"This is why we need pre emptive methods of crime control like VERY TOUGH SENTENCING for DUI, castration for rape, and 1 month gauranteed murder conviction to death row"
Strictly speaking, wouldn't "pre-emptive" crime control mean:
sending people who looked like they might drive while intoxicated to prison for years;
castrating people who we arbitrarily decided might commit rapes at some point in the future;
executing people who we felt might commit murder in the future?
Actually, that last one would probably be a real time saver, since the trial would be much shorter than it is now ("Who do you think?". "That guy over there". "What, the one with the squinty eyes?". "Yeah". "OK, he'll do")
Okay, it clearly doesn't apply in this particular case. His general point is quite true, though. Most US-produced movies open later in the UK than in the USA.
Just looking at last week's top ten films in the UK, four opened one week later in the UK: Troy (#1)
Kill Bill II (#4)
Scooby-Doo II (#6)
Laws of Attraction (#7)
One opened on the same day in the UK and USA:
Van Helsing (#2)
The other three US-produced films opened 6 weeks (Eternal Sunshine..., #3), 7 weeks (Secret Window, #10) and 8 weeks (50 First Dates, #9) later in the UK than in the USA.
The other two films in the top ten were Bad Education (#5), a Spanish film which (according to Yahoo Movies) won't be released in the USA until November; and The Football Factory (#8), a British film with no US release date.
Part of this is to do with marketing strategy and the availability of stars to do plugging etc. Some of it might be to do with re-editing in the case of films that bomb in the USA. Some of it is because they re-use the prints in other English-speaking markets.
Err, I do know how the law works. I have - or had, I haven't really used it in the last couple of years - an excellent knowledge of one small set of Acts (HRA, RIPA, some related stuff including non-statutory codes of practice etc.). Although I'm not a lawyer and nor do I have any legal training, I do work for a law enforcement organisation (HMC&E) and I understand perfectly well the concept that existing laws can be amended, but I don't really have time to trawl through the HMSO site looking for amendments to a specific Act.
You made a statement of fact regarding a particular piece of legislation, but didn't provide a reference to the original. I skimmed the text of the original Act to check the truth of your assertion and couldn't find it, so I asked you to substantiate it, which you've now done. I'm grateful for that. There's really no reason to get narky about it.
The only times that I've posted to stories regarding the law have been in cases where I have actually known (as opposed to thinking that I've known) about the legal position. That means the stuff I've outlined above, such as here and some stuff about VAT on imported goods (usually in the context of e-commerce). I try and provide references when I can - usually to the actual Act, sometimes to HMC&E notices, which are an interpretation of the law rather than the law itself (as the disclaimer at the start of each one points out), but are easier for me to find links to quickly.
If you know that you're speaking authoratatively on a subject - and it appears that in this case, you are - I don't see why you wouldn't want to back that up with a reference of some kind. As you allude to yourself, if you believed everything that gets posted on Slashdot which purports to represent the law of the land, you'd be believing some weird stuff. Knowing what you're talking about can be your USP. Just a suggestion.
I can't see it anywhere, but I've not got time to look through the whole thing just now. If you're going to use a reference to an Act dating from 1988 (that's the date from which all UK Acts are online) or later as the basis of your argument, you really ought to provide some sort of link.
Without wishing to minimise the case against ID cards, I think that we should acknowledge that there is a significant body of support for them among the UK population. There hasn't been just one opinion poll on this: the constituency exists. Whether it's 80% of the population, or 90%, 60% or 20%, it is there.
As for the European Convention on Human Rights, the sad fact is that quite a lot of people probably would be willing to opt out of parts of it. I know a lot about the Human Rights Act and the bottom line is that ever since it was passed there has been an element within the media which has attacked it at every turn - and has been perfectly willing to twist the facts to do that, if necessary. As a result, the HRA and the various related international human rights agreements are seen by many people as some sort of complainers' charter. That's a shame, but it is the situation nonetheless.
The "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" argument is persuasive to many people. Unfortunately, like many "common sense" conclusions, it's based on a simplistic reading of the facts.
Obviously, your goal in posting this has more to do with self-justificatory bullshitting than with any kind of enlightenment, but since you've been modded "insightful" - presumably by people who wouldn't recognise insight if it dropped out of a clear blue sky and landed on their heads - I'd refer you to this posting here, which reproduces just some of the dictionary definitions of the word "piracy" in the context of copyright violation, together with citations dating back to 1688.
