Pandering to idiots

At the risk of sounding like someone much older... what is the world coming to? Anyone in the UK can't have escaped this story about a vicar who kissed a schoolgirl on the cheek when giving her an award and found himself in the centre of a criminal investigation. He was found not to have committed any crime of course, but he still ended-up having to give-up his post as a school governor.

So the school loses one of the few people who are willing to give up their time to help out purely to satisfy some insane mother who seems hell bent on someone hanging for innocently kissing her daughter. The quote from her at the end of the article about sums it all up really:

But the girl's mother said she was not satisfied with the investigationor the findings and continued to allege that Mr Barrett's kiss was an assault. "I am so disappointed with the way it has been handled and Iwould like him to be removed from his position," she said.

There are too many idiots in the world and we need to do something about it. To this end I think I will start to 'name and shame' them, so this woman (who sadly remains nameless for now) will be the first person on the list when I get it onto my web site this evening. It might be a very small and probably completely ineffective thing, but I'd get some small satisfaction if these people or their friends Googled their names in future and found themselves on a list of idiots.

Labours plan to turn Britain into something like Nazi Germany are picking up pace quite quickly now. In my post earlier today I mentioned their intention to avoid having to use parliament to pass any laws, just like Hitler's Enabling Act. Now the Defence Secretary John Reid is calling for international law to be rewritten so that we can lock people up indefinitely, Guantanamo-style. His proposals would also allow us to invade other countries pretty much on a whim.

Changing the law to make it 'alright' to lock people up for any reason we feel like and torturing them is one way around the pesky Guantanamo issue of course. These proposals would also make it easy to do pretty much whatever we liked to anyone. And this 'protects' us from terrorism how? Every day we slide into fascism and the population sit there and take it like blind sheep. It's easy to conclude that they don't deserve their liberty and the people who do should just up sticks and go and live somewhere that doesn't have a government that seems to have the goal of creating Orwell's 1984 in real life?

Help to save Parliament

Further to my last post, there *is* something we can do to try to save democracy in this country. Go to www.saveparliament.org.uk and read about the problem, then follow their handy hints for actions you can take. I would argue that we all have a moral duty to do this - I think most rational people would agree.

Our Loss of Democracy, Again

In the years leading up to WWII Hitler passed very similar laws to this one that our government is passing now. Why haven't we heard more of this? For all of the complaining that the Tory/Murdoch press do about the BBC being left-wing, they're pretty complicit in not making a big deal about this sort of story.

I don't know about you, but going by his record so far I don't want Blair to find it even easier to remove our freedoms by avoiding the whole 'parliament' thing. What next?

The western world continues its slide into a police state. The latest news from America is a bill going through the Senate that would make it illegal to tell people if the President is breaking the law. Great. I've been meaning to add re-reading '1984' to my to-do list for a while - I bet it's now scarily close to how the world is at the moment. I think one of the comments in the linked Slashdot article sums it up pretty well:

"Orwell is spinning in his grave. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. We are always at war. We live in constant fear of terror attacks.

The dystopian future I studied in high school is coming true. He erred only by two decades."

Work Your Proper Hours Day

Today is Work Your Proper Hours Day. In the UK we work longer hours than in the rest of Europe, yet productivity doesn't always follow. In lots of companies (and this is certainly true in my field of IT) there is a certain amount of pressure to work beyond contracted hours despite not being paid for doing so. Sometimes there is pressure from 'on high', but oddly it seems that in most cases the pressure comes from the fact that other people do it. This results in a sort of peer pressure in that people don't want to be seen as slackers, so they stay late too. The company gets used to this and reduces estimates for work based on this free overtime, thus making it impossible to reach targets unless everyone works late.

I don't think that it is reasonable to refuse to work long hours in a professional workplace, but these long hours should be the exception. Employers need reminding of this occassionally, so events like this Work Your Proper Hours Day are important. Make sure you take part! Note that there's also an 'anonymous email' generator on the site where you can send an email to your boss telling him about the day (it doesn't reveal your name!). Make sure you use it!

Freedoms, and lack of them

It has been an interesting few days. Yesterday we learned that parliament has voted in favour of ID cards, despite it being one of the more obviously stupid ideas that the government has ever come up with. ID cards now look increasingly likely unless people actually do something about it.

Elections are the way we get rid of politicians with fascist aspirations of course, but what can we do at a more immediate level? Well I for one am a member of No2ID, and along with many thousands of other people I will refuse to carry an ID card whatever the law says. No2ID have started a fund to pay the legal costs for defending anyone who does this, but hopefully it won't come to that. The point is that if enough people refuse to carry the card the whole thing will become unworkable and the government will have to drop the plans. I won't say any more about it - check out the No2ID site to see for yourself.

In other news, smoking will be banned in enclosed public places from next summer. Smokers have tried to use 'civil liberties' and 'freedom' against this decision, but that is nonsense. I'm afraid that freedom of speech and movement are freedoms, not the ability to go and give other people lung cancer. Smokers are addicts who are too weak to give up and I don't have any sympathy for them - go and pollute your own homes. Hopefully I'll be able to go for a night out without choking on smoke and coming home stinking. All good things. If you want the 'freedom' to smoke near me, then I want to freedom to carry a canister of chlorine gas with me and empty it into every pub I go to. As I enjoy breathing poisonous fumes then it's my 'right' to inflict that on everyone else, according to smokers logic.

Freedom and civil liberties aren't words and phrases to band around willy-nilly. Smoking in public isn't a 'freedom' to defend - smoking itself is a relic of an age where science didn't know that it caused so many illnesses, and the sooner it stops completely the better. There are some real, important and critical freedoms which we're in the process of losing, and we must fight for these. If necessary we must break these laws if they are passed. It's the least we can do to defend freedoms that our ancestors died for.