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British Civil Liberties Film Released
An anonymous reader sends us to a BBC article about a British film likely to attract the attention of civil liberties supporters. The film, Taking Liberties , is a documentary about eroding civil liberties in present-day Britain. It will be showing in cinemas in major cities across the UK starting next weekend. From the article: "Director Chris Atkins wants Taking Liberties to shake the British public out of their apathy over what he sees as the dangerous erosion of traditional rights and freedoms. 'This film uses shock tactics. We needed to be unashamedly populist... Once you give up traditional liberties such as free speech and the right to protest you are not going to easily get them back,' says Atkins."
Even better. Here in Birmingham (central England) we have Policeman and Traffic Wardens equipped with cameras in their hats/ helmets. Seriously.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
The English system is based on common law, ie tradition. When there is no precedent, judges in courts of law decide, but this can be appealed up to the House of Lords in Parliament. Parliament can introduce new laws but if they come in conflict with common law then courts could refuse to apply them as invalid. This would result in a consitutional crisis as Parliament is the body with greatest legislative power in England.
The Magna Carta restricts the power of the monarchy such that it is bound by the rule of law, so there is no consent from the crown, but rather the other way round -- the monarch rules with the consent of the people and has to do so bound by the common law. No individual in England has anywhere near the power that a US president has to introduce new laws or restrict civil liberties. Neither the queen or prime minister can veto Parliament, for example. So if/when Parliament introduces laws that restrict civil liberties then it is the judges/courts that ultimately decide if the new laws are enforcable. In actice new laws have to pass through the house of lords, and the law lords there (very senior judges) advise on whether the proposed law is in fact enforcable.
"If by "never" you mean "in the last 100 years" and by "arms" you mean "guns", I think you'll find that the restrictions were very different pre-WW2, definitely pre-WW1."
You're pretty much correct. The first British gun licensing laws were enacted in 1870, but they were essentially a revenue generation tool. You had to pay ten shillings for the right to carry guns around in public places, but could keep as many at home as you wanted without one, and the licenses were handed out at post offices to anyone who could pay for them. The first actual control legislation was in 1903, when certain classes of pistol could only be sold to people who produced a valid game or gun license, although once again such licenses were extremely easy to obtain, and any other sort of gun could be bought without them. True gun control didn't happen until 1920, and was largely a reaction to the 1917 Russian Revolution, where private gun ownership played a significant role in overthrowing the Czar, and the British government feared that the millions of recently demobbed (and therefore extremely cheap) weapons from WWI would be used to start a massive armed revolt.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
This concept is called sousiveillance ("watching from below" as opposed to surveillance "watching from above"). The general idea is that the people collectively monitor themselves, rather like Wikipedia. It is often advocated by cyborg/wearable PC enthusiasts.
Free speech: a) "free speech zones" so that he needn't be bothered with people confronting his policies. Anyone wanting to protest (a freedom of speech issue) can only do so some blocks away in a cordoned off area. b) muzzling the heads of NASA, EPA, etc and telling them all publications have to be proofed by the White House so they can limit any voices that present information counter to the Bush mandates. c) monitoring phone calls and internet traffic which puts the brakes on many people expressing their views. Monitoring: a) illegal wiretaps with no court oversight. (the wiretapping has not been found to be legal - in fact, the FBI was crawled on the carpet for not following even the laws that do still exist) b) wholesale monitoring of internet traffic. c) requiring ISPs to keep records on what websites their customers visit, what they post, etc. Hiring: a) litmus tests for all key positions Imprisonment: a) Gitmo b) Gitmo c) Gitmo It's obvious you would kiss Bush's butt were he to bare it for you...
England isn't down-town Baghdad. Even if we had the right to bear arms there's not a single person in this country that would risk getting themselves killed to try and claw back their civil liberties. It would have to get a whole lot worse before it got to that point, so bad in fact that any gun law would be irrelevant anyway, because the people would be arming themselves in the same way the IRA did - through backchannels.
The right to bear arms with the aim of fighting back against the goverment is rather irrelevant in todays day and age, the difference between civilian arms and the military they'd be fighting against, assuming the army backed the goverment is too big for people to give their lives unless things got so bad that people felt their lives had already been taken. Of course the more realistic scenario is that the army wouldn't back the goverment, why? Because even people in the army are better educated than they were, back when these ideas of being able to bear arms to rebel against the goverment were introduced, soldiers themselves are citizens who'd have to be willing to be supressed, if the goverment gave them special conditions and more rights over other citizens then there's still the soldier's families the soldiers are going to care about, and friends of the soldiers family and on and on.
The only thing the right to bear arms does realistically is make American citizens think they're in control, when the reality is quite obviously the opposite, the cost of this false security they have is many countless unneeded murders and accidents caused by the plethora of available firearms.
Although other versions mentioned are from the New England Holocaust Memorial -> communists, jews, trade unionists, catholics, me. A version in Time Magazine says Communists, Jews, Catholics, me. Apparently there have been a number of versions/ translations of this poem since it was originally made, but it seems like you're right since most of the versions seem to mention communists before jews (and some of them don't even mention jews).
Regardless of which version is used, I was just supporting the idea that often times, most people aren't motivated to take action until it's too late.
File Deletion is Murder.
Or the blog from which it's drawn. I don't normally go about recommending blogs, but this one's quite good!
Ever fire a gun? A useful one, one that will stop a big ugly guy, is a heavy kicking beast. If it ever comes down to a gun fight the guy in better shape will be able to aim more rounds faster.
Your puny ass is puny armed or not.
The point is that if there are no guns around the damage will be done by other, much less lethal means. Another point is that it is much harder to kill someone when it's up close and personal, like with a knife.
I just want the sharp objects out of the nursery. It most surely is, as you and most of the rest of this comment section display pretty juvenile thinking.
That's how Ghandi was successful in his pacifist revolution.
Its Gandhi