The English language - so much more to it than you imagined, eh?
I think you'll find that the 99p tickets are very thin on the ground, and are probably either promotions or else last-minute deals to shift the last few seats on the plane. That said, the budget airline industry in general, and Ryanair in particular, are amassing quite an impressive portfolio of court defeats in cases about illegal state aid:
Airlines also enjoy a very favourable tax regime: there's no excise duty on aviation fuel (and it's excise duty, rather than VAT, which gives us our famously high fuel prices in the UK), fuel for international flights is VAT free, tickets are VAT free etc. Another thing is that rail ticket prices are invariably quoted inclusive of tax, whereas airlines, and particularly budget airlines, always quote the tax-exclusive price (with a small print note about the tax). Air Passenger Duty is GBP 5.00 per passenger on flights within the UK, EU, Switzerland and EU applicant states and GBP 20.00 on other flights.
The contemporary railway press certainly mentioned the switch from clasp brakes (where the brake shoes bear directly on the tyre treads) to disc brakes as being a factor in the leaves on the line debacle. That said, I do recall hearing the change in policy on lineside vegetation control being a factor, too, so you may well be right.
Snow messing with electrical equipment is by no means confined to UK railways. In 1958 the Pennsylvania Railroad had it's passenger service between New York, Philadelphia and Washington wiped out in a similar incident.
As unsexy as the rail industry is these days (in the UK, at least), the people working in it aren't stupid and there are almost always sound engineering explanations for this sort of screw-up. The problem is that these incidents are presented to the public through news media which is (a) chronically ignorant about the technical issues; and (b) wouldn't let those issues get in the way of a good headline even if they did understand them. Next thing you know, they're interviewing passengers at Euston or Paddington about ticket pricing, or something, and there's some gurning dipshit saying: "well, it's leaves on the line, innit? Wrong type of snow! Pathetic really!" because those are the only rail factoids that he can call to mind.
"...really nasty. Like Margaret Thatcher, but digital."
In his last years - he died in 1996 - Timothy Leary (the "turn on, tune in, drop out" guy from the 1960s and, latterly, drug-addled Gen-X elder statesman) took to saying "if you want to immortalise, digitise". As I recall, this was vaguely connected to some sort of Neuromancer-style "preserving-my-essence-through-the-creation-of-a-d igital-facsimile-of-myself" effort, but I don't know enough about the guy to say for sure.
Bearing that in mind, I have to say that the idea of a digital Margaret Thatcher, immortal and bent on causing trouble (as any Thatcher clone undoubtedly would be) has just ruined my day completely.
I take your point, and your reading is consistent with the dictionary definitions, which generally (there's actually more than one, all very similar in tone) contain some reference to profit. My personal feeling, though, is that this sense of the word pirate can easily and logically be extended to include not-for-profit copying.
"Piracy" is a perfectly appropriate word to use for copyright infringement. Not because the RIAA has adopted it as their term of choice (although that choice may well have been influenced by the other connotations of the word), but because it has been in use in exactly this context for hundreds of years.
Yes, it does. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, Vol. 11 offers numerous definitions for the word "pirate", including this one (the OED online is a strictly subscription-only deal, so this is transcribed from the print edition):
4.fig.a One who appropriates or reproduces without leave, for his own benefit, a literary, artistic, or musical composition or an idea or invention of another, or, more generally, anything that he has no right to; esp. one who infringes on the copyright of another.
[1688 J. HANCOCK Brooks' String of Pearls (Notice at end) Some dishonest booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies]...
That's the earliest citation, although there are others, many of which pre-date the founding of the USA (which doesn't matter that much to me, not being an American, but might be considered significant in that the term was clearly in use and understood at the time the first copyright provisions were introduced in the US). My favourite is:
1709 STEELE & ADDISON Tatler No. 101 These Miscreants are a Set of Wretches we Authors call Pirates, who print any Book... as soon as it appears..., in a smaller Volume, and sell it (as all other Thieves do stolen Goods) at a cheaper rate.
So there you go. Maybe we'll be spared all those crappy "ah ha, me hearties!" posts from gimps who think that sarcasm represents a sound platform on which to build an ethical case, but I won't be holding my breath.
