
Moderately cheering news on Ruth Gledhill’s Times blog of 28th February. Apparently the US population is becoming more sceptical.
However God is defined, fewer Americans are believing. The Pew Forum’s groundbreaking report, which we cover today, shows a surprising decline in religious affiliation in this most God-fearing nation of all. (From Ruth Gledhill’s blog)
I said “moderately cheering” because the Pew report (whatever that is) has only 1.6% of the US population declaring itself atheist, 2.4 % agnostic and a fair number of people who don’t care, making 16.1% of the population who don’t define themselves as religious. OK, it’s not a huge proportion but it’s an impressive show of rationality, all the same.
It still brings home quite clearly why American atheists sometimes seem to feel part of a beleaguered minority. Posts on the trials and tribulations of being an atheist can seem hard to understand if you live on a more godless continent.
Less cheering, Evangelical Protestants are the largest group at 26.3%, (greatly outnumbering traditional Protestants at a mere 18.1%) followed by Catholics at 23.9%. This explains why candidates are falling over themselves to woo the votes of the congregations. Grab the support of fundies and the Catholic Church and you’d be guaranteed a win.
Interesting that there are more Jehovah’s Witnesses than Muslims in the US, according to this report. Although that may be undercounting the “secret” Muslims, of which there might be a fair number, if US levels of fear of any Muslims are anything to go by.
There is a bizarre God-o-meter chart at Beliefnet. It’s hard to work out the logic behind it but, apparently, getting falsely characterised as a Muslim gets you high points. Scoring low on it seems to mean that you are obviously not a presidential front-runner. I’m European, ffs, I am barely familiar with the names of Clinton, Obama and McCain. and could only pick out two of these in a line-up. And my recognition failure is pretty well an exact replica of their lack of religious identification.
(If the Republican at the bottom of the chart wasn’t from Lawn Order and if I wasn’t an avid TV crime drama viewer, I wouldn’t recognise any of the others at all. )
People outside the UK may not have seen the unfolding stories about the Jersey Hammer Children’s Home of Horror. You probably don’t want to know about it, if you are a sentient being, but I’m going to bring it to your attention anyway.
Over decades, any number of staff committed horrific abuse of children they were supposed to be caring for. At least one child’s body has been found. Who can even guess how many more supposed “runaways’ ” bodies will turn up.
Every day, a more disturbing detail is released. The dungeons in which the kids were kept for really heavy abuse are being unbricked. Repellent items, such as shackles, that speak volumes by their very nature, have been found in them.
Over the years, many children went to seek help from the police and had all been ignored. One man was interviewed on television sobbing about what had happened to him there decades ago.
There are 40 suspects. 40, ffs.
These &&&&&&s – the English language doesn’t have words strong enough for me to use – got away with it because their victims were disposable. Nobody missed them. They could disappear and no one cared.
They were already damaged kids and everyone finds damaged kids too hard to deal with. The &&&&&s were presumably perceived to be doing a public service, by coralling lots of kids that people were afraid of (in the weird way that kids are now seen by many people as so intrinsically dangerous that it’s acceptable to use subsonic weapons to keep them at bay.)
People who’ve been through the child “care” systems almost always seem to bear horrific mental scars. Luckily (if you can say that) most are just scarred by being dumped in an environment in which the people who look after you are only doing it for the pay. But a disturbingly large proportion are scarred by physical and sexual abuse.
My point here is how do you stop this sort of thing happening? Some lessons that seem blatantly obvious.
(1) Stop putting “care homes” for vulnerable people in the middle of nowhere. The worst events seem to be in institutions that are miles away from the rest of society.
(2) Reward staff who speak against any practices. The newest, most inexperienced member of staff may be the only one with any residual humanity.
(3) No one paid attention to the kids who tried to speak up, in the Jersey case. So, lets start actually listening.
(4) Make the job of looking after kids more attractive – pay, conditions, status. Only recruit people who can convince a good selection of children and child advocates that they are trustworthy. Over a reasonable time. Keep them on probation for a couple of years.
(5) Teach kids that they have rights. Teach them to stand up for themselves and to tell lots of people when they are harmed by anyone. Include self-advocacy in the national curriculum.
Children need anonymous forums where they can tell the truth. I don’t just mean the Internet or phonelines. I mean providing real-life, physically present, advocates for “looked after” children, with no other role but to listen to what they say, find out what they need and take it seriously. Make them available in schools, community centres and, above all, in bloody “care” homes.
Let’s learn to recognise how children express rage and reward them for expressing justified rage in words.
