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UK Government To Back Off Plans To Share Private Data
Richard Rothwell writes with news that Jack Straw, Britain's Justice Secretary, has made public plans to drop provisions from the Coroners and Justice Bill which would have allowed the government to take information gathered for one purpose and use it for any other purpose. "A spokesman for Mr Straw said the 'strength of feeling' against the plans had persuaded him to rethink. The proposals will be dropped entirely from the Coroners and Justice Bill, and a new attempt will be made to reach a consensus on introducing a scaled-back version at an unspecified stage in the future." After defending the government's intentions, Straw bowed to pressure from a variety of groups and individuals who presented objections to the bill.
Out of curiosity, is Orwell's "1984" being used as a policy guide in the UK by her politicians?
...who finds it slightly depressing to read about a representative government choosing to "bow to pressure from [their constituents]"?
It reminds me of an XKCD punchline: "Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative—But someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The UK Labour party may have backed off this appaling legislation, but they've made it more than clear from this and other legislation - explicit even - that it is their INTENTION to increase the power of the State over ordinary citizens and to conduct pervasive surveillance upon those citizens wherever and whenever thay are able to.
It is their game plan for the UK.
All the while, they hide themselves from any light that is shone on their own activities, meetings and discussions - crying 'state security' or 'commercial sensitivity' (where their corporate freinds are complicit) as they scurry back into the darkness.
These bills and laws make explicit their aims. The citizenry of the UK seems uninterested, held perhaps in the grip of a belief that the State generally means well.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
..since the 60's. He was a nasty manipulative self-centered Trotskyite nutjob then, and the only thing that has changed since is that more people see through him, thank god - largely because he is actually incompetent.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
What public support? History is littered with examples of totalitarian regimes from both sides of the political spectrum. Almost everybody, regardless of their political view, realises what kind of society they should hope to live in by granting more power to the state.
You have just summed up the true nature of "divide and conquer". This is a thing that many people believe they understand but have never seen in action.
The state sits and watches the two sides squabble and lets them argue all they want. Meanwhile the two sides are too busy opposing each other to notice that no matter what happens, the state always becomes more powerful. When overwhelming state power becomes an undeniable threat, usually in the form of an openly totalitarian regime, the two sides then find themselves powerless to oppose it because by this time it is far too late. Then "go along to get along" changes from the favorite tool of the apologist or an excuse for not having the courage to stand up, to a method of survival, sort of like that saying "it's dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." How many examples of this must history provide before we learn to recognize these patterns?
I cannot tell you whether it was designed deliberately or if it arose on its own and was promoted because of how very convenient it is for the statists, but the left-vs-right method of politics is designed to limit possibility. This is shallow and superficial one-dimensional thinking, which is precisely why it can be represented as a linear continuum by drawing two points and one line. One side favors economic freedoms and is willing to reduce personal freedoms, while the other favors personal freedoms and is willing to reduce economic freedoms. It doesn't work that way, which is why the Left, or the Right, or the Left working with the RIght are always going to reduce freedom because neither of them value it for its own sake in all of its forms. That's a serious error and no amount of reform or adjustment of any party platform is going to fix it.
When I repeatedly try to warn against buying into this system and believing for one moment that it has our interests at heart, this is not an exercise or an intellectual debate. There is a real danger here, only it's a subtle one. It's a corrupting, compromising type of danger that demoralizes and weakens. If the media were truly your friend, you would hear about this every day on CNN and Fox News and ABC and MSNBC, and you'd probably believe it then, not because they have the authority of self-evident truth but because they have the kind of authority to which most of you respond. That is not at all natural but it's what you might call unnaturally natural. It is evidence of the compromising, corrupting, demoralizing influence of which I speak that for most of you, even your thinking and your truth needs to be prepackaged for you.
If you don't like the tone of this post, well that makes two of us. I don't like it either, but I'm really tired of the systemic failure to recognize things that are really quite basic and simple. The denial and the "can't happen here" surrounding these issues are staggering. These things should be so obvious that I am beginning to wonder whether Western culture has a collective death wish or a suicidal tendency. Especially in the USA, I don't believe that any outside threat is going to harm us. I think we're doing a fine job of that all on our own. I'd like to see that change, I'd like to see it change peacefully, and I'd like to see people wake up and start daring to dream that if we will just settle a few basic questions once and for all, and then learn to love one another, then something like "heaven on earth" might emerge. I think that's inevitable because nothing else is going to work long-term, it's just a question of how badly we need to suffer before we get there and how many unsustainable systems must fail before we make the realization that we're missing something simple and fundamental. How long that will take is entirely up to us.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"A spokesman for Mr Straw said the 'strength of feeling' against the plans had persuaded him to rethink"
Means:
Oh shit. Only one year to the election deadline...
Nuff said really
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Introduce something awful
Withdraw it
Re-introduce watered down version
See Poll-Tax -> Council Tax
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Because families like the Bush family, the Clinton family, the Kennedy family, and so on are in this for the long haul. They increase their wealth and power in their own lifetime, but then they also look at the "long term investment" for their family and their class of people. This is how monarchs retained their power throughout the centuries. We really are just cattle to them, and what do you think will happen when we are no longer useful?
Similar to the upcoming US election results