Define "equitable". Search engines results aren't fundemental truths, they're the output of complicated calculations devised and presented by private companies.
"Equitable", in that context, could only mean "processed by the same algorithm as every other web page in the index". Even then, the algorithm might include some provision boosting pages belonging to paying clients, or penalising pages with the letter "J" in the header, or some other randomly-determined condition.
In a rare moment of insight, the Slashdot editors have identified the key issue in the story summary, right where it says: from the full-disclosure-is-the-important-thing dept."
Not necessarily. Firstly, the greater frequency of spidering has a significant value in itself, at least to some people: shopping sites wanting to get a special offer indexed more quickly, that sort of thing.
Secondly, Google doesn't penalise sites solely for employing seo companies. The first paragraph of Google's page on seos makes that clear. Indeed, it would be impossible for them to do so.
I suppose that what would really matter here is
the exact nature of of the services which Yahoo was providing. This isn't stated in the article, beyond the observation that "although sites would be able to pay to be in the index, its computer system would still pick the most relevant site for each search, without regard to payment status". Everybody accepts that a search engine which compromises the validity of its results is storing up trouble for itself. That said, I don't see anything wrong with optimisation which, for instance, sharpens the focus of a site in such a way that it both helps to bring it to the fore when it's relevant and filters it out of search results when it isn't.
They aren't offering prime position in search results directly in exchange for money. What the article says is that:
"Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month"
which is just a more regular spidering;
"Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites "
which they would probably have to do anyway as part of the billing structure (which includes a click-through element); and
"(Yahoo) will help those sites improve their listings."
which sounds like a search engine optimisation service to me.
The third point seems the most interesting. After all, most SEO companies have to make assumptions about the algorithms employed by the various search engines. Yahoo's paid customers will know that they're dealing with people who know the algorithm and, perhaps even more significantly, know in advance when it's going to be changed and in what ways. I could see that being a big benefit, but it's slightly different to just buying an enhanced position in search results.
Prior to the introduction of the HRA, UK citizens could exercise their rights under the ECHR by appealing to the European Court. The practical effect of the HRA was simply that they could seek enforcement of those rights through the UK courts, which is both much faster and much cheaper. So the rights set out in the HRA weren't really anything new of and in themselves.
The UK signed up to the ECHR some time in the 1950s, as I recall (sorry, I can't remember the exact year - '52 perhaps?), so those rights have been legally protected since then.
Even prior to that, these rights were implied by Common Law. In fact the ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers and to a great extent reflects British notions of civil rights: very much the same traditions, of course, as the framers of the US constitution were brought up in.
Of course, whether either country has lived up to those principles, now or in the past, is another discussion. That said, we live in an imperfect world and there are plenty of worse places to be living.
Section 3 of the Act states that courts must, wherever possible, interpret existing legislation in a way that is compatible with the provisions of the ECHR.
Section 4 states that where a piece of existing legislation cannot be interpreted in a manner consistent with the ECHR, the court can make a "Declaration of Incompatibility". This doesn't have the effect of changing the law in question, but is supposed to act as a "flag" for the Government, calling on them to change the law. That isn't the same thing as saying that everything is legal: necrophilia, bestiality child abuse, etc. are illegal in the UK and the HRA doesn't change that.
IANAL, but I did act as a trainer on the HRA for a major Government department prior to its introduction, so I've sat through numerous lectures on how it works and how it relates to other UK law, as well as the European Court of Human Rights (which, as an aside, and before anyone else makes the same mistake that most people do when talking about it, is nothing to do with the European Union and therefore has nothing to do with "European Law", which is the general term for legislation passed by the European Parliament (which is an institution of the EU).
Not necessarily. In the UK there's a defence of "artistic merit", which means that a "serious" (for want of a better word) book or film can address subjects which might otherwise be regarded by the law as being beyond the pale.
I realise that this particular thread has gone further than you probably expected it to; but since you've elaborated upon it, maybe you could outline some of the "MANY reasons to hate" France / the French?
Sure, they've supported, traded with and armed a number of oppressive regimes over the years, but so too have the USA, the UK (where I come from, so I'm not just knocking the US), Russia/the USSR and other countries. The only things I can think of which the French have done and no-one else has (recently) would be underground nuclear tests and sinking the Greenpeace boat. Frankly, you don't come over as someone who would be all that fussed about Greenpeace, so is it the tests?