The media keeps stressing that this particular care home was closed 20 years ago, as if the years between the 1940s and mid -1980s were in some long-forgotten medieval era, in which such behaviour was possible. No such luck.
If anything, things are getting progressively worse for kids in the 21st century. As UNESCO observed, British children are the most miserable in Europe. Compared to Dutch kids, who can discuss things with their parents and aren’t pressured at school (but who somehow manage to grow up speaking half a dozen languages and being able to argue rationally…) British kids are miserable.
Just take the standard baseline level of misery of so many children and multiply that by a factor of 100 and you might just approach the misery level of a “looked after” child. I can’t even match this guesstimate with any realistic figure for the extra level of misery that a kid that ends up as prey for these monsters feels.
And yes, I know this is a humourless diatribe. I apologise but have no excuses. If our society can’t even begin to protect its most vulnerable members, we really should just give up all pretence of being human.
What a tosser Peter Hitchens is. I’ve just read his 16th February column in the Mail on Sunday First, he spits bile at Shami Chakrabati, Dwain Chambers and Rowan Williams. (About Rowan Williams – he says
“while the chief of the Church of England speaks up for Muslims, it is increasingly difficult for English Christians to follow their consciences in face of politically correct laws undermining marriage and punishing those who express doubts about homosexuality. Who will speak for them? “)
(Splutter. Precisely which “politically correct laws undermining marriage” are these, then? What punishments are inflicted on “those who express doubts on homosexuality”? You’ve guessed it. They don’t exist. He made them up. Even if these things weren’t invented out of whole cloth, what on earth would stop Christians “following their consciences”, if that feat – so difficult to achieve for most of us, whatever our beliefs or lack thereof – can be so easily achieved by marrying and not being gay? So, what on earth is he demanding of the Archbishop of Canterbury?)
But the real gem is the bit where he tries to make readers draw a subliminal connection between Barrack Obama and the Third Reich. (Yes, you read that correctly. He really does.).
I’ve recently read blogs in which Barrack Obama is called a communist. The justification for this assertion is, at one and the same time, so offensive and so ludicrously argued, that – as usual given the naivety that has followed me all my life – I assumed it’s a spoof. No, it isn’t.
Similarly I thought that his opponents presenting Obama, to a pretty well Islamophobic USA, as “really” a muslim, because his surname rhymed with Osama, was a childish joke. However, pictures of Obama in traditional dresson a visit to Kenya, are now used as more “evidence” that he’s a secret Muslim.
All this starts to strain even my determined optimism about human intelligence. There’s a whole edifice being built that is intended to work at a visual and instinctive level for political ends.
Politics is dirty. New-model politics seems to be developing a whole new face of “dirty” in the Information Age. Subliminal smears. Subliminal smears that play on people’s terrors by manipulating imagery and juxtapositions of unrelated items, to build up unexamined mental pictures.
Hmm, not unlike the (more amateurish) propaganda that was used to support the European dictatorships, in the mid-20th century. But, ironically and, almost incredibly, although Peter Hitchens’ column is presenting a subliminally racist worldview (out of 4 targets of his ire, only one is “white” and he doesn’t get a picture. Equal opportunities invective, my bum), he has decided to use that exact “mid-20th century dictatorships” imagery to portray Obama as a Nazi. I kid you not.
I quote from the demented one himself:
Obama worship has echoes of the Third Reich
This Barack Obama frenzy is getting out of hand. A Left-wing friend has emailed me a YouTube Obama propaganda video that reminds him – in technique – of Leni Riefenstahl’s Hitler-worshipping film Triumph Of The Will.
I see what he means. To an insistent beat, impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women endlessly repeat the slogan “Yes, we can”, in a disturbingly mindless way.
The thing contains no thought, no argument – just Obama worship.
Compared with this cult-like stuff, Hillary Clinton’s clumping old-fashioned Leftism is almost reassuring.
Hmm. Where to begin? It’s like a semiotic treasure trove. I’ll stick with the glaringly obvious.
An “insistent beat” (music, I think that means), “impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women “? You mean, like in almost all adverts? For everything from Coca-Cola to CPUs?
No, he doesn’t mean that. He means like Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films. For Hitler… Well, I’ve not seen Triumph of the Will but her Olympia had ranks of impossibly beautiful people, beautifully shot. That was indeed a powerful aesthetic, in the service of a vile cause. However, it’s not normally the first image that springs to my mind when I see beautiful people in adverts. But then, I don’t write for the Mail – still notorious for its admiration of home-grown UK fascists in the 1930s, and with an anti-Nazi record that even its admirers – if they exist – could hardly see as stellar.
