Hate to Hate you, Baby

I have a very mixed opinion of James Kirkup. He’s a wet centrist with some very fanciful views on almost any topic you care to think of. Read any of his ramshackle think-tank’s output for confirmation that there’s very little on which he and I could agree, starting with the existence and munificence of the magic money tree.

But he’s done some stellar work in the Spectator on the matter of transgenderism and the silencing of any dissent or questioning of this bizarre new orthodoxy.

Today he brings us a tale that shouldn’t surprise us but still ought to manifest anger, depression and despair.

To cut a long story short, Harry Miller – a former copper, owner of a company that employs 70 people, and upstanding member of the community – has a traditional opinion on the matter of transgenderism. He questions assertions that a trans-woman is the same as a born woman.

In the course of expressing his lawful opinion, he ‘liked’ and retweeted a poem that someone else posted on twitter that essentially says ‘trans-women are not women, don’t treat us like we were born yesterday’.

Someone subsequently trawled his twitter, compiled a selection of 30 ‘hate tweets’ that he had made, and made a complaint to Humberside Police.

A PC from Humberside Police looked to track down Mr Miller and, presumably using kindergarten-level Google-fu, tracked him down to his company, where the PC spoke to a company director who – de facto – works for Miller.

When Miller contacted the copper who’d made the enquiry, to find out what the story was, he was subjected to a half-hour hectoring about the ‘hate incident’ (i.e. not a crime) that had been raised against him. The copper gave him a lecture on transgenderism that a right-on teacher may deliver to a schoolchild.

Miller was told that he must ‘check his thinking’, and made sinister suggestions that this could lead to him being in trouble with his employer (the copper not realising that Miller owned the company).

Now, this is at once absurd and sinister, but there are a couple of points that Mr Kirkup doesn’t explore in his otherwise good piece about this incident.

The first is that since Miller is an ex-copper, he knows how to handle other coppers, and how to conduct himself when in communication with coppers. For the rest of us, the first law is “do not talk to the police – you can never get yourself out of trouble, but you can sure get yourself into it.”

In other words, if Miller had been rash or naive enough to say anything out of line he could have ended up on a spurious catch-all charge cooked up by the copper and his sergeant (public order, communications act, obstructing a police officer, hate crime etc). He knew that and kept his counsel. Someone else might have just told the copper to untwist his knickers and piss off, then spent the next 12 hours in a cell.

The second point, which I haven’t yet alluded to here is that Mr Miller considers himself to be pretty ‘right-on’. Speaking of his exchange with the PC, he says:

‘He said he would be passing my answers on to the complainant. I told him to tell that person I would gladly talk to them, that I’d like to take them out to dinner so we could have a conversation about this. I’d explain that I am a strong supporter of the 2010 Equality Act, and explain my concerns about possible reforms of the Gender Recognition Act and how that could affect legal rights for women.’

Whic goes to show that toeing the PC line and hoping the lynch-mob will hang you last is not going to protect you.

Admirably though, Miller says that he has no intention of changing how he acts, thinks, speaks or tweets.

How will he respond to the police attention? Will he change his approach to tweeting? He says no. ‘Free speech is a hill that we have to fight on. If we can’t express ourselves freely within the law, none of the other rights we have mean anything.’

It’s easy to see, though, that someone who doesn’t have the firm footing that Miller has – as an ex-copper and well established company owner – may feel that they needed to bite their tongue in future.

All in all, this is a great distillation of everything that is wrong with ‘hate-crime’ laws, and with the so-called Conservative government, and the so-called Conservative prime minister, who have folded – with alacrity – in the face of the progressive cult of weaponised victimhood, and enabled the cult, contrary to all good sense about what it means to be a free and fair society.

In the meantime, by the way, a little consideration of the proper priorities for a police force may be given consideration. From Humberside Police’s own website:

Humberside has seen a 24% increase in the number of Violence against the Person offences, which is above the national increase of 19%. 

The publication also shows an increase in the number of recorded Sexual Offences, which is up 14% nationally and 19% locally.

AJ

Advertisement

Uh.. guys.. I think I might know why that is…

Just one week ago, the media were reporting that “Children and teenagers have a profound lack of trust in the police”.

Well, why ever could that be?

Publishing the findings of an 18-month inquiry, the committee said children and young people’s first contact with the police was vital in shaping their attitudes towards them.

‘Ingrained attitudes’

"For a significant number of children and young people, this experience is a negative one as a victim or suspected offender," the report said.

"Once a negative encounter has occurred, it takes time and hard work to change ingrained attitudes, which are often passed on from one generation to the next".

Some children and young people, the report suggested, feel humiliated when they come into contact with the police, are confused by their procedures, and do not believe they are there to protect them.

Let’s go back to that first paragraph above..

Publishing the findings of an 18-month inquiry, the committee said children and young people’s first contact with the police was vital in shaping their attitudes towards them.

It’s difficult not to keep mulling this over when you subsequently read two very salient stories on two consecutive days:

Well that’s just one isolated incident, and accidents will happ… what? err.. oh.

LOL

AJ

The Rough Sleep of the Righteous

This is doing the twitter-rounds today, and it’s pretty disgusting, actually. It’s not at all surprising though, because the police in the UK are, and have been for some many years now, completely out of control.

Without thought, tact, discretion, compassion or nouse.

In fact, such are the systemic problems with many laws as they stand, and the way policing is directed, managed and undertaken, that you really have to be utterly immoral to do the job. If you’re a copper, you are, de facto, a wrong un. A willing wearer of the state’s lumpen jackboot, disrupter of innocent lives in mindless pursuit of targets, all the while satisfying whatever thuggery is needed to quieten your personal inadequacies.

So, onto the main event:

Confiscating the food and shelter of homeless people.

Police swooped on the homeless, grabbing sleeping bags and food parcels donated by the public, in co-ordinated raids around the borough.

Adam Jaskowiak was one of the men targeted and said he pleaded with police to be able to keep his things but was ignored.

He was sleeping with eight other people finding shelter for the night in the former Ilford Baths in High Road, Ilford.

All of their belongings were bundled into a police car leaving the men, one in his 60s, stunned.

A police chief told the Recorder the operation was carried out to “reduce the negative impact of rough sleepers”.

But Mr Jaskowiak, 34, said: “They were just taking the sleeping bags and chucking out everything. I asked to keep it and the food, but they said ‘no’.

“I just grabbed as many of my things as possible and put them into a bag and ran.”

He was given the sleeping bag by the Salvation Army, Clements Road, Ilford, over the winter months after becoming homeless when his friend died.