I don't see what you're getting at. By the time Churchill became Prime Minister, Germany had already conquered Poland, Denmark and Norway (and Czechoslovakia, albeit before the outbreak of the war). Within days of his taking the job, Belgium and Holland had been conquered; and within weeks, France. I think that it's safe to say that those countries would have been invaded whether Churchill had become PM or not.
I accept that Churchill could, in theory, have sued for peace at some point early in his period of office (presumably after the fall of France). Hitler certainly hoped that that would happen (hence his "last appeal to reason" speech in the Reichstag on 19 July). On the other hand, if there was any widespread political will in Britain to make peace:
Why was Chamberlain forced out? He could have extracted the country from the war just as readily as Churchill.
Why was Churchill the popular choice to replace him, rather than Halifax? Anyone arguing for Churchill must have known what they were going to get: his views on the conduct of the war weren't exactly a secret, whereas Halifax was far more likely to entertain the idea of reaching a settlement.
So I would suggest that Churchill was only reflecting - and very skilfully articulating - the national mood (not universally held, no doubt, but generally adhered to) in his refusal to countenance a peace. Furthermore, by the time he was in a position to wield any significant influence on the issue, the war was about a great deal more than the fate of Poland. The 1939 population of the countries occupied by the Germans by July 1940 was:
Poland 35 million (not all under German occupation, but all under totalitarian occupations)
Denmark 4 million
Norway 3 million
Holland 9 million (including Luxemburg in here: it rounds out the same)
Belgium 8 million
France 42 million (not all under German occupation)
(all figures taken from here: you need the pages suffixed with a "c")
I don't know how the Polish and French populations split between German/Soviet occupation and German occupation/Vichy government, but even if we assume that only half the population of each country was subject to German rule, that's still over sixty million people. Not to mention the strategic significance of a single power commanding the entire coast of Europe from the North Cape to the Bay of Biscay (and beyond, taking into account the fascist governments in Spain and Portugal). That in itself was something which Britain had fought more than once to prevent - in the Napoleonic Wars, for example.
I am absolutely not blind to Churchill's faults, but your initial posting seems to me to be an utterly bizarre interpretation of the causes of the war in Europe and Churchill's part in it.
Churchill wasn't Prime Minister in 1939, Neville Chamberlain was. Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, after the fall of Norway.
Chamberlain's late-30s policy of appeasement remains controversial. It has been interpreted variously as a policy born of moral cowardice or as one founded on a realistic assessment of Britain's military strength (for example, the RAF only began re-equipping with modern monoplane fighters - the Spitfire and Hurricane - in 1938).
Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister in May 1940, but remained a member of Churchill's war cabinet. He resigned on ill-health grounds in October 1940 and died the following month. Churchill's speech in the House of Commons on November 12, 1940, is a very generous assessment of Chamberlain's role in the build-up to war.
"Tony poodle Blair, ranking as the most arrogant 'leader' we've ever had, IMO"
I take it that you mean "more arrogant than John Major", then? Nobody who saw Margaret Thatcher in action could think that anyone could be more arrogant than her!
Although, in fairness, Blair has made a heroic effort to attain that demanding standard:)
On the other hand, how many other media organisations would carry such comprehensive coverage of their own screw-up? CNN? Fox?
Also, if you examine the UK news media you'll see that whatever Lord Hutton said, the overwhelming weight of public opinion is that his report is a whitewash. I personally go along with his conclusion that the BBC's handling of the Government's complaint was deficient (in fact they can barely be said to have "handled" it at all: just denied that anything could possibly be amiss) and that, for that, there was a strong case for heads to roll. Hutton's conclusion that the Government was right at every step and the BBC wrong fails the "does this seem very likely" test, though. Blair, Campbell, Hoon et al have reached the top of the greasy pole. As affable as Blair's image is; and as bland as Hoon's is, they've clambered to the very pinnacle of a bruising business. People look at what happened and say: "how probable is it that a group of people who have fought their way to such a position, faced with a situation like the one they were in, would ALL act in as blameless a fashion as Hutton describes?" Then they answer themselves: "not very probable at all".
