I found this on Flickr and loved it. It is a stunning picture with great compositional elements and spot on focusing.
I love the colours and the overall feeling of sunset tranquillity it gives.
Land of the Free…
Found this on the interesting, if occasionally outraging, War on Photography Blog:
taking photographs of public buildings is, in and of itself, evidence of suspicious behavior sufficient to give authorities the right to stop and detain anyone engaging in such behavior.
Isnt that a great attitude for the Chief of the Franklin, Wisconsin Police Department to have?
Isnt it equally great to remember back to the bad old days of the Cold War when this sort of behaviour was used as an example of how Ebull the Commiez were?
Welcome to Minority Report
On the BBC
Bus CCTV could predict assaults
The system would monitor suspicious behaviour on buses
CCTV security systems could soon spot an assault on a bus before it happens, according to a major research project.(from the BBC)
🙂
OK, admittedly, this is what is more often known as “vapourware” than a fully-working Minority Report system.
Although much of the work is currently at the theoretical stage, the team from the university’s newly-founded Centre for Secure Information Technologies predict that within five years their software will be able to profile people as they board a bus. (from the BBC)
I bet they haven’t even bred the mutants for the tank yet.
“Profile” bus passengers troublemakers? Through CCTV? With software that does exactly what a bus driver thinking “I don’t like the look of him” would do?
Leaping to conclusions on the basis of appearance and movements?
I can do that for free. I try to stop myself doing it because I believe the more accurate word is “stereotyping,” rather than “profiling,” but then, I’m only human…..
Oh right, that was why Minority Report seemed such a good choice of title. 😀
montserrat A
Stunning landscape and a good reason for browsing through Flickr pics.
While it can be argued that flickr has a mixed bag of images (in terms of quality), it is undeniable that there are some stunning captures there.
Song: Death of god
Here’s folk/rock singer Roy Harper singing “The Death of God“. The link is to part 1 – the first of 4. Roy Harper is given to really long intros, so the words don’t even really kick in until the end of Part 1.
He’s been writing and performing heathen songs for over 40 years. This is far from his best work but still worth a listen. To quote from his website:
He was raised by his father and step-mother, whose Jehovah’s Witness beliefs eventually alienated him. Harper’s anti-religious views would later become a familiar theme in his music.
Rumble about the Jungle
How easily does extreme right-wing discourse slip into the way the media frames the world? Answer: Very easily.
The BBC website has a report on the argument by the Refugee Council that the UK should take some responsibility to grant asylum for vulnerable residents – children -of the squatter camp at Calais.
They are talking about children. Children who are living in a squatter camp. I think that qualifies as a humanitarian issue. Surely all our media hysteria about risks to children should also apply here?
But, in the interests of “balance”, presumably, the BBC gives at least an equal space to the views of Migration Watch, who carefully seek to redefine this issue to ignore the “children” bit. After a load of unchallenged nonsense such as an assertion that 80% of people who say the word “asylum” are admitted to the UK, their spokesman says
“You have to look at the system as a whole, you can’t just say there are vulnerable children” (from the BBC)
Now, I’m already on semiotic alert by the BBC’s description of this squatter camp as
the camp known as “the jungle”
And lo, there is a sidebar with links to previous BBC articles about this camp.
SEE ALSO
UK turns down ‘jungle migrants’ 18 Sep 09 | Europe
France to close migrant ‘jungle’ 16 Sep 09 | Europe
Migrant squalor in Calais ‘jungle’ 02 Jul 09 | UK
UN to help advise Calais refugees 01 Jul 09 | UK
Was a decision taken in early July to use the “jungle” word? Hmm, does that mean that it’s full of Africans? Yes, I believe it does. Jungle is a pretty loaded word. It arrives carrying echoes of the racist ideas that supported colonialism. That’s why we now say “rainforest”.
I don’t have a problem with calling the “rainforest” the “jungle”. However, I do have serious problems with the BBC calling a refugee camp a “jungle,” given that I don’t believe that trees and parrots are over-represented in the Calais camp.
And what is MigrationWatch? Surely that must be an organisation with equal credibility to the Refugee Council, given that it’s accorded equal billing by the BBC? Well, maybe it’s just me but I rather think not.