Unbelievable, right? But the brave, righteous soul behind this initiative has a name. And that name is SCUM. But he prefers to call himself Chief Inspector John Fish.

Ilford Ch Insp John Fish said: “The public rely on police to reduce the negative impact of rough sleepers, this includes the need for us to assist in the removal of temporary structures, tents, and bedding from public spaces and other inappropriate locations.”

 

Chief Inspector Big Strong Hardman. Pic from here.

I hope you sleep real well in your warm cosy bed at night, Chief Inspector John Fish. Has your wife left you yet, or is that inevitability still in your grim lonely future?

As an aside, it’s worth bearing in mind that the way the Met Police treat the homeless is clearly a mere bagatelle compared to how they treat rape victims, in the pursuit of their twisted priorities.

AJ

ACTA: Maybe it is time to sit up and take notice of globalisation

Not in the way the left so often claim to, but still, there are questions of a genuine global corporatist stitch-up that should concern us all.

That any topic should come as a surprise to me, being reasonably well read, in terms of keeping abreast of current affairs, is cause in itself for concern.

Well, I certainly sat up and took notice when I happened upon this Daily Mises Podcast about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

Gennady Stolyarov at the Mises Institute, opens thusly:

A clandestine international treaty is currently being negotiated among parties including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the European Union, Japan, Singapore, and Morocco. It can justly be called the greatest threat of our time to the advancement of human civilization. Considering the magnitude of the other abuses of power pervading the world today, this might seem an exaggeration, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) contravenes every principle of civilized society, both in its content and in the nature of the proceedings leading to its creation.

It threatens to undo the accomplishments of the great Internet revolution and to thrust humankind back to a time when individuals had no public voice and no countervailing power against politically privileged mercantilist institutions. ACTA tramples on essential rights that have achieved even mainstream recognition: innocence until one is proven guilty, due process, personal privacy, and fair use of published content. Moreover, because of its designation as a trade agreement, ACTA could be imposed on the people of the United States by the president, without even a vote of Congress.

So far, so alarmist, huh?

Read on or get the MP3 Podcast to hear the narrative unfold.

Some excellent background information on ACTA can be found in posts by Stephan Kinsella (here and here) and Justin Ptak (here), as well as in a detailed communiqué from the American University Washington College of Law. The first official draft text of ACTA was released only as late as April 20, 2010, even though the treaty has been negotiated since 2006. A subsequent draft text was leaked on July 1, 2010. An earlier discussion draft was made available on WikiLeaks on May 22, 2008. Indeed, the extreme secrecy in which the ACTA negotiations have been shrouded should itself lead to the strongest doubts regarding the merits and desirability of its framers’ intentions.

Learn how not only will all free-content providers end up on the wrong side of the law, but how powers will be introduced enabling, and perhaps obligating at the request of a corporation or trade body, border forces to inspect the personal property of travellers for ‘contraband’ or ‘pirated’ copyright material. That means, potentially, having to account for the contents of your pen drive, you laptop, your phone and your iPod.

The EU protests that it isn’t so.

But do you think it won’t happen?

As Stolyarov reminds us:

It is immaterial whether or not the intent is to target massive commercial cross-border "pirating" operations: where the authority to engage in a certain act against ordinary individuals exists, it will be invoked somewhere, sometime, by somebody.

Yes they will. Oh yes the will. The thin end of the wedge isn’t always a fallacy or rhetorical diversion.

In any case, US border agencies already have all these powers – unsurprisingly, what with the all powerful, protectionist dinosaurs, RIAA and MPAA being US organisations. This makes it all the more likely that the US based WTO and UN will support throwing this global, totalitarian, cultural faraday cage over us all, and the EU will sign up with alacrity.

I plan to do more reading on this, but on first inspection, it seems like a nightmare waiting to be unleashed on us.

AJ

Policing priorities: Not the easy targets, oh no. Never.

I see that while the police weren’t able to keep a crowd of yobbos away from the Prince of Wales, they were able to put the fear of all holy fuck into a 12 year old boy who wanted to picket his constituency MP, David ‘Heir to Blair’ Cameron, over the closure of local facilities.

Click through, and once you’ve digested the main thread of the story, steel yourself for a masterpiece of self-serving dissemblance from the Thames Valley Power Rangers.

AJ

Quick, look over there!

While the mongs are focussed on the results of our bid for the 2018 World Cup, a couple of excellent examples of how liberal and unstatist our new coalition overlords aren’t.

First, there will be regulation of what clothes shops are allowed to sell for children.

ORLY? Presumably, these children are feral orphans, who are turned loose into the world at 7 years old. They don’t have parents to raise them, guide them or retain responsibility for them. Enter Nanny. Presumably the same Nanny that Andrew Lansley says he’s making redundant from the Department of Health.

And as if that’s not bad enough,

The document also promised to create a new group of experts to tackle “low levels of body confidence” among children and teenagers. Ministers are concerned that many young boys and girls feel they have to live up to impossibly thin airbrushed images of celebrities in magazines and advertisements.

Oh. Okay. Because the 60s, 70s & 80s didn’t have skinny models.. anorexia wasn’t invented until 1997 after all..

And anyway, maybe ‘the kids’ feel that the images they have to live up to are impossibly thin because they graze on Greggs pasties and Krusty Cremes, and play Xbox all day.

In any case, what is is that the government thinks qualifies it to have opinions on any of these things, less still to start imposing whatever ludicrous, misguided and spendthrift schemes they have in mind?

Speaking of which…

I.. errr.. oh will you all just fuck right off.

AJ

Dear Tories, Go Fuck Yourselves.

If I had voted Tory at the last general election, as I most certainly did not, now is about the time I’d be starting to feel really fucking stupid.

They’ve barely been in charge for 5 minutes, yet they’ve managed to abandon all the policies, promises and pledges that might vaguely have appealed to me, or at least to the traditional conservative.

As if that’s not depressing enough, they rub our faces in it by being as good as their word on the most hideous, interfering, statist articles of Social Democratic endarkenment that they’d promised us.

Take Mr Andrew Lansley, who got a brief mention the other day.

In February, Obo wrote a post about one of Lansley’s proposals, and he tackled the subject with his usual uncompromising aplomb.

Hannan and Carswell are regarded as utter fucking lunatics by the Tory leadership, who prefer to have policies like this instead:

Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, has launched the Conservative Party’s new green paper on public health – A Healthier Nation.
The Green Paper outlines how we will tackle Britain’s public health crisis by completely overhauling Labour’s failing system of dealing with public health.

Okaaaaayyyy …

Much greater responsibility for tackling problems like obesity, drug use and teenage pregnancy will be devolved to communities on a new payment-by results basis, with extra rewards for improving the public health of the poorest. In spending their dedicated public health budgets, communities will be obliged to partner with local bodies, like schools, businesses, councils and GPs.

