Autoritarianism – Page 3

Leave the kids alone? Ain’t gonna happen

Published on April 5, 2008

Last night while I was dropping off to sleep, for some reason I started thinking of how I used to walk to school when I was little. I must’ve been four when I started walking on my own to school, which was only five minutes away and how nobody thought this was weird, because everybody did this. In a neighbourhood with lots of young families and small children and little car traffic, this was perfectly safe to do. Had we lived in Amsterdam it would’ve been different, but no doubt I and my brothers and sister would’ve been using the public transport before we hit our teens. All of this is of course several decades ago and no doubt parents have become more uptight here as well, but I sincerily doubt we ever see shock horror articles likes this: Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone (found via Unfogged):

Once upon a time in New York City, it wasn’t a big deal if pre-teen kids rode the subways and buses alone. Today, as Lenore Skenazy has discovered, a kid who goes out without a nanny, a helmet and a security detail is a national news story, and his mother is a candidate for child-abuse charges.

A columnist for The New York Sun, Skenazy recently left her 9-year-old son, Izzy, at Bloomingdale’s in midtown Manhattan with a Metrocard for the subway, a subway map, $20, and told him she’d see him when he got back home. She wrote a column about it and has been amazed at the chord she struck among New Yorkers who remember being kids in those more innocent times.

[…]

Dr. Ruth Peters, a parenting expert and TODAY Show contributor, agreed that children should be allowed independent experiences, but felt there are better – and safer – ways to have them than the one Skenazy chose.

“I’m not so much concerned that he’s going to be abducted, but there’s a lot of people who would rough him up,” she said. “There’s some bullies and things like that. He could have gotten the same experience in a safer manner.”

In the accompanying poll, 51 percent of the people who responsed said they wouldn’t allow their children on the subway at that age. It all seems a bit hysterical. Even in Amsterdam, vice capital of the Netherlands, I see pre-teen kids ride bikes to school and why shouldn’t they? Part of growing up is learning to do things without your parents and if you keep your kids in an overprotective bubble they will never learn to be independent. Yet judging from the article, keeping their children in such a bubble is exactly what many if not most parents want to do.

A related development is the amount of work and pseudowork children, even young children, seem to be saddled with these days. Children of my generation didn’t get homework until the final year of primary school, if at all and while we did have afterschool activities like learning to play guitar or were involved in sports, few of us had more than one or two of those at the same time. these days it seems schools and parents both are deeply involving even young children with what one Unfogged commenter called “the cultivation of personal individuality and resumé-like individual capacities” all in highly structured, cocooned settings but without giving children much freedom to do things on their own, outside a parent or parent-substitute’s supervision.

So you get a generation of children who are expected to have an agenda filled with “career building”highly structured activities alongside their school work, while everything outside these activities is frowned upon, actively discouraged or even criminalised –asbos for youths hanging around shopping centres, zero tolerance anti drugs policies for toddlers, metal detectors at schools and police officers at the door. Does that combination strike you as raising a generation of people able to dissent from what their leaders and betters have planned for them?

Frank Fields: a noxious kind of stupid

Published on July 28, 2007

The Week in Westminster, BBC Radio 4’s Saturday look back at what happened in politics this week is on right now and the subject at hand is Gordon Brown’s plan to extend the period a terror suspect can be held without charge. Member of Parliament Frank Fields is asked to comment and he made the following comparison, allegedly something a constitutent said to him, whose husband lost his legs in one of the London bombings. Nobody or nothing can give this man his legs back, but somebody who has spent time in prison as a wrongly accused suspect can be adequately compensated for this, so therefore extending the period somebody can be jailed without trial as a terror suspect is not a big deal.

Even when taking this argument at face value, there’s a huge flaw. The idea is that you can compensate for time spent in jail, but compensation cannot bring back legs lost in a terror bombing. However, no compensation will bring back the time spent in jail while innocent either, nor the accompanying lost of reputation.

Apart from that, Field’s whole atrgument is nothing more than hiding behind the righteous halo of innocent victimhood; he’s taking his constituent’s torn off legs and appropriating them for himself, in order to push through his agenda of extending the period you can be held as a terror suspect, without being charged. The one has nothing to do with the other. Locking up innocent people without charge will not prevent equally innocent people from losing their legs in terrorist bombings and guilty people can be charged. The only thing this extension will do is make for even more lazy police work, as they can just throw everybody who looks suspicious in jail and only then start looking for evidence.

Frank Field’s whole argument is based on a noxious kind of stupidity, one that wants us to believe that the price of combatting terrorism is that sometimes the wrong people will be locked up without a charge, that if we want no more legs blown off we cannotafford to be precious about civil liberties. It’s noxious, because so many people want us to believe it. It’s stupid because it’s just is not true.

Our Orwellian world

Published on July 17, 2007

Item one: a man is jailed for three-and-a-half years for carrying a blueprint of a rocket through Luton Airport:

British man who was found with blueprints for a rocket in his luggage at Luton Airport has been jailed for three-and-a-half years.