Its website says that
We are an independent, voluntary, non political body which is concerned about the present scale of immigration into the UK.
Let’s say “concerned” is putting it mildly. The word “rabid” would probably fill the bill better. Here are the first 3 of what they call “key facts”:
Net immigration has quadrupled since 1997 to 237,000 a year.
A migrant now arrives nearly every minute.
We must build a new home every six minutes for new migrants.
They have a press page where they record their appearances in the media: (When I say “their” I am not convinced that “they” exist far beyond their spokestwat, but that may be wishful thinking)
Bear with me while I paste in their media triumphs over the past couple of years. Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph are the favoured platforms – until the BBC started to see their glorious leader as a spokesman:
Migrant housing figures, Letter in The Daily Telegraph 25 July, 2009
25-Jul-2009
Turks increasingly turn to Islamic extremism: Al Qaeda’s reliance on Arabs is altering as recruits from Turkey and Turkic-speaking areas of Central Asia form a recent wave of trainees, experts (sic) say.
By Sebastian Rotella Los Angeles Times – 20-Jul-2009
At last, the truth about immigration and council house queue jumping
By Andrew Green The Daily Mail, London – 30-Jun-2009
Statisticians are right to publish and be damned By Sir Andrew Green,
The Times – 12-Feb-2009
We must create a culture of solidarity, not offer amnesties
Editorial from The Catholic Herald 28-Nov-2008
How many more people can our small island take? As population heads towards 70 million has the penny dropped for Labour? by Sir Andrew Green The Daily Mail – 19-Nov-2008
Devastating demolition of the case for mass immigration by Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, The Daily Mail – 01-Apr-2008
Immigration is making matters worst (sic) Letter by Sir Andrew Green
The Surrey Advertiser – 07-Dec-2007
Hold back the immigrant flood By Sir Andrew Green,
The Sunday Times – 04-Nov-2007
‘We must act now to cut immigrant numbers’ Commentary by Sir Andrew Green, The Daily Telegraph – 24-Oct-2007
Plus this “1 Sep 2009 … Sir Andrew Green was interviewed on the Today Programme at 8.35 this morning about the asylum seekers’ camp near Calais”
Who is Sir Andrew Green and why are his views so much more worthy of media attention than, say, mine? A Guardian profile from 2005 says his friends are unanimous that he’s not a a racist. Oh, well, that must be OK, then.
Apparently, he can’t be a racist, because he was British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia…….
The portrait that emerges from those who know Sir Andrew is of a shy, private individual, “a right old Tory, Daily Telegraph reader”, and also a “very religious” man who held regular evangelical meetings at the British embassy in Riyadh. (from the Guardian, 4 Nov 2005)
A very religious man. LOL Regular evangelical sessions.. Double LOL. Why am I not surprised that this right-wing figurehead for an ugly ideology is also an “evangelical Christian”? Indeed, “suffer the little children” may have become his new watchword, if we consider his Calais stance.
Just to show exactly how “unracist” the former ambassador is:
The row offered Sir Andrew an opportunity to renew his argument on the BBC’s Today programme, when he said: “We have no problem with immigration from Poland, which is valuable to all sides.” (from the Guardian, 4 Nov 2005)
So Eastern Europeans are OK?
But. almost all the migration to the UK that makes up the numbers that Migration Watch presents (e.g UK supposedly needs to build a house every 6 minutes for migrants) is from EC countries. This apparently doesn’t worry “Migration Watch”.
Shouldn’t they call it “Non-white Migration Watch” and have done with it, then? Clearly not, because even the BBC would then have problems presenting Sir Andrew Green’s views on its main pages, in the name of balance.
Oh Emm Gee !1!
OMG! Have you heard? The president of AMERICA has an opinion…. ZOMG!!!!!!111
Seriously. It must be the slowest news day ever. Obviously the media has hit saturation point with war, famine, plague and pestilence so now we have a headline news bulletin which revolves around the President of the USA expressing an opinion about someone.
What the fuck has the world come to for this to be news? Even the BBC has shamed itself by covering it. To death.
