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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."
...and just download this documentary. It sounds interesting.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Yes, but if you overdramatize it people will say "it's not that bad - most of those laws will never negatively affect my life" and whenever they hear about the issue in the future they'll think "Oh, I've considered that - I even saw a film about it once - but I've decided it's not really a problem".
oh, and before you ask, many of them regard themselves as 'intellectual' (a.k.a. they don't read yellow press etc.).
kinda seems like only IT ppl and civil rights activists are concerned now. and i absolutely cannot see anything that would change that.
Call me a troll if you want, but the Bush administration has clamped down hard on free speech, monitors just about everything, litmus tests public servants, puts whoever it wants on various lists, puts others in prison without charging them, declares pre-emptive war with no legal basis, and does it all while putting every citizen and their children so deep in debt they will probably never get out.
Talk about disappearing civil liberties, but this country might have well reverted to monarchy rule. It would really be tough to call it a democracy any longer.
the day they wake up is the day when more ppl are afraid of dying in a car accident than dying in a terrorist attack.
the possibility of such an event ?
...but not necessarily because of its content. No, what is interesting is how the film maker will decry the loss of liberties, the encroachments of freedom, and the institution of censorship -- in a film openly distributed and marketed to the general public, and all without the government shutting him down. Yessireee...a police state! That's what we're living in for sure. The jackbooted thugs will be here any minute now...any minute now...I'm sure they're almost here...somewhere. Well, maybe their black helicopters broke down or something, but I'm sure they're on their way!
I had recently seen to videos that conveyed messages about some current events; http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/, and Al Gore's http://www.an-inconvenient-truth.com/.
It's interesting to me that video has become the newest, best tool to portray a point of view on an issue. Now if we could get these videos on the airwaves on a regular basis, I think the public good would be served. I realize that oil companies, tobacco companies, and other groups with an agenda might tend to drown out the discourse with their own videos. Still, these videos are better than the 30 second sound bites that we get in our broadcast TV channels.
Best regards.
"Banned in all the cinemas, NOW!"
I'm pretty sure I already saw this movie when it was called V for Vendetta. Or was it Children of Men?
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
So in this one South London neighborhood that I occasionally frequent, there was an armed robbery at 4 in the afternoon on the main street last Saturday. It's a quiet neighborhood, very well-balanced, well-off, so it makes sense to come there and rob people.
There was a similar robbery the previous week.
The week before that, it was on a weekday evening, I guess they had a busy schedule that week. It's the same guys each time. They live in this totally different neighborhood a way to the south, though.
And there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Nothing at all. What are you going to do? Call Batman? The UK police are very nice guys (compared to any other police force I've met) but they really can't do much in this situation.
The trouble is, this particular chunk of street doesn't have any cameras. The south half of the street near the station does, and the north half near what's called a 'roundabout' does, but there's this bit in the middle that doesn't. So all you have to do is rob people there, since nobody around here is fool enough to intervene and get jailed or killed, and there's no chance of a conviction (or even police attention) without video evidence. If you have video evidence, and there is a history of crime, and someone gets hurt, then in the end, you can get a custodial sentence passed. It's an uphill struggle, though, because there's a hell of a lot of civil liberties in the way.
If nobody gets hurt, there's nothing you can do even with cameras. Every weekend, kids come up the road from the other, nastier neighborhood to the south, and as they go they kick over stuff and pull flowers out because, well, that's the local culture. It's not a life-threatening problem -- it just means you kind of have to remember to get stuff indoors by a certain time on Fridays. And don't grow rosebushes in the front yard.
But all is not lost. Armed robbery generally *does* mean someone eventually getting hurt, and next year there will be cameras for that bit of street, yay! And none of this is really *Real Violent Crime* such as you might find in south chicago; it's just that there's no reason *not* to mug people or kick stuff over so it just becomes the normal expectation that those things will happen.
The thing about 'omg they are taking our libertiez!' is, Civil Liberties in this sense aren't as important as for example the liberty to *not* be mugged or the liberty to *not* have your stuff smashed or the most important liberty of all, the liberty to *not* have the nature of your life dictated by the whims of thugs. The liberty of not being recorded on camera is actually pretty trivial by comparison.
So install some more freakin cameras. Create new powers to stop 'public nuisance', use electronic tags, maybe suspend habeas corpus or something. Take away more civil liberties. Here, have some of mine. I'll expect them back when I leave the UK.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Who's going to go watch a documentary about civil liberties when Big Brother's on TV?
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security.
It is intresting because the words in bold are not usually included. Watch the excellent british series "yes minister" ("the right/need to know" I believe) for why these words are so fucking important.
In that episode it is the word "significant" wich is added to a sentence to make it into weasel language.
Yes, if this quote above is correct, then Benjamin Franklin was a weasel.
After all, just what do you classify as essential or for that matter tempory. The right to travel outside your own country is hardly essential for the majority of us, and if a sacrifice would grant you a million years of security by the age of the universe that would still be temporary.