Yassin Nassari, 28, from Ealing, west London, was earlier found guilty at the Old Bailey of possessing documents likely to be useful to a terrorist.

[…]

Sentencing him, Judge Gerald Gordon said: “I have come to the conclusion that, sadly, like a number of young Muslims, you have somehow been indoctrinated into beliefs supporting terrorism by others.

“I have no doubt you wanted to immerse yourself in this fundamentalist trash, but in the material available to me there is nothing to indicate that any actual terrorist use would have been made of it by anyone.”

Nassari’s hard drive contained documents about martyrdom and weapons training, as well as instructions on how to construct the Qassam artillery rocket – a home-made steel rocket used by terrorist groups in the Middle-East.

So even though there was no evidence that this guy was involved with any terrorist organisation or intended to perform any terrorist acts himself, the mere fact of possessing documents that are a bit dodgy landed him in jail. Really, you don’t need to be an evil terrorist to be interested in the sort of material described in the last quoted paragraph; who hasn’t downloaded The Anarchist Cookbook at one point or another out of curiosity? There are plenty of people interested in weapons, guns, warfare etc. who aren’t terrorists or even terrorist sympathisers; remember Gareth the T.A. nerd from the Office?

Item two: The Metropolitian Police is given real-time access to London’s congestion charge cameras:

Police are to be given live access to London’s congestion charge cameras – allowing them to track all vehicles entering and leaving the zone.

Anti-terror officers will be exempted from parts of the Data Protection Act to allow them to see the date, time and location of vehicles in real time.

They previously had to apply for access on a case-by-case basis.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith blamed the “enduring vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” for the change.

The thing is, a) the only true “vehicle-borne terrorist threat to London” was organised by the Keystone Cops branch of Al Queda, b) you cannot tell from the outside if a car is a terrorist car c) if you know enough to know which car to track, you also could’ve gotten permission to do so anyway under the old rules. In his science fiction thriller Whole Wide World Paul J. McAuley predicted that ultimately, all of the UK’s CCTV cameras would be linked up into one giant network, controlled by police computers; this seems like a step in that direction. The Met says this capacity will only be used to fight terrorist activity, but once a capability is there, other uses will be found for it, as the internet itself has shown us.

Item three: The association of Chief Police Officers wants unlimited detention without charge, again for the noble cause of fighting terrorism. And again the question crops up, what is the purpose of locking people up if you don’t have the evidence to charge them, let alone convict them?

Item four: the Dutch police can now keep records of anybody who interacts with them — detainees, suspects, victims, witnesses, literally anybody– for up to five years (Dutch). In the first year, any police officer can look into these records, afterwards it’s only accesible to those who have “a good reason” to do so. But that’s not all, as it’s not just the police who can view these records, but also other parties with a vested interest: social workers, housing societies, even shopowners. All in the name of fighting crime.

Reactions to Labour’s treatment of the heckler

Published on September 30, 2005

The BBC have, as is their wont, been collecting responses to the treatment of that 82 year old heckler at Jack Straw’s speech at the Labour Conference. Some interesting points were made and much of the usual know-nothing rightwing blather was absent. Sure, there are some confused souls who think political speeches are like sermons and it’s impolite to heckle, but the overwhelming majority is both angry and scared at the treatment of this man, especially his subsequent arrest under the prevention of terrorism act.

The following response I thought hit the nail on the head:

The key issue here is that laws promoted as defending us from murderous fanatics are already being used to suppress anti-Government opinion. To look at this issue as being about anything else – the quality of stewarding, the rights and wrongs of heckling etc – is to dangerously miss the point.
Chandra, England

All in all, even with the swift almost-apology issued by Tony Blair, it seems Labour has shot itself firmly in the foot with this incident, awaking a lot of people to the dangers of this government which preaches a lot about democracy and respect, but does not practise either.

Handling criticism with dignity: the Labour way

Published on September 28, 2005

At the Labour conference today, an eighty-two year old man was dragged from the conference, his conference card taken away and arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, all for heckling Jack “boots” Straw during his speech on Iraq. Another man underwent the same treatment after protesting this spectacle:

Jack Straw was heckled today as he told the Labour party conference Britain was in Iraq “for one reason only: to help the elected Iraqi government build a secure, democratic and stable nation”.

A delegate, who was 82 years old and has been a Labour party member for 60 years, was bundled out by security guards after he shouted, “That’s a lie,” during the foreign secretary’s keynote conference address.

The outburst came during one of the few mentions of Iraq in the conference hall this week.

A second delegate was expelled for complaining at the treatment of the first heckler.

Fascistic, petty and arrogant this action was, it is also an unmistakable symptom of Labour’s weakinging grasp on reality and power. A confident party does not need to be this heavy handed. As unpleasant as it was for the persons involved –the main victim actually came to the UK from nazi Germany in 1937– I can’t help but gloat over this…