The usually-wonderful Marina Hyde makes a really good point in the Guardian today. About the effect that the Daily Mail campaign against some pathetically stupid BBC presenters (Ross and Brand) has had on the BBC’s nerve, making the BBC too cowardly to broadcast an appeal for aid to the people of Gaza.
Enough said, here’s Marina.
Two good (even entertaining, on a serious subject) articles in the Guardian: Jan Morris’s Davis fight is not just for liberty: It is for Britain’s soul. (This was published a couple of days ago but it’s well worth reading just to remind yourself that the whole world is not mad.)
She says that Britain is becoming divided into two camps – those who care about freedom and those who are happy to give it up:
of the contemporary two nations, it seems to me, by far the greater is giving up on liberty. Anyone can see that in Britain, 2008, individuality is being suppressed, so that year by year, generation by generation, the people are being bullied or brainwashed into docile conformity. What is more ominous is that so many want to be docile. They want to be supervised, cosseted, homogenised, obedient.
She suspects that even those of us who don’t want to be brainwashed are dreaming of autocratic powers to put paid to the current nonsense.
Already every free soul, I suspect, has sometimes wished that we had a benevolent dictator to sweep all the nonsense aside, the flabbiness and the conformity, the brainwash and all.
There is something in the point she is making – so many people are becoming so passive and fearful, it’s quite a temptation to think they don’t deserve any freedom.
Today, the intermittently-brilliant Marina Hyde also takes a strong stance against our incorporation into an authoritarian Truman Show world: This surveillance onslaught is draconian and creepy. She says that the level of surveillance for petty offences makes her ashamed to be British.
The past few years have thrown up dozens of instances which made one wince to be a citizen of this septic isle, but a personal low came with the discovery that 500,000 bins had been fitted with electronic tracking devices. Transponders in bins … Could any morning news item be more designed to force one back against the pillows, too embarrassed about one’s country to start the day? Yes, as it turned out…
(referring to the Poole Council’s surveillance of parents suspected of trying to get their kids in a specific school.)
She suggests that wearing a hood or hijab might become a necessity for anyone who wants any degree of privacy in public space.
Yet there does seem a vaguely depressing irony in governments insisting that constant surveillance is essential to prevent our being overrun by repressive regimes who’d make us all cover our heads and the like. It’s these initiatives that drive even the most pliant members of society to dream of taking just that precaution themselves, if only for a bit of privacy.
Of course these articles got a fair number of comments from people who could be replaced by the Twat-a-tron with no loss to the planet and a valuable net saving of air.
I’d repeat some of the more comedic ones here, if only I could see them again on the Guardian website… and if Firefox didn’t die every time I pay attention to its “unencrypted- information- being-sent” warning about the Guardian website and refuse to send whatever is harvested every time I open a page. I’ve looked at the Guardian’s privacy policy and it doesn’t say its cookies will dial home every time you look at a page.
No, not the kind, sane, rational people who comment here! My post on “Writing from Ignorance” was largely based on having read the paper edition of the Guardian today. Out of curiosity I visited the online version to see what sort of comments people came up with. Wow. For a while, I had felt I was being harsh towards Marina Hyde and had tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Not so some of the people who commented.
Now, there are zillions of comments and I read very few of them — mainly the first and last as I find that is the best way to get a feel for the debate when there are loads of comments. Here the majority of insane posts come from people claiming to be Americans. I truly hope they are either lying through their teeth or they do not present a representative sample. Some blasts of wisdom are: Continue reading
The false authority fallacy is one which rears it’s ugly head on a regular basis. I used to labour under the suspicion that this was more a problem for the right wing extremists, religious zealots on the like. Sadly, I have had my eyes opened somewhat.
In the most basic form, the false authority fallacy is most often invoked when a person, an expert in one field, is used to provide expert testimony in an unrelated field. We get it on a regular basis in the UK news (and I assume this is a global phenomenon), when (for example) Surgeons from the GMC pass opinion on anti-crime legislation. They may be wonderful surgeons, but what do they know about criminology or social control? Note: They may also be excellent criminologist or sociologists — but this is not something which can be assumed by their status as a surgeon. This fallacy happens all over — although they understand the grief, what special insight do the parents of murdered children have into law? — and it often manifests itself in a variety of mutated forms (Creationists are specialists at this). Recently, I have seen a new variation.