QotD: Justin Webb appreciation society

BBC Bias, Comment of the Day
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Glad to see we’re not the only one to fully appreciate Justin Webb, as this extract from Chicken Yoghurt shows:

ITEM: Using the voice of John Humphrys ‘to scare off hungry deer from eating gardeners’ prized fruit and vegetables’ is a great idea. His voice certainly scares me away from listening to Radio 4′s Today programme. No doubt the voices of the programme’s other presenters could also be put to good use. When I hear Justin Webb’s voice, for instance, it always scares off feelings of wanting to be alive.

What the Twitter Joke Trial means for all of us

Bloody Lawyers, Civil liberties, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust
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Jack of Kent on why the Twitter Joke Trial matters:

The Paul Chambers case – known as the “Twitter Joke Trial” – has three points of significance:

– how relentless administrative and judicial stupidity can end in a conviction;

– how the CPS are wrongly using criminal law in respect of electronic communications; and

– how a criminal record can change a person’s life for the worse.

Let us hope Doncaster Crown Court can reverse this injustice on Friday and allow Paul to rebuild his life.

He explains succinctly why and how these points matter for Paul Chambers, the poor guy whose life was ruined through this case, but it has of course broader considerations too, especially the first point. Chambers was originally convicted through a long chain of people and institutions unable or unwilling to apply common sense about what was essentially the kind of stupid joke you’d make to your mates or cow-orkers, but on twitter. You could’ve had the same sort of case thirty-forty years ago as well, if some passing police officer had taken offense to a similar joke by some local wit. But whereas then you had to have had spectacularly bad luck to say something stupid in front of a copper himself dumb enough to take an obvious joke seriously, if you do the same on the internet, your bad joke can land you in hot water long after you’ve made and forgotten it.

Twitter is meant for ephemeral conversation, but they don’t disappear when you stop talking. Once it’s on the internet it’s there forever, barring acts of god or Google. Which means that many more people can read and misinterpret your comments than just your mates and it only takes one blockhead to ruin your day. What’s more, because it’s so easy to gather data online, you have whole classes of professional blockheads, in government as well as working for private companies looking for “threats” and it’s not in their interest or power to treat anything like a joke. As with airport police, these people have no sense of humour and are obliged to treat any bomb joke like a real threat, no matter how stupid.

This is not to blame Paul Chambers for his misfortune, rather the fault lies with institutions like the police, like the Crown Prosecution Service and like the Robin Hood Airport security department for not using common sense or rather having institutionalised processes in which the right thing to do is to not think for yourself but follow procedures. That’s always been a bad thing, but it’s made worse when such a dumb organisation is fed the huge amounts of data gathered on us routinely every day and starts to datamine. No government and damn few private companies truly understand information technology and the simple fact that it’s not how much but what kind and which quality of data you gather and how you use it that’s important. So you get things like airport security officers googling for their airport to detect threats and then using inflexible, dumb procedures to process these “threats” because the only thing their organisations understands is “more data good”, “common sense bad”.

That’s the spectre we’re all living with, of huge unaccountable organisations fucking over our lives not out of malice, but out of wilful stupidity because of something we said online.

A concrete example of US leadership on human rights

Civil liberties, Torture, War on Terror
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This op-ed by the US ambassador to the UN human Rights Commission Eileen Donahoe is devoid of reality that you have to laugh, if you don’t want to cry. Every paragraph is an exercise in chutzpah and quote worthy but this is I think the worst:

Time and again human rights defenders underscore the importance of our public statements as an essential tool against government repression. The power of truthful words, spoken by the United States, should never be denigrated or underestimated. Those words provide hope and courage to those who fight against the worst rights abuses.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth:

Former CIA agents have confirmed for the first time that the agency tortured prisoners at a “black site” detention center in north-eastern Poland at the height of the war on terror. According to the Associated Press, a former CIA agent identified only as “Albert” tortured the terror suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri multiple times with an electric drill at the converted Stare Kiejkuty military base near Szymany in the Masuria region of Poland.

Al-Nashiri is the suspected mastermind behind one of the first large al-Qaida attacks, which targeted the US destroyer USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden in October 2000. According to former CIA agents who prefered to remain anonymous, Albert tortured the suspect for two weeks in December 2002. The claim is backed up by a review by the CIA’s inspector general, which reads: “The debriefer entered the detainee’s cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded.”

Sure, apologists will claim that this was an “isolated incident”, a “bad apple”, that this does not happen anymore under Obama. Yet Guantanamo Bay is still open, the Obama administration uses the same excuse of national security Bush used to hide the details of what’s going on in its War on Terror and nobody is even talking about any of the other nodes in the American gulag. The United States is not leading the world in human rights, it’s leading the world in ignoring them.

QotD: the decline of America, as evidenced by Terry Jones

US politics, War on Terror
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Almost a decade of the War on Terror and some fucking hick “pastor” from bloody Florida is able to hold the country to ransom with his nazi book burning stunt. Says Jamie:

I suppose it could be argued for various reasons that they had no choice, but if anything that’s even worse news from the American perspective. They’ve reached the demagogue event horizon: the most obvious vulgar chancer thrown up by the whole War on Terror nonsense is taken with absolute seriousness by people who everybody else is supposed to take seriously.

It’s the logical outcome of a process in which the rightwing of America has been allowed to make itself more and more shrill withou adults stepping in and saying enough is enough. On the other hand, there have been loons like this all through American history; they just couldn’t be interviewed on CNN before.

Parenthical notifications considered harmful

Abortion, Feminism, US politics
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Many American states have some kind of law requiring parental notification for underage women wanting an abortion. The point of these laws is to enable proper communication between parents and children on this topic, that parents are not kept in ignorance of their daughter undergoing a (supposedly) dangerous medical procedure. Some girls however can’t tell their parents even they required to by law and those girls end up in the courts getting a waiver. But who are those girls?

Harriet J. has the answer, based on her own experience dealing with them. Ranked from most often to least often, these are girls who:

  1. have dads missing in action
  2. or a dead parent
  3. or parents opposed to the abortion
  4. or who don’t have an ID
  5. or who have been raped
  6. or who have been raped and don’t (want to) know it
  7. or who come from an abusive family
  8. or who cannot let their parents know as they would not be able to deal with it
  9. or who are in some kind of legal wasteland

And she also knows who these girls are not:

The girl who just whimsically doesn’t want her parents to know grows up to be the woman who just whimsically gets an abortion, all nail-biting and hair-twirling and “Gosh! I didn’t realize my baby has fingernails WHAT.”

And the upshot is:

So, there you go. Girls who can’t tell their parents about their abortions? After you pass a parental notification law, they still can’t tell their parents. Girls who can tell their parents? After you pass a parental notification law, they still tell their parents, unless they fall into an ill-defined legal loophole – then they tell their parents but still have to come get a bypass. A parental notification law accomplishes two things: 1) it takes the girls who can’t tell their parents and penalizes them for not being able to tell their parents and, 2) it takes a portion of the girls who can tell their parents and makes them go through the process anyway.

But of course, as Harriet J. and her commenters are fully aware of, the overt reasons why these laws are passed are horseshit. The real reason is to a) make it that much more difficult to get an abortion, b) make it easier to shut down abortion clinics for “breaking the law” and c) perhaps most important, punish these girls for having sex in the first place. It’s the last impulse that makes abortion and sexual politics so frustrating in the US, as this is something that you can’t reason people out of, as it’s not a position they have reached through reason.