I’m sorry, Mr Lansley, but just chucking the word "devolved" in there doesn’t fucking mean shit, you mendacious cunt. And what’s with this "partnering" cockwaffle? Obliged? So if my local trust doesn’t want to "partner", fuck them anyway? How is that "devolution", you lying fuck?

There will be a new focus on innovative strategies, with national campaigns harnessing the latest behaviour change research and delivered by providers who are paid by results. We will provide prizes for ‘open source’ suggestions for successful new public health strategies.

No. No. No. Just fucking NO!

And as assuredly as anything ‘good’ has been abandoned, everything ‘bad’ is being pursued with relish, and to the letter.

Schools, employers, the food and drink industry and communities themselves are being urged to do their bit to make the nation healthier.

Ministers said they wanted to unlock the potential of all sections of society in setting out their plans.

Projects being promoted include everything from bike training in schools to voluntary cuts in salt and fat content by food manufacturers.

I’m sorry? What? I seem to recall the last 10 years have been marked by schools forcing kids to have ‘healthy’ school meals, intruding into packed-lunch items in search of contraband calories, by the drinks industry being forced to adopt “Drink Aware” bollocks and food manufacturers ruining every damned item of food they’ve sold by replacing all the fat, salt and sugar with sawdust and grubs.

And as if companies don’t already do enough interfering and hectoring of their staff?

But no, it’s not enough. Andrew Lansley thinks there’s still some way to go. Still some potential to be unlocked. Because we’re not absolutely fucking miserable and downtrodden yet, so there must be pockets of joy, fun and indulgence that have remained beyond the reach of the bully-state.

Good job the Big Society is here to make sure that everyone is equally, and irrevocably miserable.

Isn’t this just the most New Labour thing you ever heard? Heir to Blair indeed.

If you voted for this, you’re a fucking idiot and I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.

AJ

UPDATE: TimDog (in the comments below, the filthy linkwhore) has written a very good piece on this.

The Joke Trial #Twitterjoketrial

No, not mock trial. Not even a trial where Rolf Harris sings “Tie me kangaroo court down”

This is a joke trial. Of the kind that makes a mockery of justice.

I speak, of course, about the Paul Chambers case, about which I and others have written extensively.

Yesterday, Paul’s appeal against his conviction under section 127.1(a) of the Communications Act 2003 was denied on all counts.

I am utterly aghast. Paul, and his nearest and dearest, must be utterly devastated.

Commentary on Twitter has been almost universally of the view that Paul’s treatment, at the hands of the CPS and the courts, is simply disgraceful and utterly baffling.

Take this post from CharonQC, for example. It refers to some of his tweets on the matter:

He makes some useful points, too.

WE MUST DO – AND DESERVE – BETTER THAN THIS….

I won’t be arrested for saying this (I  assume.. although nothing is certain, it would seem) …. I won’t be prosecuted for saying this (ditto) …. I do not practice… so I can’t even be censured… (pretty sure on that one).   We really do need to sort our legal system out if it can bring about such an absurd and unjust result….. even if *The Law* justifies the decision of the judge as framed… if that is the case.. we need better laws..and we do deserve them.

And this, it would appear, is the rub.

Stereotypically inscrutable legal tweeter, @Art_Li makes some good points in the comments of Charon’s post.

He suggests both that the judgement is, tacitly or otherwise, a matter of policy….

What I will say is that behind every law and/or prosecution, there is a public policy decision (read motive). The policy decision in this case MAY BE one to discourage “joke” threats, whether on Twitter or elsewhere IN ORDER TO minimise the “leads” the police and security services have to follow up on a daily basis. We know resources there are not unlimited and already they are following up on dozens if not hundreds of leads every day (that is not a fact, just my assumption).

… and that the high court is unlikely to overturn the decision, because it is based on the strict interpretation of a law, as handed down by the House of Lords (now Supreme Court).

The following passages from the House of Lords judgment in the case of DPP v Collins (2006) may be of interest. This case was referred to by Mr Chambers’ legal team as well as the Judge in the recent appeal. The case concerned offensive messages but the wording of S.127(1) includes menacing messages too. (Capitalisation below is mine) :-

“The very act of sending the message over the public communications network … constitutes the offence even if it was being communicated to someone who the sender KNEW WOULD NOT BE IN ANY WAT OFFENDED or distressed by it”.

Lord Bingham of Cornhill : “it must be proved that the respondent intended his words to be offensive to those to whom they related or BE AWARE THAT THEY MAY BE TAKEN TO BE SO.” … “It can make no difference to criminal liability whether a message is ever actually received or WHETHER THE PERSONS WHO DO RECEIVE IT ARE OFFENDED BY IT.”

It appears the Judge was therefore applying and following the Collins precedent.

Art

I’m not a lawyer, and I can’t claim to understand the precise technical implication of the ruling, but it frustrates me greatly that Art thinks this is so fundamentally important. As if the law is an end in itself, before which all must bow down, however absurd it may be.

Charon does, on the other hand, know a bit about the law…

If this is taken to extremes – then many disagreeable statements are capable of coming within this definition and then we are truly doomed…..

There is a place for a common sense approach to be taken into the application of our laws….. and if that can’t be done by the judiciary, then we simply have to get the law changed so that we don’t have these manifestly absurd cases.

Art’s point seems to be this: The ruling of the Lords is the ruling of the Lords, and that’s that. That there is no latitude for a judge in any lower court to make any different or differentiated ruling.

Regarding the chances of success in the High Court, Art is, therefore, not optimistic.

The implication is this: there are only two realistic ways of fixing the situation.

One is to take the case to the Supreme Court in order that they may over-rule, clarify or supersede, the DPP vs Collins ruling – for only they can do so. A defeat in the High Court looks like an expensive and risky step that will have to be taken in order to undertake the even more expensive, and even more risky journey to the highest court in the land.

Having come this far, and Paul Chambers might not thank me for saying this, it would be pointless if he now won in the high court, leaving the next hapless twitterer to role the dice time after time in the same way he has had to, in the face of judge after judge who takes an inflexible reading of DPP vs Collins.

Far better, it seems, would be for the case to end up before the Supreme Court, where the issue of DPP vs Collins could be put to bed.

The other thread to be taken up is for the statute under which Chambers was prosecuted to be changed, amended, repealed, dumped in the great legal shredder.

With the farce that is the Government’s so called ‘Your Freedom’ consultation around a grand repeal of so-called bad or illiberal laws, I don’t believe we can in anyway count on this important matter being addressed.