In a nutshell, Kanye West was a jack ass and interrupted an award winners speech. Yeah, big deal. I could just about see that being the news item but the reality is people act like self-centred idiots day in, day out. The fact that some one famous is self-centred is hardly news. Following this frankly uninteresting incident, President Obabma was holding a conversation about it off air, but some ABC staff recorded it and felt the need to post twitter messages about it. Following it becoming “news” ABC have apologised to CNBC and the POTUS and have removed the twitter posts. Obviously this has done nothing to reduce the global spread and the wonders of the interweb mean we can all listen to the President of the USA calling Kanye West a “jack ass.”
Is this really how low our society has sunk? Is the President’s personal opinion about someone’s behaviour genuinely newsworthy? What impact does this have on anyone’s life?
If pushed, I am sure you could easily find in excess of 50% of the worlds population who would call Kanye West a “jack ass” even prior to his MTV awards behaviour. Is that news worthy? If not, why not?
The only thing I can think of is that the worlds news agencies are so overwhelmed by the onslaught from Web 2.0 crap applications that anything which has even a passing reference to them becomes news based solely on its perceived ability to appeal to the yoof market. It is shameful, and certainly goes a long way to explaining why “old media” feels it is under threat from the new media…
Shame on every news outlet that carried this story. Even a cat up the tree would have been more newsworthy.
Byronic flights of fancy
Wow, “danger”, “perils” to children, “help – before it’s too late”. What a scary Times headline! I am already shaking with fear before I’ve read it. Won’t anyone think of the children, and so on?
What is this scary thing? Of course, it’s the internet.
Mind the gap: The perils of failing to keep pace with your child online
A dangerous gap has emerged between web-savvy kids and parents. Professor Tanya Byron has launched a new campaign to help — before it’s too late
Hmm. This is to mark the launch of a campaign, a “grassroots campaign” no less. (There’s a beautiful phrase in US politics for a campaign that pretends to be a genuine upsurge of democratic will but actually, well, isn’t. Oh yes, the word is “Astroturf”)
The campaign seems to involve asking kids if they can use any tech and getting very afraid when they say yes..
The campaign’s catalyst is Byron, known for her television programmes The House of Tiny Tearaways and Am I Normal?, as well as the author of the government-backed 2008 Byron Review Safer Children in a Digital World, which resulted in the creation of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety.
So, a tv child psychologist heads it. Hmm, why am I less than convinced by this whole thing? A tv child psychologist who also writes for the Times. And gets written about in the Times. Because, she’s also in the news today. (In the Times):
Ministers need to act swiftly on child safety, warns adviser
It’s Tanya, now known as “Gordon Brown’s adviser.”
Well who else could the government call on? Obviously, no amount of experience or qualifications or all-round peer-reviewed respect gained by any other child psychologist, or by any person who actually knows anything about the internet, could stand up against the fact that she’s got tv programmes.
(If you ever doubted that senior politicians are in thrall to the cult of celebrity at least as much as the people who read Heat (etc) magazines, Tanya is the living proof of your naivete.)
The busy Tanya is panicking about the UK not implementing some European directive on games classification. Or all of her recommendations, really. So she’s going from school to school asking questions, to support the idea that kids may know things about using the internet that their parents don’t. And that this is somehow inherently terrifying….
The games classification thing is typical of the kneejerk reactions of this “grassroots” campaign. For a start, it’s inherently counter-productive, in terms of their supposed goals. Would anything make a game more attractive to an early teenager than an 18 certificate?
Is there any evidence that playing pc or console games that are “too old for them” harms kids? Any evidence at all?
Is there any evidence whatsoever that parents are all in a strange population subgroup that failed to notice anything that happened over the last twenty years? Like the arrival of the Internet. How many adults do you know who don’t use computers or the net?
There’s a more internet and computer nonsense on the BBC today.
Tech addiction ‘harms learning’
Technology addiction among young people is having a disruptive effect on their learning, researchers have warned.
The study – Techno Addicts: Young Person Addiction to Technology – was carried out by researchers at Cranfield School of Management, Northampton Business School and academic consultancy AJM Associates.