Slashdot Mirror
- sending people who looked like they might drive while intoxicated to prison for years;
- castrating people who we arbitrarily decided might commit rapes at some point in the future;
- executing people who we felt might commit murder in the future?
Actually, that last one would probably be a real time saver, since the trial would be much shorter than it is now ("Who do you think?". "That guy over there". "What, the one with the squinty eyes?". "Yeah". "OK, he'll do")Just looking at last week's top ten films in the UK, four opened one week later in the UK:
Troy (#1)
Kill Bill II (#4)
Scooby-Doo II (#6)
Laws of Attraction (#7)
One opened on the same day in the UK and USA:
Van Helsing (#2)
The other three US-produced films opened 6 weeks (Eternal Sunshine..., #3), 7 weeks (Secret Window, #10) and 8 weeks (50 First Dates, #9) later in the UK than in the USA.
The other two films in the top ten were Bad Education (#5), a Spanish film which (according to Yahoo Movies) won't be released in the USA until November; and The Football Factory (#8), a British film with no US release date.
Part of this is to do with marketing strategy and the availability of stars to do plugging etc. Some of it might be to do with re-editing in the case of films that bomb in the USA. Some of it is because they re-use the prints in other English-speaking markets.
You made a statement of fact regarding a particular piece of legislation, but didn't provide a reference to the original. I skimmed the text of the original Act to check the truth of your assertion and couldn't find it, so I asked you to substantiate it, which you've now done. I'm grateful for that. There's really no reason to get narky about it.
The only times that I've posted to stories regarding the law have been in cases where I have actually known (as opposed to thinking that I've known) about the legal position. That means the stuff I've outlined above, such as here and some stuff about VAT on imported goods (usually in the context of e-commerce). I try and provide references when I can - usually to the actual Act, sometimes to HMC&E notices, which are an interpretation of the law rather than the law itself (as the disclaimer at the start of each one points out), but are easier for me to find links to quickly.
If you know that you're speaking authoratatively on a subject - and it appears that in this case, you are - I don't see why you wouldn't want to back that up with a reference of some kind. As you allude to yourself, if you believed everything that gets posted on Slashdot which purports to represent the law of the land, you'd be believing some weird stuff. Knowing what you're talking about can be your USP. Just a suggestion.
Be lucky
Stone Pony
I can't see it anywhere, but I've not got time to look through the whole thing just now. If you're going to use a reference to an Act dating from 1988 (that's the date from which all UK Acts are online) or later as the basis of your argument, you really ought to provide some sort of link.
As for the European Convention on Human Rights, the sad fact is that quite a lot of people probably would be willing to opt out of parts of it. I know a lot about the Human Rights Act and the bottom line is that ever since it was passed there has been an element within the media which has attacked it at every turn - and has been perfectly willing to twist the facts to do that, if necessary. As a result, the HRA and the various related international human rights agreements are seen by many people as some sort of complainers' charter. That's a shame, but it is the situation nonetheless.
The "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" argument is persuasive to many people. Unfortunately, like many "common sense" conclusions, it's based on a simplistic reading of the facts.
The English language - so much more to it than you imagined, eh?
Charleroi ("Brussels" - sort of)
Pau (South of France)
Strasbourg
Airlines also enjoy a very favourable tax regime: there's no excise duty on aviation fuel (and it's excise duty, rather than VAT, which gives us our famously high fuel prices in the UK), fuel for international flights is VAT free, tickets are VAT free etc. Another thing is that rail ticket prices are invariably quoted inclusive of tax, whereas airlines, and particularly budget airlines, always quote the tax-exclusive price (with a small print note about the tax). Air Passenger Duty is GBP 5.00 per passenger on flights within the UK, EU, Switzerland and EU applicant states and GBP 20.00 on other flights.
Snow messing with electrical equipment is by no means confined to UK railways. In 1958 the Pennsylvania Railroad had it's passenger service between New York, Philadelphia and Washington wiped out in a similar incident.
As unsexy as the rail industry is these days (in the UK, at least), the people working in it aren't stupid and there are almost always sound engineering explanations for this sort of screw-up. The problem is that these incidents are presented to the public through news media which is (a) chronically ignorant about the technical issues; and (b) wouldn't let those issues get in the way of a good headline even if they did understand them. Next thing you know, they're interviewing passengers at Euston or Paddington about ticket pricing, or something, and there's some gurning dipshit saying: "well, it's leaves on the line, innit? Wrong type of snow! Pathetic really!" because those are the only rail factoids that he can call to mind.