Which leaves the option of lobbying, campaigning and insisting that this ludicrously framed law is fixed. Making representations to your MP, to the Minister of Justice, to the Prime Minister. To the newspapers, on the internet, on placards and through loudhailers.

This is evidently the view of @John_Demetriou. Art Li clearly leans towards the view that getting the law changed is the only way forward.

And yet, that won’t clear Paul Chambers’ name, or give him his life and career back.

I wish Paul well and hope that this all, in the end, works out for him. It’s been a shit year for him. The state has made him their plaything, and the state doesn’t play nice.

#######

Nor will any change in the law come in time to help the Conservative councillor chappie who was arrested yesterday and bailed, accused of the same offence as Chambers, for tweeting that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should be stoned to death, in response to her on-air assertion that the west has no right to cast moral judgement against the practices of some Islamic countries.

Delicate, vulnerable Yasmin called the police. She said:

Alibhai-Brown, who writes columns for the Independent and the London Evening Standard, said last night she regarded his comments as incitement to murder. She told the Guardian: "It’s really upsetting. My teenage daughter is really upset too. It’s really scared us.

"You just don’t do this. I have a lot of threats on my life. It’s incitement. I’m going to the police – I want them to know that a law’s been broken."

She added that she regarded Compton’s remarks as racially motivated because he mentioned stoning.

So, rolled into one, from Yasmin, we have a ludicrous playing of the race card, a bit of ‘nasty Tories’ political point-scoring and great fear, offence and upset – all from some daft tweet, the likes of which must occur en masse on forums, twitter and blogs, in response to inflammatory comments from this controversial talking head.

Do Mel Phillips, Rod Liddge, Simon Heffer, Peter Hitchens  or even Jeremy Clarkson not attract vituperative and unpleasant critics? Judge Jacqueline Davies, who presided over Paul Chambers’ defeat yesterday has certainly been in receipt of twitter ordure in the last 24 hours.

And, apparently, like a good little socialist, Yasmin’s first and last response is to run crying to nanny.

Compton’s arrest may well be the first indication that the Chambers conviction has opened up the floodgates for to police arrest any one for any contentious, angry or humourous tweet at any time, “even if it was being communicated to someone who the sender KNEW WOULD NOT BE IN ANY WAY OFFENDED or distressed by it”"

Think about it? Get in a political argument on Twitter, and next thing, some offence-seeking lefty will decide that it’s best to rebut your argument by calling the police and accusing you of being a racist/homophobic/offensive menace, even if you are a threat to nothing more than the merit of their argument.

A free for all and a legal feeding-frenzy could ensue, which would seal the deal on our lack of freedom of expression in the UK.

Might as well delete all your tweets now, folks. We are truly and genuinely screwed.

AJ

Alcohol

The thing that I really hate (well, one of them) about this coalition government is that we seem to have something very much like Labour.

It’s like you just need to pick & choose the most unpalatable parts of both parties platforms and merge them together.

With the Tories, you may get sound economics, but you get authoritarian social policies.

With the Lib Dems, you may get (sometimes crazily) liberal social policies, but you also get the economics of Keynes.

With the coalition, we seem to have Keynesian Authoritarianism.

I mean… graduate tax student loans with higher interest rates for the most successful? And redemption penalties for those that pay off early?

And in terms of authoritarianism, it’s hard to imagine even the puritans of New Labour coming up with this latest wheeze.

 

The ”24/7 sobriety” programme involves people paying to be tested for alcohol twice a day after being convicted of drink-related crime, and appearing in court to face the prospect of a jail sentence if they fail.

Oh aye? Can you say AlcoBO?

It has already been implemented in the US, with the state of South Dakota reporting a 14 per cent drop in the prison population as a result, according to Deputy Mayor of London Kit Malthouse.

He said he would like to pilot the scheme in the capital in 2011, subject to government approval.

He described London as having a "disproportionate problem" with alcohol where almost twice as much alcohol-related crime is committed compared with the rest of England.

Sooo.. you’re going to try this out in London are you? Based on a scheme hailing from the country with the most twisted attitude to alcohol of any Western nation? And from a state that no-one ever goes to, and is riddled with po-faced religionists.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I’ve been thinking about this and the list is pretty long. Because while you can bet this ruse has been conjured up to tackle a hard core few persistent drunken troublemakers, it never turns out that way, does it?

"The advantage of this is it is not just punitive but corrective," he told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

Corrective? Do go on…

"It may be that it is used as an alternative to prison or conjunctive to prison."

Mr Malthouse said that current methods such as counselling did not work to discourage persistent offenders and that some needed a "more rigorous approach".

He added: "If you ask the police there are some people who cause trouble every Saturday night."

Ah yes, as I said.. it’s aimed at a hardcore minority.

Mr Malthouse said the American version of the scheme had a 99 per cent compliance rate and that it was "of no cost to the tax payer", because the people taking part paid a dollar per alcohol test. He described it as a ”cheaper and more cost-effective” alternative to prison.

Yes yes.. and for those who have committed serious enough crimes to warrant prison, perhaps this sanction has a place.

Sure, it’ll start that way, with such good intentions as pave the way to hell. But, sooner or later…

End up in front of the beak for a spot of drunk & disorderly? £100 fine, £40 costs and an AlcoBO. You’re ordered to be dry for 12 months.

Wanna bet it couldn’t happen? Wanna bet innocent and legitimate photographers could never possibly be harassed by the police under abusive invocations of our Anti-terrorism laws? No.. that already happens, of course.

Back to booze laws then. Ask drinkers in Crawley who have experienced the zero-tolerance approach, by the police and their plastic pals, to even genial and mild drunkenness of a Friday night.

This is the next logical step for the zealots, and you can bet the swelling ranks of hypocrites and puritans infesting this country will rub their hands together with glee, egging on the police and courts to take ever more radical action, against ever more trivial infractions.

Now to the reasons why this scheme is just as likely to be both unjust and unworkable, as it is to be implemented with relish by the drones and collaborators of the state.

It has the potential to be unjust in at least a couple of ways.

The first is that this will be implemented under the guise of preventing or punishing behaviour for which criminal sanctions already exist– Public Order Act , Offences Against The Person Act etc etc, and if these offences were properly dealt with, the need for this sweeping new power would cease to exist. So what exactly is this proposed law for? Probably to make life easier for the police, who are, obviously, never known to overstep the bounds of their authority, or to use their powers injudiciously.

The second is that, similar to the ASBO, it would criminalise an act which is, in itself, perfectly legal. I.e. drinking alcohol. To completely ban a person from consuming alcohol is a serious infringement of the rights of the individual.