By definition, the one thing that wouldn’t have appeared in a Nazi propaganda film was “impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women “… Even Mail readers can’t be so dumb that they don’t know that the defining characteristic of the Third reich was the ideology of “race”, used to gather support for a power-hungry group by playing on people’s prejudices.
So what’s your point then, Peter Hitchens? Despite its being labouring the obvious, I’m still going to spell it out. It is a deliberate attempt to create subliminal associations in the (laughingly named) “mind” of the average Mail reader.
Hitchens piles up negative verbal images of non-white people, throws in a couple of pictures, just in case the subliminal effect isn’t working properly and the Mail readers are too dumb to make the negative associations on the text alone. Shami Chakrabati’s valid concern that directing uncomfortable sound devices at children contravenes human rights is presented as “whining”.
When Archbishop of Canterbury is presented as being pro-Muslim, pro-gay and anti-marriage, I begin to suspect that Hitchens has a tick-box of Mail reader triggers and he’s going to make sure that every possible Mail hate-figure (gays, Islam, black people, civil libertarians, rowdy youth, socialists) gets a name check.
Then wham, after the Mail reader’s mental hornet’s nest of fear and rage has been suitably stirred up, Barrack Obama’s name gets dropped into the mix.
You are wasted in the UK, Hitchens. Using all the dirty tricks in the propagandist’s Big Book of Dirty Tricks. But, even Mail readers don’t have a vote in the US elections. You Yanks really don’t appreciate how lucky you are, sometimes.
One of the most often paraphrased sayings runs along the lines of “those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat its mistakes” (or variations on the theme – don’t get pedantic). While this is a touch simplistic (it seems even studying history wont save you) it has a comforting ring of truth, and it is often sadly accurate (*). Despite this an amazing number of people seem either wilfully ignorant of history or to have drawn some mind-numbing inaccurate lessons from it. This month I have come across two pretty large examples of this weird mindset, so I will try to dissect them here. Please feel free to let me know what you think.
First off, Time Magazine from the start of the month had this titbit in its letters pages:
Power [Samantha Power, 28 Jan 08 Time Magazine] recommends engaging Iran, including high-level negotiations. It’s not very reassuring to see how little we’ve learned from history. The ghost of Neville Chamberlain rides again.
Greg Lifschultz, Rowlett, Texas
Poor old Neville Chamberlain eh? He is constantly used as a bogeyman every time there is a debate about using military force. This is, interestingly enough (well not that interesting) an exact match to a debate I had repeatedly with various Americans last year (both in the flesh and online).
Now, it is true that with historical hindsight, Chamberlain’s desire for “peace at all costs” was a mistake in the 1930’s but does that mean it is an applicable lesson? Chamberlain was Prime Minister of a country with a reasonably small military. He was faced with a large, aggressive nation that had repeatedly flouted international laws and agreements. Chamberlain was faced with an opponent that had annexed several previously sovereign nations against international will and caused all manner of death and suffering. Chamberlain was wrong to try and negotiate with a country set on war. This is reasonable and we can all agree that if Chamberlain had been more forceful the course of WWII would have been different (not necessarily “better” though, be careful of historical assumptions).
Here is my problem. Using this analogy requires more assumptions than the current evidence will allow. Nothing about the current situation matches the historical one in the way Greg (for example) seems to imply. Iran is militarily the weaker nation, the US has invaded two of its neighbours and is threatening the do the same to Iran, not the other way round. If anything, the Iranians are behaving like Chamberlain… It is saddening, not reassuring, to see how little people like Greg have learned from all their education. (**)
The next weird history bit is more recent and from the Guardian Comment is Free but is equally false. Ranting about UK – Israel relations, this commenter felt the need to highlight how the UK is very much anti-Israel with his list of hate:
1. Britain refused to grant entry permits to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees to Palestine in the 1930s and ’40s, effectively causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews during the Holocaust..
Erm, I have two issues with this. First off, the deaths were caused by the Germans not anyone else. Secondly, Britain pretty much met its international obligations to allow the movement of people escaping the Nazis. We even fought the Germans (not over the Jews but that is a different issue).
2. Britain killed hundreds of Jewish freedom fighters during the Mandate and fought a ferocious war in order to keep Palestine out of Jewish hands.