This is, quite simply, evil beyond my capacity to cope with it.
In his last years - he died in 1996 - Timothy Leary (the "turn on, tune in, drop out" guy from the 1960s and, latterly, drug-addled Gen-X elder statesman) took to saying "if you want to immortalise, digitise". As I recall, this was vaguely connected to some sort of Neuromancer-style "preserving-my-essence-through-the-creation-of-a-d igital-facsimile-of-myself" effort, but I don't know enough about the guy to say for sure.
Bearing that in mind, I have to say that the idea of a digital Margaret Thatcher, immortal and bent on causing trouble (as any Thatcher clone undoubtedly would be) has just ruined my day completely.
I take your point, and your reading is consistent with the dictionary definitions, which generally (there's actually more than one, all very similar in tone) contain some reference to profit. My personal feeling, though, is that this sense of the word pirate can easily and logically be extended to include not-for-profit copying.
"Piracy" is a perfectly appropriate word to use for copyright infringement. Not because the RIAA has adopted it as their term of choice (although that choice may well have been influenced by the other connotations of the word), but because it has been in use in exactly this context for hundreds of years.
"Equitable", in that context, could only mean "processed by the same algorithm as every other web page in the index". Even then, the algorithm might include some provision boosting pages belonging to paying clients, or penalising pages with the letter "J" in the header, or some other randomly-determined condition.
In a rare moment of insight, the Slashdot editors have identified the key issue in the story summary, right where it says: from the full-disclosure-is-the-important-thing dept."
Secondly, Google doesn't penalise sites solely for employing seo companies. The first paragraph of Google's page on seos makes that clear. Indeed, it would be impossible for them to do so.
I suppose that what would really matter here is the exact nature of of the services which Yahoo was providing. This isn't stated in the article, beyond the observation that "although sites would be able to pay to be in the index, its computer system would still pick the most relevant site for each search, without regard to payment status". Everybody accepts that a search engine which compromises the validity of its results is storing up trouble for itself. That said, I don't see anything wrong with optimisation which, for instance, sharpens the focus of a site in such a way that it both helps to bring it to the fore when it's relevant and filters it out of search results when it isn't.
"Yahoo will update its index of paying clients every two days, while it may update its listing of other sites once a month"
which is just a more regular spidering;
"Yahoo will give paying clients detailed reports on when its users click on their sites "
which they would probably have to do anyway as part of the billing structure (which includes a click-through element); and
"(Yahoo) will help those sites improve their listings."
which sounds like a search engine optimisation service to me.
The third point seems the most interesting. After all, most SEO companies have to make assumptions about the algorithms employed by the various search engines. Yahoo's paid customers will know that they're dealing with people who know the algorithm and, perhaps even more significantly, know in advance when it's going to be changed and in what ways. I could see that being a big benefit, but it's slightly different to just buying an enhanced position in search results.
The UK signed up to the ECHR some time in the 1950s, as I recall (sorry, I can't remember the exact year - '52 perhaps?), so those rights have been legally protected since then.
Even prior to that, these rights were implied by Common Law. In fact the ECHR was largely drafted by British lawyers and to a great extent reflects British notions of civil rights: very much the same traditions, of course, as the framers of the US constitution were brought up in.
Of course, whether either country has lived up to those principles, now or in the past, is another discussion. That said, we live in an imperfect world and there are plenty of worse places to be living.
The ECHR is enacted in English law through the Human Rights Act 1998.
Section 3 of the Act states that courts must, wherever possible, interpret existing legislation in a way that is compatible with the provisions of the ECHR.
Section 4 states that where a piece of existing legislation cannot be interpreted in a manner consistent with the ECHR, the court can make a "Declaration of Incompatibility". This doesn't have the effect of changing the law in question, but is supposed to act as a "flag" for the Government, calling on them to change the law. That isn't the same thing as saying that everything is legal: necrophilia, bestiality child abuse, etc. are illegal in the UK and the HRA doesn't change that.