Consider the eventuality I describe above, of these orders being handed out rather more freely than Kit Malthouse would care to admit.

Now, hand one of these orders to an alcoholic, say. One who holds down a job and lives a relatively untroubled life in terms of brushes with the law. What have you just done? Oh yes, you’ve said to someone addicted to a legal substance, ‘I will put you in prison each time you have a fix’. And will the alcoholic get the help and support he would need for this undertaking of sobriety? Not likely.

Next, a reason why the scheme is impractical and unworkable. They want to test people for alcohol twice a day? How?

Consider the pilot of this scheme, in London, with its highly transient population, as well as a million or more commuters who come from all over the country on a daily basis, not to mention the tourists.

Would they effectively want people to report to a police station for a breathalyser test twice a day? in London? For a year? Or perhaps they could be more sly than that and enforce blood tests and other invasive medical tests weekly or monthly, so that they could detect alcohol consumption?

Oh wait – there’s the massively expensive technology solution! Someone, somewhere must be building a breathalyser, that includes a GPS tag and cellular technology, so the recipient of the order has to self report, in real time. But how would those monitoring know who was blowing into the thing? No.. thats obviously gonna need more thought. Perhaps build DNA testing of saliva into the unit? Sounds cheap.

Sadly, the outcome of London’s pilot will be that the scheme failed because it was too localised. A projection would show how very successful the scheme would have been, if there was a national database and cross-county co-operation.

So even though the scheme will prove to be calamitously expensive, unjust and unworkable, it will be rolled out nationally on the basis of these finding.

If you look back at the last quote from Malthouse, above, it bears repeating:

it was "of no cost to the tax payer", because the people taking part paid a dollar per alcohol test.

Of no cost… no way. Not here, with the multi-million pound IT system, the gold-plated legislation, the enforcement teams, the medics, the courts, the prison places, the lawyers, the cases being defended in the the European Courts of Human Rights.

Spare us.

AJ

False Rape Claims

A regular reader would know that this is a bit of a theme on my blog.

This is because I’m constantly aghast at how the perverse state and its enforcers take the word of women as gospel on account of their feminist-inculcated infallibility, and take the word of men as intrinsically faulty, on account of the feminist-enforced idea of universally brutal men.

This blog is awash with examples not just of women who have falsely cried rape, but of those who have been violent, abusive or evil in other ways. Not because I’m a misogynist, because I’m not, but because the reality is that some women and some men are capable of evil deeds or words. Just a little balance, you see.

So I was particularly interested in the article tweeted by the splendid @AbsolutLaudanum this afternoon.

Read the whole thing, but to abridge massively…

Lots of falsely accused men are dragged out of their places of employment in full view of their bosses and colleagues, no doubt giving their false accusers that extra sexual thrill of knowing they’ve thoroughly stripped their prey of the last vestiges of their dignity.  Some young men are dragged from their bedrooms in their parents’ homes half dressed, carted away without any explanation to their terrified parents. 

Once the innocents are hauled to the police station, the fun really begins. They are subjected to grueling questioning on and off over the course of hours or days, often by surly law enforcement personnel who couldn’t care less that the men or boys they are berating are human beings.  They are looking for evidence of a conviction, and if they can convince the male to confess, that makes their jobs all that much easier. Their attitude is often to treat the presumptively innocent male as a vile rapist.

And then there’s the physical examination.  If an innocent woman or girl were subjected to something akin to the following, do you suppose there’d be an outcry about it? "I was taken to a doctor’s waiting room, I was told to completely strip naked. While I was naked the CID agent took pictures of every part of me. The doctor then swabbed my penis 2-3 times, then pulled hair from every part of my body."  That was from a first person account on this blog of a soldier recounting his false rape nightmare. It is typical of many stories we’ve run. 

Once locked up, the men or boys too often are subjected to cruel and offensive batteries and verbal assaults by jail personnel and other prisoners.

And, yes, dear readers, sometimes men and boys are wrongly convicted of rapes they didn’t commit. The young ones, who have no experience in the prison system, are too often routinely victimized by the same crime they were wrongly convicted of. Sometimes, they serve decades in prison before they are released. The news is filled with men who’ve served many years before their innocence can be proven. Think how many others rot away in prison today because the evidence of their innocence was long ago destroyed.

Too often, the awful consequences of a false rape claim are even less predictable.

Remember this story we wrote about at Glenn Sacks’ blog?  Two young lives destroyed — one of the boys was killed — because of a girl’s rape lie. She, of course, served no jail time.  Go read it. It will make you sick.

Or how about this story — I’ll reprint our opening paragraph: "Clifford Martin, 19, is heading to prison for accepting the word of two teenage girls that one of them had been sexually assaulted by another 19-year-old man named Cory Headen. Mr. Martin broke into Mr. Headen’s home and beat him to death while he was sleeping."

Remember the serial rape liar whose lie caused one of her young victims to kill himself?  Despite that, she was allowed to falsely accuse another young men — and he was forced to undergo a grueling trial before he was acquitted.  The liar?  She retains her anonymity, of course.

Or how about mentally unstable man who was charged with rape, then took his own life after the police delayed in telling him he had been falsely accused?

Or the innocent man who suffered months of abuse in his community after being falsely accused of being a paedophile before his heart couldn’t take any more?

Or the falsely accused young men who were attacked by thirty inmates?  Or the man who was brutally attacked and suffered devastating brain injuries when he was falsely accused or rape?  Or the man who was beaten because he was mistaken for a rapist?

The only thing in which one can take heart is that while the USA apparently persists in allowing these false accusers to remain free and anonymous, we have at least recently started to prosecute them in the UK, strip them of their anonymity and jail them. This is in spite of hateful Hattie’s shenanigans.

It’s scant consolation, though, because as the article above shows, once the genie is out of the bottle, the damage is done for the men involved, no matter how demonstrably false the claims they have endured.

We must hope that, as we trudge backwards from collective enlightenment, the UK does not end up where the US is. I do wonder, though, whether it’s the insane and terrifying US feminists, or insane and terrifying US religionists that keep America in the dark ages on this matter of fundamental injustice.

AJ

Paul Chambers #twitterjoketrial update – half time at the appeal court

Friday saw the opening of Paul Chambers’ appeal against his conviction under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which he was adorned with after sending a silly, but harmless and hyperbolic, tweet relating to an airport.

Initial expectations were that the hearing would be wrapped up on the day, with a verdict either in favour of common sense and reason, or in favour of the cruel and arbitrary whims of the state.

However, not only has this not come to pass – the hearing was adjourned late on Friday afternoon – but the matter is likely not to be resolved this side of November. So Paul Chambers, and his nearest and dearest, are to be left in further agonising suspense by a callous, arbitrary and inhuman system.