Wow, just goes to show one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. I seem to recall the Stern Gang were not trying to “reclaim” land they had once occupied (unless we allow centuries to be an acceptable gap). I have no qualms whatsoever with the state of Israel, but trying to re-interpret its Origin Story is a BADTHING™. In the early post-war years, the Jewish terrorists (as they were at the time) killed hundreds and fought a ferocious war to claim land away from both its natural inhabitants and the occupying power.
3. Britain took the side of the Arabs during Israel’s War of Independence and supplied them with arms and military advice.
Really? Well, actually I don’t need to ask. This is largely nonsense. The Arabs who attacked the fledgeling state of Israel in 1948 did indeed have British tanks and weapons but then so did Israel. This is largely down to all the crazy countries being recent escapees from the “oppressive” British control.
4. Britain has consistently sided against Israel with the Arabs since the Suez War.
Crap.
5. Britons are in the forefront of anti-Israel boycotts and campaigns to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish State.
Hmm. Hard to challenge this use of language. It is reasonable to assume there are British citizens who are in the forefront of pretty much anything. That implies nothing about official government policy nor the “general” stance of the public (if there even is one – I suspect most British people are neither for nor against “Israel” and a goodly percentage couldn’t find it on a map).
6. Britain has the highest number of physical and verbal attacks on Jews of every country in Europe.
Two counts of crap here. First off it is simply wrong but even if it wasn’t it still carries a “so what?” with regards to this debate.
7. Britain tolerates extremist clerics genocidal anti-Semitic rhetoric in it’s Moslem communities.
So allowing freedom of speech means you are anti-Israel? Interesting. Britain no more tolerates anti-Semetic rhetoric than it tolerates anti-Church of England rhetoric. This is a massive example of special pleading which some pro-Israel types have a tendency to fall back on. It is not anti-Israel to afford people the right to criticise Israel and its policies.
8. Two British suicide bombers killed dozens of Israelis in Tel Aviv in 2003.
Bwahaha. Four British suicide bombers killed dozens of British people in London in 2005. Dozens of Jewish terrorists killed scores of British in Palestine in 1947 does that make Israel anti-British? The actions of two people do not signify either the will of the public or the government.
It seems that education really is no longer important. People can surf the internet, pick up a few historical facts and then argue the toss with national newspapers. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that liberating? Isn’t it ironic that the same people are often complaining about others not learning from history…
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(*) I could talk for a while about how the US seem to be repeating most of the mistakes from Vietnam in Afghanistan and the UK seems to be repeating all the mistakes of early 1970s Ulster in Iraq but that would be boring…
(**) Please don’t make the mistake of thinking I am “anti-war” or “pro-Iran” on the basis of what I have written here…
Well, while I have been away it seems like our accelerating progress to the 1984 Utopian Ideal has been a pretty prevalent topic for this blog. Unfortunately this is simply a reflection of what is current “news” as almost daily we see more and more about how a socialist government is trying to turn us into a dictator’s fantasy land. In about two generations we (the UK) have gone from a shining example of a “free nation” to a state in which a stunning amount of state monitoring seems to be normal.
We can start with DNA databases. The news this week has been clamouring about how we need a bigger national database (see Heather’s previous post) – despite the fact the government already has the largest DNA database in the world. As always, there is a never ending stream of talking heads who say how the perpetrator of Crime XYZ would have been identified in a few seconds if we had a national DNA database. These commentators range from the understandably grieving relatives (who are always the WORST people to have opinions on a topic) to, in at least one case, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).
There is certainly a strong argument that recording the DNA of every person in the UK (including, I assume, all visitors and immigrants) would increase the detection rate of some crimes. On national news yesterday one senior police officer even went as far as to say that crimes were taking longer to solve because police had to use “traditional” methods to determine who the offender was. This is certainly the line taken by relatives of dead people and large portions of the right wing media.
However, it has (IMHO of course) some major fundamental flaws. The most basic of these is the overhaul of the presumption of innocence. If we had a national DNA database the police could turn up at a crime scene, sample any DNA found and then arrest who ever it matched in the database. The person whose DNA has matched is then put in the position of having to prove that they are innocent of the crime and give alternative reasons for their DNA being present. Now they must do the almost impossible task of proving their innocence.
In a similar vein, we (the public at least) have no idea of the accuracy with which a DNA match is made. If you think of all the steps required to collect a national database, store it, collect crime scene DNA and then compare it, there are numerous stages where an error can creep in. If we assume the process has an error rate as low as 1 in 1,000,000 (which would be bloody impressive) then it becomes really scary. At any given time there are around 60 million residents and another 10 million transients within the UK. That DNA sample found at the crime scene could, through sheer accident alone, match any one of 69 innocent people. What is really scary is that it is unlikely anyone will ever actually know what the false positive rate is – does anyone know what the accuracy bars of a fingerprint match are? Will a jury be able to understand the statistics when the person in the dock is claiming they are innocent? Or will the CSI magic take effect and sentence innocent people?