(The AJM website mission statement says:
“Providing outstanding returns for investors along with excellent leadership in managing real estate projects is the AJM Associates mission.” I, for one, admire the conduct of educational research by profit-oriented real-estate companies and management schools….In your face, stuffy old educational academics. )
You can buy the study from Siigel Press for about $25. It’s on their “Bestseller” list. (Hardly surprising that it’s a best-seller. It got a free plug on the BBC, ffs)
The blurb talks up the shock value of this “bestseller”.
Technology addiction amongst young people, particularly in terms of facilitating social networking, is having a disruptive effect on positive attitudes towards learning. Read the results of this collaborative study spearheaded by Cranfield School of Management, Northampton Business School and AJM Associates. While students expressed little concern of addiction, technology obsession is hindering spelling skills, encouraging plagiarism and disrupting classroom learning. Download this report to learn the full details and the disturbing impact technology is having on today’s youth.
Call me a pedant – despite my possible incipient adult-onset internet addiction – but “While students expressed little concern of addiction,” doesn’t seem like correct grammar to me.
And surely they don’t really mean to claim that technology addiction is “facilitating social networking”?
If it was only possible to channel the energy that goes into manufacturing internet scares and turn it to a useful purpose, we could all be driving round in hot-air powered vehicles and could stop worrying about global warming,
Otherwise, I think that – if you really want to protect your kids online – you actually talk to them.
Early Religion
Religion...
[hat tip: A commenter on Pharyngula]
Missing Null
Aside
Does anyone know what has happened to Nullifidian? His blog seems to have been flatlined for a while and, here at Why Dont You towers, we are missing his excellent brand of commentary. Come back Null! We miss you! Although Null’s site is down, his aggregator live at Planet Humanism.
Misguided Security Managers
In the July / August edition of Infosecurity Magazine, there is a fairly interesting article on security matters, and differences, in the public and private sectors. I cant find this article online so you will have to trust me.
There is a quote in the article, from an “anonymous” security manager which sadly echoes comments I have heard right across the public sector, when public servants discuss the need to protect public privacy:
One senior manager at a local council – who ask not to be named – told infosecurity that he would rather be brought before the courts for an information security charge, than because a child or other vulnerable person has been harmed as a result of data not being shared.
(Here, I get visions of Reverend Lovejoy’s wife crying out “wont anyone think of the children”)
In the article this is presented as a dilemma public sector information security professionals face on a regular basis. My experience of said individuals supports this. It is very tabloid friendly. It is also complete nonsense that infuriates me to the point of wanting to choke the life out of the idiots who say it. (note for any future court action – this is purely imaginary, I am not really planning to kill anyone now or in the future)
There are so many things wrong with this it is hard to know where to start.
This person is paid to be a security manager. They are not a child protection professional. They are there to manage the security of the information that the public have entrusted to the council. Nothing else. If their job description means they have to ensure that vulnerable persons are safe in their homes, then I suspect there is something seriously wrong going on.
As a public servant, this “senior manager” is paid by the public, who you would rightly assume should have some expectation of his behaviour. Unless we’ve moved into some weird world where the vulnerable pay more for their services he has no right to unilaterally assume what laws he will follow and what laws he will break. He has no right or authority to compromise my privacy and personal data because he thinks that doing so 100,000 times might save one vulnerable person.
Equally this “manager” (sneer quotes intended) has no way of knowing if he is placing the safety of vulnerable people in further danger. Privacy laws and restrictions on how your personal data can be handled are there to protect everyone. Yes this includes criminals but it also includes vulnerable people. If this senior manager feels sending a copy of the addresses of everyone “at risk” to an agency across town would be helpful sharing of their data, what would he do if it got lost? What is his defence if his information security failures allow a predator to get the details of the vulnerable people he seeks to protect?
Equally importantly, what about those who only become vulnerable because of his lackadaisical attitude? This idea that passing private information and personal data is inherently a GOODTHING™© is insane. An otherwise fine person who has their home address details passed into the hands of a criminal becomes a vulnerable person. They have, through no fault of their own, become open to a vastly different threat – one they may not be prepared for. Is this acceptable behaviour for public servants? Imagine a serial rapist who gets hold of modified electoral roll data indicating addresses (and telephone numbers) of every house in the area where a single female lives. Would you be happy with the response that he would rather be in court over an Infosec case?