They are weasel words, words that can be used to, well weasel out of commiting yourselve to anything firm. Franklin by including these words could always claim that he never meant for something to be considered an essential liberty or that security measure in his eyes was not temporary.
The world changes. Take travelling, pasports have been known for a long time and used to be documents that merely asked of friendly powers to let this person pass unharmed. The dutch pasport at least still has text that asks friendly powers to allow the owner of the pasport to free passage and any aid or assitance necesarry. Officious language from an age when the vast majority of people never travelled from their place of birth.
Nowadays you can easily find a job were you pass several borders each and every day. Taking a long weekend on the other side of europe is common as hell and airports handle millions of people everyday.
Obviously then a passport today is much different then it once was. More and more info linking the intended owner to the document is included. Loss of an essential liberty? Providing temporary security OR the price for a liberty that gives us some security. Discuss, but know that Benjamin Franklin's famous quote does NOT take a firm stand against any amount of biometrics to be included on your pasport, not even if it was to be injected in your body. "Essential" and "temporary".
Liberty is a noble goal. Just go ahead, disable the traffic lights on a busy intersection, see how well people cope with liberty. The simple fact is that for instance speed cameras do have a positive effect, areas known to be heavily controlled show a drastic reduction not only in the speeding itself but also in accidents. The essential freedom of being able to speed sacrificed for the temporary security of not being killed by some idiot who thinks he is Michael Schumacher?
Play an MMORPG for a while, say WoW and see what a world looks like when the police and the state are essentially absent. It ain't pretty. Yes it is freedom, but at what price?
We should always be wary of what is being done in the name of security, but next time someone quotes Benjamin Franklin and leaves out the two weasel words take note of it. These words were included by a smart man for a good reason, why did they choose to leave them out?
...but not necessarily because of its content. No, what is interesting is how the film maker will decry the loss of liberties, the encroachments of freedom, and the institution of censorship -- in a film openly distributed and marketed to the general public, and all without the government shutting him down. Nice strawman, but he was warning against the destruction of civil liberties, not claiming that Britain was a police state yet."Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
So all you have to do is rob people there, since nobody around here is fool enough to intervene
Ahh. there is your problem. People in that nieghborhood don't give a shit. How did nieghborhoods ever have low crime rates before CCTV? Because they stood by their nieghbors and acted in their own best interest by actually doing something about it themselves. By hiding behind closed doors pretending not to see, they are getting the shitty neighborhood they deserve. Act like a victim, get treated like a victim. I have more than once come out of my apartment into the street and made my presence known, when there is a disturbance on my street.(I live in New York City) Guess what happens when I walk out and look them in the eye? Well usually it's some arguement that is starting to turn physical, but when suddenly there is a witness threats go back to being just words. The one actual mugging that I encountered the guy just ran away.
We are all just people.
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
We've never had them in the first place, Mr Atkins. In order for there to be inalienable rights like freedom of speech, there must be constitutional limitations on the power of the state, legislature and judiciary, all three of which needing to be subject to the rule of law.
WE DON'T HAVE SUCH A DOCUMENT. WE DON'T LIVE IN SUCH A STATE.
We never have.
Therefore your film about rights we've never had is as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Furthermore, not one British citizen on 10,000 would want anyone to have such a right. the other 9,999 are 100% behind the full enforcement of 7 years jail for anyone posessing a weapon, legally or otherwise. The American right to bear arms is seen as the reason why American deaths from gunshot wounds run at around 100 times the rate here, adjusted for population size. In short, almost everyone in the UK sees weapons as the problem, and none see them as the solution.
A few criminals have guns, and probably a similar number of country dwellers have them, and perhaps a few who shoot competitively as a sport, but carrying guns is not something many in the UK would consider. Those with a sound legal reason for carrying a gun have very little support here.
Our police dont normally carry guns, but have still managed to shoot more innocent people than guilty ones. Each time a policeman is shot by a criminal, there is a clamour to arm the police, but I do not recall any incident where this would ahve prevented the policemen being shot. AFAIR 75% of American polise shot are shot with their own gun, or by a colleague.
How about a right to bare breasts? Now that really would be popular!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I just got done sitting on a jury for a drug trial. It was a frightening experience. The evidence was so weak and indirect that I couldn't even believe they had charged these two people with a crime. One of them was a transsexual prostitute who was clearly (to me) just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, when the jury started to deliberate, there were four of us who all thought it was going to be an open-and-shut not guilty verdict, but we ended up with a hung jury, 8 voting guilty and 4 not guilty. This is the kind of offense that can easily land you in prison for life under California's three strikes laws. And no, you don't have to be a career criminal to fall under three strikes. The prostitute was charged with three felonies from the same night, and that's enough. There's a guy who's in prison for life under three strikes for stealing four chocolate chip cookies. After the trial was over, I visited the place where the cop claimed he'd conducted surveillance from using binoculars. Well, you absolutely cannot see the stuff he claimed to have seen from that location. There are buildings, trees, and walls in the way. I hope these defendants don't have to go to trial again, because next time they might be unlucky in the jury they get.
Find free books.
"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.