All the coverage you need on the current state of play is provided by the distinctly uneffable @DavidAllenGreen.

 Click to read on…

.. And from @flayman, the guy widely credited with bringing Paul’s case to the attention of the Internet at large, a very insightful post about the state of play.

I’m writing this new post because Paul’s appeal was heard and then adjourned yesterday in Doncaster Crown Court and because the prosecution has, in my opinion, not only failed to strengthen its case since May but has offered evidence that actually weakens it to a never before seen level of farce.

Click to read on…

Matt (@flayman) highlights a telling account of one of the CPS’s arguments, as relayed by the Guardian.

Caroline Wiggin, for the prosecution, said Chambers had earlier sent direct messages to the woman in Northern Ireland as it appeared possible that the airport might close. In one he wrote: “I was thinking if it does I have decided to resort to terrorism.” She argued that the context provided by such messages strengthened the case that Chambers intended to cause menace. “If a man in prison were to send a message to his wife that he was going to come and beat her up, the court might consider that were menacing, albeit the man himself may have difficulty in putting it into effect,” she said.

He does a simply masterful job of demonstrating the monumental incoherence of the argument put forward by Caroline Wiggin, which you should read.

What really irked me about it, though, and what Matt does not address, is the implied gender politics informing the CPS’ argument.

It’s like something from chapter one of the “Harriet Harman Manual of Righteous Misandry” and my piss has been gently simmering ever since I read it yesterday.

Look at it again.

In one he wrote: “I was thinking if it does I have decided to resort to terrorism.” She argued that the context provided by such messages strengthened the case that Chambers intended to cause menace.

ORLY? How so? After all, this is a chap messaging the girly he’s on his way to see. Part of a running gag, perhaps?

Anyway, what possible motive, in the minds of the righteous, could a horny, hairy Yorkshire MAN have to make such a journey?

“If a man in prison were to send a message to his wife that he was going to come and beat her up, the court might consider that were menacing, albeit the man himself may have difficulty in putting it into effect,” she said.

O. Kay.

So, err… once more for the cameras…

If a man in prison were to send a message to his wife that he was going to come and beat her up

Permit  me to pose a question. Do you think, for one minute, that if it were Paul’s young lady in the dock for her part in the same series of messages, Ms Wiggin would have posited that…

“If a woman in prison were to send a message to her husband that she was going to come and beat him up, the court might consider that were menacing, albeit the woman herself may have difficulty in putting it into effect,”

Well, do you?

There are plenty enough objective, rational reasons why Caroline Wiggin’s argument is fatuous, non-sensical, prejudiced and fallacious.

But none of these approaches, as effectively as they make this woman look like a fool, satisfies my ire.

The implied, and lazy, feminist premise that all men are brutes and all women are victims, which seems to underpin this argument is breathtaking.

Matt, though – a man who is reasonable to the point of being fucking infuriating sometimes – insisted that Ms Wiggin was only putting forward the arguments cooked up by the CPS, and that it was unfair of me to level accusations of stupidity at her.

If anything, Matt’s assertion makes things look even worse.

In the conclusion I’d provisionally drawn, perhaps one of shooting the messenger, what we had was one woman who could be dismissed as a lazy, spiteful, man-hating, feminist idiot.

In Matt’s scenario though, the only conclusion we can draw is that the CPS is, institutionally, running a prosecutorial policy of lazy, spiteful, feminist, man-hating idiocy.

I was happier when I was just pinning the blame on Caroline Wiggin.

Now the whole house of cunts has to fall. Kier Starmer’s head needs to be on a platter by Christmas if Chambers is not cleared.

AJ

UPDATE: Matt has now gone one better and garnered the opinion of a linguistics expert, who has deconstructed the tweet that got Paul into so much bother. Must read blogging.

Another story where everyone is an arsehole

This is our free country:

The men, all but one of them members of the far-right English Defence League, set fire to what appears to be the Muslim holy books on the anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities in the United States.

They say they carried out the “private joke” as a riposte to historical images of Muslim extremists burning American flags and effigies of western leaders.

Now, I shouldn’t need to state that I think it’s sick and absurd that people in a country such as ours can be charged with a criminal offence for burning a book, or for posting a very ludicrous and moronic video of the occasion on YouTube. Although, the latter is apparently not even the case.

Four more men were arrested and bailed on Wednesday pending further inquiries, Northumbria Police said.

“The arrests followed the burning of what are believed to have been two Korans in Gateshead on September 11,” a spokesman said.

He added that the men were not arrested for watching or distributing the video, but on suspicion of burning the Koran.

And I needn’t point out that police, in fact, provided protection in London to a group of radical Islamists who made a public show of burning a US flag, on 11th September, in front of the US embassy in London.

Now, these EDL guys are clearly pretty dim.

The clip, recorded in the back yard of a public house in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, has been broadly condemned by other YouTube users, some of whom have expressed concern that British soldiers in Afghanistan could be targeted as a direct result.

They were marshalled by a man wearing a jacket bearing the logo: “English Defence League, Gateshead Division”.

The group admit to having been drinking at The Bugle in Felling, Gateshead, ahead of a Newcastle United match.

“It wasn’t anyone’s idea as such,” said the spokesman, who agreed to speak only on condition that all six remained anonymous.

But not so dim that they couldn’t speak truth to power.

“People are sick of British soldiers being killed out in Afghanistan and then being spat at and called baby killers when they come home.”

And that’s true enough. Some of the Islamist provocation surrounding Wootton Bassett etc has been truly disgusting.

But if that bunch of nutters have the right to act in a sick, deluded and provocative way (and so far as I’m concerned, they do), then how have a handful of daft Geordies burning two copies of the Quran in their back yard ended up having their collars felt?

Double standards? Thought police?

The Islamists have won? It really does seem that way, doesn’t it?

AJ

Community Policing: Ur doin it wrong.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect.

It’s like South Yorkshire police have a sixth sense about when best to unleash their lunacy on an unsuspecting public.

Yesterday:

 

Police have broken their ‘psychological contract’ with the public to keep the streets clear of anti-social behaviour, the country’s most senior officer admitted yesterday.

Scotland Yard chief Sir Paul Stephenson accepted beat patrols had been neglected and officers left behind desks, in cars or left doing ‘social work’.

The Metropolitan Police Commissioner supported the call for the public to join the fight against yobs, saying they should be confident officers will back them.

I think when they say ‘yobs’, they must mean parents dropping their disabled kids off at school.

Police have been accused of being ‘heavy-handed’ after sending a riot van to hand out parking tickets at a disabled school.

