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British Video Recordings Act 1984 Invalid
chrb writes "BBC News is reporting that the British Video Recordings Act 1984 is invalid due to a 25 year old legal blunder. The Thatcher government of the day failed to officially "notify" the European Commission about the law, and hence it no longer stands as a legal Act. There will now be a period of around three months before the Act can be passed again, during which time it will be entirely legal to sell any video content without age-rated certifications."
What are we going to do with it?
be the first to sell pr0n to little kids without any age-rating?
Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?
-- Note to Mods: There is a good reason there's no "-1 Disagree" option. --
So when society DOESN'T collapse into anarchy, are they going to realize this law was idiotic and unnecessary and not pass it again?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
When the British Video Recordings Act 2009 is passed, it will be more restrictive than the original 1984 verson. I mean, why would any good centre-right, middle-class courting, focus-group driven pack of fear-mongers pass up a perfectly good opportunity for a moral panic? Won't somebody PLEASE think of the CHILDREN!?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
"Existing convictions will stand"
In other words "existing convictions will collapse as soon as they are challenged in court, but let's lie about this and hope that everyone believes us".
FTA:
"Our legal advice is that those previously prosecuted will be unable to overturn their prosecution or receive financial recompense," she said.
So people who were previously prosecuted for breaking a non-law will be unable to overturn their prosecution.
Overturn their conviction perhaps.
If all of the judges in the land believe it is within their power to continue with the lie and refuse to hear appeals based on this, guess what happens?
Thats not how we do it in the UK mate. Here we make as many laws as possible, criminalizing as many people as we can. This so that when we decide we don't like them anymore there's a quick exit waiting. It also makes it easier for the police to root out the bad guys. When everybody has committed at least one crime, gives them leverage.
This was an embarressing oversight, normal service will be resumed shortly.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
I'm glad you've been marked "troll" because you're flat wrong.
Time-and-time again laws have been declared unconstitutional and the prisoners freed (see my previous post filled with quotes). Just watch Henry Fonda's excellent movie "Gideon" for an example which is about a real man who stood-up against tyranny, and won.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
What are you talking about? Britain doesn't even have a constitution.
No problemo. They can take ours. We're sure not using it.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I think Tom Lehre said it best in his song called Smut.
I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days I have here a march for mine. It's called...
Smut!
Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can't shut,
If it's uncut,
and unsubt- le.
I've never quibbled
If it was ribald,
I would devour where others merely nibbled.
As the judge remarked the day that he
acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
"To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance."
Por-
Nographic pictures I adore.
Indecent magazines galore,
I like them more
If they're hard core.
(Bring on the obscene movies, murals, postcards, neckties,
samplers, stained-glass windows, tattoos, anything!
More, more, I'm still not satisfied!)
Stories of tortures
Used by debauchers,
Lurid, licentious, and vile,
Make me smile.
Novels that pander
To my taste for candor
Give me a pleasure sublime.
(Let's face it, I love slime.)
All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth (I'm glad to say) is in
the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)
I thrill
To any book like Fanny Hill,
And I suppose I always will,
If it is swill
And really fil
thy.
Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley.
But now they're trying to take it all
away from us unless
We take a stand, and hand in hand
we fight for freedom of the press.
In other words,
Smut! (I love it)
Ah, the adventures of a slut.
Oh, I'm a market they can't glut,
I don't know what
Compares with smut.
Hip hip hooray!
Let's hear it for the Supreme Court!
Don't let them take it away!
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
What? Hysteria? In my Slashdot? Okay I think I'm going to actually get modded down for this, but seriously, while reactions on Slashdot are often hysteric (i.e. "OMG CCTVs/Internet filtering/copyright laws, futuristic dystopia here we come!"), Slashdot has a dominantly American audience (56.5% according to my stats, +9.1% if you count Canada in), and it's just American hysteria.
Just look at how people react to news in the USA, the healthcare reform is the latest and best example of American hysteria at work (but you have lots of examples since the 20th century). A fairly popular administration wants to fix a messed up healthcare system by adding options, and people go "OMG Nazi fascism they want to kill babies and grandmothers!!!". Sure, FOX News and what's left of the Republican party are helping, but the fact that what they do actually works should reveal something about the American society. Would it work in France, Germany or the Netherlands? Doubt it.
People often talk about how Americans as a whole, as a herd, are stupid. They're not directly stupid, they're just very susceptible to hysteria. I don't know where it's coming from but it's something deeply embedded in the American culture. It certainly had its fair share of participation in bringing about the prohibition, McCarthyism (what witchhunt isn't rooted in hysteria?), all sorts of reactions and attitudes during the Cold War, but more recently, the aftermath of the 9/11 (again a prime example of hysteria, and undoubtedly the main reason for the Iraqi invasion to go domestically mostly unchallenged at the time. Same thing for the boycott of France, that went something like "OMG France if you're not with us you're against us!!!"), and yes, even the global warming and creationism debate (which are practically inexistent in civilised nations that are not satellites of the USA). I cannot stress enough how big a part hysteria plays in America, this is not a new phenomenon at all, and if you're American you may not realise this but this is actually very characteristic, believe it or not but some other societies are more cool headed. Here's the good news though, you're not stupid, just hysteric, to the point of getting into stupid stuff, until a few years after the cause that triggered the hysteria is gone you realise it was stupid.
So yeah, Slashdot, its hysteric reactions and projections of doom and dystopia just reflects that.
You just got troll'd!
I thought that "independence" was a French word, but clearly it must have drifted quite a lot in meaning since king William. From New Labour to the Tories and the fucktards at UKIP, it seemed quite compatible with bending over backward to please GWB and begging for more. Now when Brussels asks you to follow simple rules you agreed to and 24 other countries have no problem adhering to, that's an outrage.
What a joke.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
What you said, specifically, was "so many violent criminals manage to dodge convictions here based on legal technicalities." That makes it sound like we have some plague of people who are actually guilty of violent crimes using legal trickery to avoid paying the penalties for their actions. While such cases do happen, the vast majority of the time when a "technicality" gets someone off, it's because it's not at all clear whether or not they actually committed the crime, and/or it is quite clear that the evidence against them is invalid. In short, it's the system working exactly the way it's supposed to.
Those "technicalities" are the only thing standing between us and a police state. Decades of cop show writers have used "off on a technicality" as a convenient plot device to explain why an obvious bad guy is still running around on the street -- which is why people think of them as "technicalities" instead of what they are, which is Constitutional protections of fundamental liberties. This is a serious threat to our freedom.
So that's why the outrage, pretty much.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.