I suspect the real problem is that privacy and information security statutes don’t have enough teeth. If this senior manager was facing 20 years in jail for an infosec compromise, I am sure he would think differently. As it stands, nothing he does will get him properly punished in a court of law, so he must be talking about the court of public opinion. This is, sadly, so seriously misled by the tabloids that it is easy to see he would be hounded to the brink of suicide if it turned out he had withheld data that might have possibly prevented the death of a child. In a similar manner, if it turned out he had lost a disk containing the personal details of 250,000 people it would get, maybe, a few column inches.
To an extent this is our fault. We want easy to digest news. We ignore the mights and possibilities in the first instance, so we can get to the meat of saving the child. In the second case, its too technical, too distant and probably doesn’t affect “us” so we don’t really care about it. We, the public, are stupid.
Fibre optic cable to god
I hope the god-of-abraham has a decent internet connection. He seems to have dropped “omnipresence” from his skillset and to have been reduced to logging on to catch up with his latest comments, like us mere mortals.
A good post on the Times religion blog reported on the growth of online prayer sites. Like beliefnet.
I was already baffled enough by prayer. The internet version is incomprehensible to another order of magnitude.
There are lots of tragic situations listed, with set prayers to go with them. (I don’t know if the participants are allowed to put them in their own words or to precis them in a hurry.)
Do these get delivered straight to the-god-of-abraham? Or are people supposed to repeat them aloud or read them silently, or what? (I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have inadvertently “prayed” by reading them online).
Apparently, the site has seen a huge surge in online prayer requests since the economy tanked. Is the divine omniscience failing again? Surely the-god-of-abraham already knows about the economy?
If he was going to spare his devotees from getting poorer, surely he’d have already sorted them. Or, at least, raptured them or something. Don’t tell me he’s doing that bastardy thing again of just helping them out if they really crawl first and tell him how much they love him.
The answer is so obvious. He’s got fibre-optic cable and now he spends all day surfing the net rather than listening to individuals’ hearts. If it’s not on a blog – or at least on twitter – he hasn’t heard it.
The Times post quoted Richard Sloan:
“The prayers on these sites are all prayers for petition, as opposed to prayers of praise, or prayers of wonder…”
In other words they are all celestial begging letters.
Beliefnet reckons Jesus or god or both (I’m mildly confused by which one this is) promised to answer these prayers:
Jesus lays down amazing promises about the power of asking things from God. He promises to answer. You can check out Thursday’s post if you’d like to see a few of those commitments. Bottom line: God puts himself on the line to deliver what we pray for!
God “puts himself on the line”!!! By Ogum! God may even step up to the plate to deliver on these prayers. Count me in, there’s loads of things I’d like to ask for.
No wait, there is small print. “conditions.”
One of which is, bizarrely, that “Jesus makes prayer a corporate matter.”
I am in awe at this 21st century god. He doesn’t just have a net connection. He is also a CEO.
Ah, it seems to mean he answers prayers by volume.
Effective requests come to God as petitions with more than one signature attached.
Look, he’s a busy guy, right? He can’t be expected to pay attention to the fall of a single sparrow or anything, in a world with 6 billion human beings. He needs lots of voices clamouring for him to do something before he’ll bother to put himself on the line. (That’s why your single prayer for the regrowth of your amputated limb failed, fool.)
There were previous conditions: “asking” (Well duh, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Surely you didn’t think your god was omniscient enough to know that you wouldn’t welcome that bankruptcy?) and “faith.”
Which has a strangely instrumentalist meaning:
Faith as the Bible defines it is an action based on a conviction that something promised with be delivered, even before any evidence appears that it will be so.
Is this a new consumerist adaptation of Christianity? Guaranteed delivery, even if you don’t actually get the thing you ordered.
The god-of-abraham as a giant e-commerce application?
According to the Times,
Worries about the ethics of these sites are further fuelled by the existence of some which charge for intecessionary prayer, offering a ‘call-centre’ style service.
Bang up to the minute, again, god-of-abraham.
What’s the betting that he’s outsourced the whole god business to some Indian call-centre? There must be enough gods in the Hindu pantheon to service the current global demand for divine intervention.