Parents were stunned when the vehicle pulled up as they were helping the children in wheelchairs from the school to their cars.

Officers were accused of being ‘rude’ for dishing out on the spot penalties as they waited at Hilltop Special School in Maltby near Rotherham.

…

One of the victims Dave Phillips was handed a £30 fixed penalty when he stopped for five minutes to pick up his wheelchair bound son Matthew, aged 16.

He had driven 15 miles from his home in Retford, Nottinghamshire, and parked outside the school before being confronted by a police woman.

He said : ‘The police response has been heavy handed – and it’s the kids they are penalising not us. The police behaviour was unpleasant and completely unnecessary.

‘Nine officers and a police van created an intimidating atmosphere around the school.
I was approached by a young policewoman who told me to "move" – not "excuse me sir" — it was just a total ignorant attitude .

‘I explained to the officer I was going to park here for five minutes to get my son. I said ‘He’s a wheelchair user and we have got a side loading lift’, – "not my problem" was the reply, "move it" so I said "no, I’m stopping here I’m going to put my son in."

…

South Yorkshire police said tackling ‘inconsiderate parking’ in the area was now a priority.

And they wonder why an increasing proportion of the public think that the police can go fuck themselves.

This is the same South Yorkshire Police, we should remember, who arrested and charged Paul Chambers for sending a joke tweet about an airport, which resulted in his conviction. His appeal is ongoing.

Oh and it could well be that there’s something in the police’s assertion that these parents were parking inconsiderately, but the police are supposed to treat members of the public with respect, and they fail on that count, time after time.

A disgrace to the nation, and another legacy of Labour.

AJ

#twitterjoketrial is back on the agenda as appeal gets underway

Pay attention. This is important.

For the background, see my #twitterjoketrial category.

The estimable David Allen Green, formerly Jack of Kent, sums up nicely with a new post here.

This is required reading if you have any interest whatsoever in the state of justice in this country.

AJ

Collaborators, snitches and the Stasi

I expect the forums at Pistonheads.com have been rendered in a state of apoplexy about this:

Thousands of drivers have been reported by fellow motorists after being spotted speeding, drink driving or talking on mobile phones.

Anyone reported twice in a year could face police action under the scheme, named Operation Crackdown. The culprits could receive a home visit or a warning letter.

Sussex Police is trialling the campaign and has already received 20,488 reports from the public. Warning letters have been sent to 2,695, while a further 1,047 have been sanctioned for offences such as having an out-of-date tax disc.

The scheme, under which reports are submitted anonymously online, could be rolled out nationally if it is deemed a success.

…

A newsletter promoting the scheme reads: "Are you fed up with anti-social drivers? People who still use their mobile phones while driving, not wearing seat belts or those who insist on getting right up your bumper and are really annoying and dangerous to others."

I’m sorry.. how does not wearing a seatbelt constitute anti-social or dangerous driving?

Surely they’ve seen the studies showing that when wearing seatbelts, people drive in a less risk-averse way? AKA the Peltzman effect.

No, this is not about safety or anti-social driving. It’s about the police asking members of the public to do their job for them, and in doing so, appeal to the worse-nature of the inevitable portion of society that is given to being judgemental, self-righteous, nosey and vindictive.

Dylan Sharpe of Big Brother Watch points out the most obvious flaws with the plan, and is quoted in the article.

Dylan Sharpe, of the campaign group Big Brother Watch, warned that Operation Crackdown is "based on unfounded accusations by untrained and possibly prejudiced members of the public".

He added: "This scheme is wide open to abuse, ranging from people with minor grudges against neighbours to busybody drivers who think they know what constitutes bad driving."

There is a further problem though. I drive getting on for 30,000 miles a year. On a mile for mile basis, that makes me 2-3 times more likely than the average 10k a year driver, to be reported by some embittered numpty. And yet the bar for police action is set at 2 reports over a given period, not per 10,000 miles driven. Of course it’s obvious that they can’t realistically judge it on miles driven, but the result is a creation that is manifestly unfair to those of us who drive a lot, in the course of generating revenue for the tax man to steal from us, to play for police.

But…

The main problem I have with this scheme is something of a personal one. I’m a target for this shit. I drive quickly and assertively. I have no patience for timewasters and idiots on the road.

You know what I find to be anti-social? Driving at 40mph in 50mph zone for no good reason, and causing a queue of traffic to build up.

I don’t want to be doing 40. I want to be doing 50 (probably I want to be doing more than that, but I can live with 50), and you can bet your arse that after a half mile or so, I’ll be doing everything I can to draw this fact to your fucking ignorant attention.

 
This means “Get the fuck out of my way” you tedious wanker.

So what do the police encourage? Well they diagnose my behaviour to be anti-social and ask the 40mph fuckwit to report me.

They will doubtless fail to accept my assertion that Mr 40mph is, in fact, the one driving anti-socially.

Similarly, the art of overtaking is a dying one in this country, and when encountered, it is frequently met with righteous indignation, flashed headlamps or a ‘wanker’ gesture.

For why? I didn’t do anything dangerous. There was a plentiful gap, and I used my car’s considerable power in order to overtake swiftly and safely, in line the police driving manual Roadcraft.

No doubt a goodly proportion of these remonstrators will be moved to go on to the local police website and tell tales about me.

What’s interesting about the phenomenon regarding objections to overtaking is that the usual source of this objection comes from one of two stereotypes. Firstly, is the obvious one. Old people, of whom there are far too many on the roads, and most of them drive like total fucking morons. Secondly, though, is young men.. teenagers to late 20s. The class of the New Labour years. Conformist metrosexual sheep.

Fuck them all.

AJ

NB: This is far from being the first time that a police force has tried to make informers out of their paymasters.

UPDATE: Manwiddicombe makes an interesting case for exceptional circumstances.

This evening at around 6pm I was proceeding in an Easterly direction along the Old Shoreham Road (A270) approaching the junction for West Hove Sainsburys. I was driving *cough* at the 40 mph speed limit when a vehicle raced past me in the outside lane.

It was definitely travelling at speeds in excess of the posted limit. A *cough* passenger in my vehicle managed to take a photo of the rear of the vehicle with a mobile telephone device. Would you like to see the photo?

Whoever it is that works for this nannying outfit deserves everything they fucking get. Speed kills? Cunt.

Tyranny of the NIMBYs

First they came for the motor racing, but you didn’t speak out, because you weren’t a motor racing enthusiast.

Then they came for the chiiiiilldreeeen’s playtime. You’re fucking paying attention now, aren’t you?

A school has reluctantly banned hard-ball games and reduced pupil numbers in outdoor breaks after neighbours complained about "excessive" noise.