Last (for now) but certainly not least, would you trust any government or private organisation with that much data? For a DNA database to work as a crime solving tool it needs to have details on who you are, where you live, how the police can find you (etc). This is a scary amount of information to put in one place. If you think ID fraud is rife as a result of people getting hold of your bank statements just think what can happen if all the data is housed in one place…
The most worrying thing about centralised data registries (such as national ID cards, DNA databases) is that no one wants to pay for them. The staff who maintain them are often the lowest grade in their organisation and quite often the ones with no prospects of advancement. It is trivial for Nefarious Individual X to offer poorly paid (and usually badly managed) person Y some money to either get access to the data or have an “accident” with it. When we establish the national register as the “Gold Standard” it becomes impossible for people to escape the consequences.
A tragic example of this was ironically headline news today as well. A couple lost their lives after a “gangland boss” infiltrated the “witness protection” scheme that was looking after them (quotes from the Guardian). More worryingly, this was not actually a case of gangsters infiltrating the Police Witness Protection scheme (which you would hope was one of the more secure government institutions) but the simple case of bribing BT employees to do lookups of confidential phone records:
The Stirlands [The couple killed] were ultimately betrayed by two BT staff misusing computer records at the request of the gang, without knowing or asking why they were wanted.
It really is that easy. This was nothing more than an act of revenge, so can you imagine how much bargaining power a gangster could bring if he wanted to, for example, get the national DNA register to point to an innocent person rather than him…
This blog has mentioned it many times in the past, but one of the biggest problems of total state surveillance is the significant shift in the balance of power. The government and public bodies serve the will of the people. They should be worried about the people. They should be 100% accountable to the public who grant them their rights and privileges. With the steady shift towards 1984 this is changing. The people will have to learn to worry about the government and what it is doing in “their” name.
When I was growing up I remember seeing TV programmes and news items about how Communist Russia was the great Evil and how oppressive regimes like Nazi Germany (and East Germany post WWII) were symbolised by how they oppressed the public – demanding “papers” on a regular basis, controlling who could travel and where and when, bugging everyone calls and monitoring their every movement. All my life I thought this was supposed to be teaching people what was wrong with some nations – I never realised it was a blueprint for the new millennium.
The DNA database has scored a notable win in the Ipswich murders and the murder of another woman. Predictably the imagined glories of holding everyone’s DNA have been raised again. (BBC, DNA database debate urged.) More fodder for the ongoing project of turning us all into good 1984 citizens – purely selfish, totally conforming, great at spending money, fearful of each other and afraid to open our mouths.
The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has added its voice to calls for a debate on the database issue.
The Chief Constable of Lincolnshire, Tony Lake, speaks for the association on DNA.
He said: “If there was a national database of everybody then we would solve more crime, of that there is absolutely no doubt.
A few instances don’t make the case for the huge attack on civil liberties.
The Ipswich murders appear to have had plenty of other evidence besides just DNA. CCTV footage, for a start. Eye-witnesses. And lots more. The DNA itself would have been pretty shaky without the rest of the evidence.
This shows the uselessness of CCTV footage at preventing crime, although it might help to catch criminals. That goes double for DNA. It has no preventative effect whatsoever.
Unsurprisingly, my priority is NOT to be murdered, rather than to be sure that anyone who murdered me was caught. So, I can’t really think it’s a fair trade for my civil liberties to know that anyone who murders me will do time.
Murderers like the Ipswich killer, who kill for reasons deep in their bizarre psychology, tend to plan out their crimes. They pick on vulnerable people who probably won’t be missed, for example. They are pretty capable of becoming too careful to leave DNA. So, catching serial killers through DNA identification is a one-shot deal. As soon as they understand that leaving DNA is a sure route to being caught, they will just stop leaving it.
That throws us back on standard police work, which is liable to get more and more inept, if relying on technology goes much further.
One obvious flaw with relying too heavily on DNA is how easily it can be faked. An enterprising attacker with half a brain could gather a few hairs, a bit of spittle from a cigarette butt or a discarded cup, the fingernail clippings from a manicurists, the sweat left on a bus seat on a hot day, even……
To all those people who parrot the “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear” line, are you willing to bet your liberty and good name on the belief that all criminals are stupid?