And the god-of-abraham is sunning himself on the beach at some Red Sea resort with a fast internet connection.
No educashun
The reliably extreme wingnut daily – and seemingly hundreds of other blogs with names like rightwingerz.com (don’t you just love that ludicrous z?) have an almost word-for-word replica of a story about:
Court orders Christian child into government education
10-year-old’s ‘vigorous’ defense of her faith condemned by judge
(“Her” “vigorous defence”, indeed. “Her” faith, indeed.) To summarise the tale, a court-appointed guardian ad litem
reasoned that the girl’s “vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view.” (from worldnetdaily)
To paraphrase, he saw the girl as being in danger of being far too isolated and brainwashed for her own good. Just in case, that doesn’t have the ring of truth, look at, say, Amazon’s Classical homeschool list to see what kinds of material are available for homeschoolers.
Classical.HomeSchool for grades K-3
(No, I don’t know why it has a dot between Classical and Home either. I am already baffled enough by grades K-3. I am guessing kindergarten to grade 3[?]. Basically very young children then.)
Item 1. is
KJV/Amplified Parallel Bible, Large Print (King James Version) by Zondervan Publishing
The list author says:
“My favorite Bible, the beauty of the KJV language, with Amplified to enhance…great for reading aloud to the children.”
Item 2.
Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style by Harvey Bluedorn
The list author says:
“The # 1 Homeschooling Book in my opinion, and I have read ALOT of them. This is where it all starts!”
(wtf is the trivium? I casually assume that was the metal thing you use to suspend pans over a camp fire. No, that’s a trivet. The freedictionary says
in the Middle Ages, one of the two divisions of the seven liberal arts, comprising logic, grammar, and rhetoric.
So, a medieval curriculum then. Hmm. What a brilliant idea in the 21st century. (not) Wikipedia gives more choices.:
Trivium is the Latin singular form of trivia. It may also refer to the following:
* Trivium (band), an American heavy metal band
* Trivium (cipher), a synchronous stream cipher
* Trivium (education), in medieval educational theory
I suspect “the singular form of trivia” may be just as appropriate.)
To continue the homeschool trivia curriculum:
3. The Three R’s by Dr Beechick
4. Dr. Beechick’s Homeschool Answer Book by Ruth Beechick
5. Egermeier’s Bible Story Book by Elsie E. Egermeier
6. The Child’s Story Bible by Catherine F. Vos
7. Prima Latina: Introduction to Christian Latin, Teacher Manual by Leigh Lowe
8. The Alphabet for Classical Latin by Helena Bluedorn
9. A Greek Alphabetarion: A Primer for Teaching How to Read, Write & Pronounce Ancient & Biblical Greek by Harvey Bluedorn
10. Ray’s new primary arithmetic: For young learners (Ray’s arithmetic series) (Ray’s arithmetic series) by Joseph Ray,
etc. Enough, already… You get the flavour.
Basic reading and maths, fair enough, although I begin to be suspicious of even these books, given the context. And the fact that googling Ruth Beechick found me this enthusiastic home-schooler’s blog.
I think I now own every book Ruth Beechick has written ~ well, not every one; she’s got a new one just hot off the press: “World History Made Simple: Matching History With the Bible.” (from Homeschooling from the Heart blog)
Speaking of history, number 14 on the Amazon list is:
14. The Story of the World: History for the Classical Child; Volume 1: Ancient Times by Susan Wise Bauer
The list author says:
“This is a *good* story…I do like it, however have your Bible handy and make sure your children are grounded in OT History FIRST…may want to skip the beginning sections, and pre-read so for editing”
In other words, it’s a book that doesn’t JUST have the Old Testament in it, so they have to issue a health warning.
The Latin and Greek seem eccentric, to say the least. However, surely they’d be a welcome relief from the constant Bible shit. Maybe not, given that they seem to be there just so these poor unfortunate kids can read even more Bibles.
I can understand why people might prefer to spare their kids the many horrors of standard schools. But, to teach kids at home, following this sort of curriculum…… How could any child subjected to this have a hope in hell of fitting in with other people, let alone of thinking for themselves?