IANAL, but I did act as a trainer on the HRA for a major Government department prior to its introduction, so I've sat through numerous lectures on how it works and how it relates to other UK law, as well as the European Court of Human Rights (which, as an aside, and before anyone else makes the same mistake that most people do when talking about it, is nothing to do with the European Union and therefore has nothing to do with "European Law", which is the general term for legislation passed by the European Parliament (which is an institution of the EU).
Not necessarily. In the UK there's a defence of "artistic merit", which means that a "serious" (for want of a better word) book or film can address subjects which might otherwise be regarded by the law as being beyond the pale.
You have a good day too :)
Sure, they've supported, traded with and armed a number of oppressive regimes over the years, but so too have the USA, the UK (where I come from, so I'm not just knocking the US), Russia/the USSR and other countries. The only things I can think of which the French have done and no-one else has (recently) would be underground nuclear tests and sinking the Greenpeace boat. Frankly, you don't come over as someone who would be all that fussed about Greenpeace, so is it the tests?
I accept that Churchill could, in theory, have sued for peace at some point early in his period of office (presumably after the fall of France). Hitler certainly hoped that that would happen (hence his "last appeal to reason" speech in the Reichstag on 19 July). On the other hand, if there was any widespread political will in Britain to make peace:
- Why was Chamberlain forced out? He could have extracted the country from the war just as readily as Churchill.
- Why was Churchill the popular choice to replace him, rather than Halifax? Anyone arguing for Churchill must have known what they were going to get: his views on the conduct of the war weren't exactly a secret, whereas Halifax was far more likely to entertain the idea of reaching a settlement.
So I would suggest that Churchill was only reflecting - and very skilfully articulating - the national mood (not universally held, no doubt, but generally adhered to) in his refusal to countenance a peace. Furthermore, by the time he was in a position to wield any significant influence on the issue, the war was about a great deal more than the fate of Poland. The 1939 population of the countries occupied by the Germans by July 1940 was:- Poland 35 million (not all under German occupation, but all under totalitarian occupations)
- Denmark 4 million
- Norway 3 million
- Holland 9 million (including Luxemburg in here: it rounds out the same)
- Belgium 8 million
- France 42 million (not all under German occupation)
(all figures taken from here: you need the pages suffixed with a "c")I don't know how the Polish and French populations split between German/Soviet occupation and German occupation/Vichy government, but even if we assume that only half the population of each country was subject to German rule, that's still over sixty million people. Not to mention the strategic significance of a single power commanding the entire coast of Europe from the North Cape to the Bay of Biscay (and beyond, taking into account the fascist governments in Spain and Portugal). That in itself was something which Britain had fought more than once to prevent - in the Napoleonic Wars, for example.
I am absolutely not blind to Churchill's faults, but your initial posting seems to me to be an utterly bizarre interpretation of the causes of the war in Europe and Churchill's part in it.
Chamberlain's late-30s policy of appeasement remains controversial. It has been interpreted variously as a policy born of moral cowardice or as one founded on a realistic assessment of Britain's military strength (for example, the RAF only began re-equipping with modern monoplane fighters - the Spitfire and Hurricane - in 1938).
Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister in May 1940, but remained a member of Churchill's war cabinet. He resigned on ill-health grounds in October 1940 and died the following month. Churchill's speech in the House of Commons on November 12, 1940, is a very generous assessment of Chamberlain's role in the build-up to war.
I take it that you mean "more arrogant than John Major", then? Nobody who saw Margaret Thatcher in action could think that anyone could be more arrogant than her!
Although, in fairness, Blair has made a heroic effort to attain that demanding standard :)
Also, if you examine the UK news media you'll see that whatever Lord Hutton said, the overwhelming weight of public opinion is that his report is a whitewash. I personally go along with his conclusion that the BBC's handling of the Government's complaint was deficient (in fact they can barely be said to have "handled" it at all: just denied that anything could possibly be amiss) and that, for that, there was a strong case for heads to roll. Hutton's conclusion that the Government was right at every step and the BBC wrong fails the "does this seem very likely" test, though. Blair, Campbell, Hoon et al have reached the top of the greasy pole. As affable as Blair's image is; and as bland as Hoon's is, they've clambered to the very pinnacle of a bruising business. People look at what happened and say: "how probable is it that a group of people who have fought their way to such a position, faced with a situation like the one they were in, would ALL act in as blameless a fashion as Hutton describes?" Then they answer themselves: "not very probable at all".