Boisterous children have played in the grounds of Barlby primary school, near Selby in North Yorkshire, for more than a century, but governors say that modern legislation has forced the move.

Three nearby residents have complained repeatedly to Selby district council, and the school feared that a noise abatement order might follow, imposing more severe restrictions.

Well, look. I don’t have kids. Hell, I can’t even stand the grotty little sods. But I’m speaking out. Do you see?

Three people – fucking three! – complained about the noise of children playing. In a school playground. That’s been a school playground for more than 100 years.

And the school has to roll over because of stupid NIMBY-loving laws – probably brought in by Labour, but the other lot are just as big a bunch of cunts, so it’s a moot point.

Or perhaps the school could have had more robust legal advice? And just who are these three people who seem to be able to make the world bend their will? What is it I should know?

AJ

I have said it before and I will say it again

.. as if having kids isn’t a big enough challenge, in this country, having kids opens you up to a million new ways that the bully state can fuck you over.

Lincolnshire County Council can go fuck itself in the eye-socket with a cactus.

AJ

Welcome to the Machine

It could be argued that I don’t stand often enough against the tide of lazy misogynist shite the Daily Mail peddles, but today I do.

 

A mother who neglected her three children and let her two dogs starve to death after becoming obsessed with a computer game has been given a suspended jail sentence and banned from using computers by a judge in Kent.

Her German shepherd and lurcher dog lay rotting in the dining room for two months as the 33-year-old widow played Small World on the internet almost non-stop.

After a neighbour peered through the letterbox and saw the ‘appalling conditions’, the NSPCC were told and police officers gagged as they entered the home and saw the ‘decay and filth’.

…

The toilet was in a disgusting state. The woman tried to block officers from entering the dining room and when asked why she replied: “All right, my dogs are in there. They are dead. I killed them.

‘I probably starved them, probably because I have been playing the computer game all the time.’

…

‘She started playing initially for an hour a day in late 2009 but since August of that year it had become an obsession to the point where she was only getting two hours sleep a night,’ said the prosecutor.

‘She still managed to feed the children and get them to school but accepted she let everything else go. Afterwards, it became so overwhelming she didn’t know where to start.

‘It got to the stage where she only bought food that didn’t need cooking. She fed the children pot noodles, sandwiches, chips and pies. She was ashamed.’

Scum! Hang her! Flog her! Feed ‘er to the pigs, Errol.

Well, no actually. Hang on a minute.

Allan Compton, defending, said the woman had been a devoted and competent mother until tragedy struck some years ago with the death of her husband from a heart attack.

‘She retreated into this virtual world provided by her laptop computer,’ he said. ‘She shut herself off from the outside world and operated in the real world on a very basic level.

This puts an altogether different complexion on the case.

The mother was sentenced to six months imprisonment suspended for two years and ordered to do 75 hours unpaid work. She was banned from keeping animals.

I understand that banning her from keeping animals for a period is for the best. I also understand that her kids going into care – temporarily – is probably for the best.

But what purpose does the suspended prison sentence or the unpaid work serve, at all?

And what of this:

Judge Carey banned the woman from having any internet access ‘to assist you to resist the temptation to return to this virtual world’.

This is akin to banning an alcoholic from buying wine. Completely misses the point. It could be a Tamagotchi or a Nintendo DS game next.

And that’s not the only way in which Judge Carey appears to miss the point.

Judge Jeremy Carey told her: ‘I am satisfied you have been a good mother but your life went very badly wrong when you became obsessed with the Small World computer game.’

Errrr. Wait a minute. Didn’t her husband die of a heart attack, leaving her with 3 children to take care of?

You don’t think that may have been the point at which her life ‘went very badly wrong’?

This woman doesn’t need punishing. She doesn’t need opprobrium. She needs help.

What did her psychiatric evaluation conclude? I suppose that completely missed the point as well, being conducted by a low-grade state-appointed ideologue. And her legal team? How did this terribly sad case end up going down this route at all?

I just can’t see how the best interests of anyone at all are being fulfilled here at all. It stinks of the heavy-handed inhuman state making its mark. Again.

I’m almost tempted to go and see what’s being said about this on Mumsnet, but I dread the prospect of unearthing a lynch-mob of hatched faced hormonal harridans.

AJ

UPDATE: A further thought on banning this woman from accessing the Internet.

I was given to believe that, rightly or wrongly, access to the Internet had now been elevated to the status of being a human right.

I can quite understand that the life of a single parent is at time very lonely and isolated, and that access to the Internet is a massive help in so many ways.

It’s not as if this woman has used the Internet to cause or incite harm, like, for example, someone consuming child pr0n would be.

So the act of banning her from the Internet seems quite cruel in itself.

Some kind of therapy for her addictive behaviour would seem like a far more useful approach.

Oh and does she have a mobile phone that has access to the Internet? Has she been forced to change to an old-skool mobile phone because of this?

Sleight of hand

It’s not really made the news here, but yesterday, on 11th September, someone tried to blow himself up in Copenhagen.

What struck me was the response of the Danish Prime Minister:

"Regardless of the background for the bomb detonation, it is important that we don’t allow ourselves to be guided by fear or change the way we live,"

These are fine sounding words in the “Keep calm and carry on” tradition. We heard much the same sentiment from the cunt Blair after 7/7/2005.

But actually, he should be telling that not to the public, but to the politicians.

Because, on account of the overblown threat of Islamist terrorism, governments across the western world have imposed profound changes to the way we live, and they have done so by promulgating a culture of fear and suspicion.

Basically, I’d rather live with the remote risk of being blown apart by a nutter, than live with the certainty that my daily life will be hemmed in by all sorts of bullying, state intrusion and compulsion as a sop to ‘security’. But I don’t get to have that choice.

Am I alone in that? Are the majority so invested in the idea that not only must “this never be allowed to happen again”, but that it is the job of the state to bring about this bubble-wrapped utopia?

It comes down to power and control. Again.

Accordingly, my nomination for cunt of the day is not the latest dickhead who couldn’t organise an explosion in a gunpowder factory, but Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen

AJ

Has a bigger shit ever walked the earth?

I speak, of course, about arrogant shitbag extraordinaire, Dave Hartnett, top tax civil servant at HMRC.

The HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) Permanent Secretary responsible for tax denied there had been any errors, and that there was no “need to apologise”.

He said HMRC was justified in asking people who owed more than £2,000 to repay it more quickly, saying they were likely to be the highest earners.

Hmmm… reminds me of something.

This guy is such a joke that even senior Tories have been able to accuse him of arrogance while keeping a straight face,

AJ