Tories try to spoil the Wire
My Wire fan-status already took a knock when the Guardian started running a Wire-fan reading group and most of the posters seemed to be prats. But to find the Tories using the Wire, just to steal its perceived credibility for a soundbite, is making me gag.
The BBC website headline says
Parts of Britain ‘like The Wire’
I assumed that was a subject-verb-object construction, meaning “There are parts of Britain where people like the Wire.” Which is bound to be true but a bit of a strange news headline.
But it turned out they meant:
Parts of Britain (are) ‘like The Wire’
Even that is fair enough. After all, it’s a drama that’s deliberately meant to suspend disbelief through “realism” ffs. Bits of it feel “true” to me, “true” in terms of my experience of the world and of the ways people act. I don’t assume that makes it literally “true,” in a documentary sense. No one who’s ever watched a tv series before would assume it’s a literally “true” representation of life in Baltimore, let alone any UK city.
The Conservatives have compared parts of the UK to The Wire, a US television show which portrays inner-city drugs and violence.
In a speech, shadow home secretary Chris Grayling argued that the UK was suffering the same culture of gangs and street violence found in the US.
He said Labour had failed to ensure law and order was preserved in the poorest parts of the country. ..
Mr Grayling repeated his charge that poorer communities in the UK have been let down by Labour, saying: “The Wire has become a byword for urban deprivation and societal breakdown in modern America.”
He said: “When The Wire comes to Britain’s streets, it is the poor who suffer most. It is the poor who are the ones who have borne the brunt of the surge in violence under this government.
It’s pretty obvious at this point that Chris Grayling hasn’t really ever watched the Wire.
Because, if he had, he’d have noticed that the crimes aren’t just at street level.The economy, the political world and the media don’t exactly emerge unscathed.
Crocodile tears for the “poor” seem to be the Tories’ new election strategy. For instance, they claim that the poor are being let down.
Oh yes, “let down by rising crime” is the claim. I think that misinterpreting & manipulating crime figures is called “juking the stats” in the Wire. So you’d think that a Wire-o-phile like the shadow Tory Home secretary would have the grace to blush when he does it. (Seeing as all crime figures show falling rates)
OK, the Tories aren’t the BNP – which is also trying to corner the market in populist concern for the class-formerly-known-as-working (before the last Tory governments hammered it into the ground.) But they bear a pretty monstrous responsibility for the disaffection and poverty of so many neighbourhoods, where many people never found work since the 1980s. (Don’t make me repeat the list of Tory crimes against “no-such-thing-as-society”, because I will rant for hours.)
So it’s doubly sickening to see them both using the consequences of their own actions as a stick with which to beat the government and dragging the good name of the Wire into it.
Still, it’s all in the game, I suppose…..
Justice, mercy or revenge
Today’s news has been pretty much filled with items about the decision to allow Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the man jailed for blowing up a US airliner over Lockerbie in 1988, to go home to die. al-Megrahi is suffering from terminal cancer and, according to some reports at least, has about three months to live. It is probably unsurprising that this release has generated a lot of vox pop about what an “outrage” it is that he be allowed home to die. One of the terms of his release is that al-Megrahi dropped his series of appeals against his conviction, saving the UK taxpayer a large amount of money; however I can only assume that he still thinks he is innocent (or at least has a chance of being found innocent) but no longer had the will to fight this.
In the UK a life sentence doesn’t actually mean you are expected to die in jail. The criminal justice system is, in theory at least, based upon the principles of removing an offender from society as long as they present a danger to society, while providing correctional education to allow them to reintegrate to society upon release.
Equally, in the UK (and the US I am fairly sure) there are frequent cases where a prisoner is released from jail on compassionate grounds. There is nothing specifically unusual about this case.
The biggest difference here is that this is a person who has killed Americans. As a result, President Obama felt the urge to pressurise the “Scottish Government” (hmm) to change its mind about al-Megrahi’s release. President Obamba is not alone in this, almost every US politician has tried to convince the Scottish Justice Minister to change his mind. The UK radio and TV news is running headlines about how this has “all been ignored” – as if the requests of US politicians should carry some weight in this matter. I notice that previously the US government fell over itself to listen to pleas from UK politicians about the treatment of Gary McKinnon… Or not.
All this is only mildly interesting. I notice with more interest, and a lot of amusement, that the same parts of the British media objecting to this were crying for the release of the convicted Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs. Obviously there are differences, Biggs is unrepentant, proud of his crime and white so the objections of Jack Mill‘s son went largely ignored.
Unusually for a missive from WhyDontYou Towers, I have no real opinion one way or another over the treatment and final disposal of al-Megrahi other than to wish there was some actual justice and consistency in the UK Criminal Justice system. Justice is not about revenge. Fair treatment includes compassion. Nothing that happens to al-Megrahi will bring back the dead or turn the clock back to before the murders. If justice is allowed to become revenge, then Al Qaeda can give up, we’ve destroyed western society ourselves. There can be no doubt that al-Megrahi showed his victims no compassion, but so what? Do two wrongs make a right? Does anyone honestly think al-Megrahi remains a danger to society? The news is showing traumatic footage of the night Pan Am Flight 103 went down – what can this do other than inflame people about the decision, which I think is at least consistent with the UK criminal justice policy.
As is always the case, the BBC is an example of the odd responses. There is the frequently wrong idea that those who are emotionally entangled can give a just and reasoned opinion – the BBC website has an entire page devoted to “Reaction – Lockerbie Bomber Set Free.” Show the effects of emotional involvement, the sister of a victim understandably says:
I don’t know how you show compassion to someone who has shown no remorse for what he has done and as Mr MacAskill praised the justice system and the investigation and the trial, how do you then show this person compassion? It’s just utterly despicable. I think he should have died in prison. Why should he be returned to Libya? That’s not what we were promised. We were always told he would serve out his full sentence in Scotland.
It is understandable, but wrong. I cant begin to imagine the suffering this person has undergone, but that is not grounds for a policy decision. This is why in the Dark Ages we moved away from blood feuds and instituted a system of courts and laws. While she may not, yet, see it, the only way to show compassion is in situations like this. There is no compassion in being nice to nice people you like. Compassion involves doing what is right even when you dont want to.
The inherently evil David Cameron gives us a sign of the Criminal Justice system we can look forward to if the Tories come to power:
This man was convicted of murdering 270 people, he showed no compassion to them, they weren’t allowed to go home and die with their relatives in their own bed and I think this is a very bad decision
Ah, an eye for an eye eh? Does the body count matter? If he had killed just one, would he be objecting? Is the only reason to keep him in jail the fact that 270 families were torn apart rather than one or two? I suspect that if you are a grieving family member, the pain is not reduced simply because no one else died.
The Scottish Labour Leader has shown a tendency towards fluid politics that is characteristic of the Labour Party in general:
While one can have sympathy for the family of a gravely ill prisoner, on balance, our duty is to honour and respect the victims of Lockerbie and have compassion for them. The SNP’s handling of this case has let down Scotland
Yes, have compassion for the victims. Making someone suffer because not doing so would upset the families is not compassionate. It is pretty much a cowardly response.
Annoyingly for a committed Atheist, the Reverend Ian Galloway (Church of Scotland) says what is, IMHO, the right thing:
We are defined as a nation by how we treat those who have chosen to hurt us. Do we choose mercy even when they did not chose mercy? This was not about whether one man was guilty or innocent. Nor is it about whether he had a right to mercy but whether we as a nation, despite the continuing pain of many, are willing to be merciful. I understand the deep anger and grief that still grips the souls of the victims’ families and I respect their views, but to them, I would say justice is not lost in acting in mercy. Instead our deepest humanity is expressed for the better. To choose mercy is the tough choice and today our nation met that challenge.
Infuriatingly I cant help but agree with everything he has said here.
If you want to read some genuinely insane arguments on this matter have a look at the BBC “Have Your Say” Pages. Here the hatred really flows. The whole of Europe is called “Cowardly” because the Scottish National Party stood up to American pressure. The irony is amusing, if the ranting is disturbing.
It saddens me that people are still suffering to such an extent about this. Their suffering will not be changed by this persons release, nor would their suffering end if he had died in jail. That political figures in both countries are making so much capital out of this is an example of how craven politics really is. When I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with a Church of Scotland Reverend, its time to lie down.