Sim-O

From 21st Century Fix…

This, via Dave Winer, came my way this evening:

US subpoenas Twitter, seeking information on WikiLeaks’ 635,561 followers. http://r2.ly/6ixh

The article he links to can be found here:

A Dutch investigative journalist blasted the US Department of Justice for requesting information on everyone following WikiLeaks’ Twitter account and everyone they follow.

So this doesn’t only mean that I now potentially form part of a US government criminal investigation. It also means – if I’ve understood the slightly ambiguous phrase correctly – that if by any chance I decided to follow you on Twitter, you, as the recipient of the attentions of someone who also follows WikiLeaks, may just as easily find yourself the object of the attentions of some random US National Security official who – at some time in the future – will end up sticking his or her legalistic nose in your electronic communications, bank details, personal associations and cloud data.

But not because you yourself followed WikiLeaks. Simply because someone else who followed you also followed WikiLeaks.

Alex Gabriel at Political Promise has a sort-of-rant about the trains. I’m not sure how accurate the figures are Alex uses but they sound about right…

If Arriva run the train you need and you’d rather travel with Virgin, tough. Unlike buying most other things, we don’t get to choose the superior brand. The companies aren’t really competing, either, because we have to travel with whichever one has trains at the right time. They might as well have the monopoly that the Conservatives promised they’d take from British Rail, because there’s no real choice of service involved: we board the train irrespective of how good or bad it is, or else we can’t make our journey.

The same applies to public transport in general. Fields, lakes and mountains surround my hometown, and when last I checked it cost £10 for the twenty minute journey to the next town. Long distance bus companies which compete for better prices will take you from Manchester to London for half that, but local companies – like rail firms – can be as exploitative as they like because people who use them have no choice.

They’re not accountable, efficient or cheap, but don’t the train companies at least strengthen the economy with their profits? Well, no. Salford University published a paper which found that in 2002-3, taxpayers paid subsidies of £1.34bn to prop up the rail industry. That’s right – we’re actually paying them to rip us off, and they wouldn’t be profitable if we didn’t.

When British Rail existed, it received £1.07bn of the same subsidies, so ironically train travel is more tax-funded now than then. National Rail even gets £20bn a year from general taxation to keep it going. The Thatcherites said not to fund unprofitable industries with public money, but that’s exactly the situation we’re in – except with all privatisation’s downsides and none of its benefits.

Sometimes there is no market and trying to create one just doesn’t work.

As if you didn’t already know, but Northern and Shell, the publishers of Richard Desmonds media titles, has stopped paying its subscription to the Press Board of Finance (PressBof). As a result, they have been excluded from the self regulation system run by the PCC.

There’s enough comment about the blogosphere on it, but my post, written yesterday, is over at Expresswatch, if you’re interested.

Jack Straw is a fucking knobber, isn’t he?

Two blokes have been convicted of abusing girls. The girls are white and the men are from Pakistani origin so Jack Straw feels the need to shout about Pakistani men abusing ‘our’ girls…

Pakistanis, let’s be clear, are not the only people who commit sexual offences, and overwhelmingly the sex offenders’ wings of prisons are full of white sex offenders.

But there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men… who target vulnerable young white girls.

There is also a specific problem of psychos targeting prostitutes, husbands targeting wives, big kids targeting little kids, female school teachers targeting boy pupils. It’s just some people within one demographic going for people within another just because they are seen as weak or vulnerable.

We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way.

Look at that quote. It seems reasonable enough, but let’s do a classic word swap and see…

We need to get the White British community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of White British men thinking it is OK to target prostitutes in this way.

Sounds a bit stupid now, doesn’t it? Why should it be so, though? From the news I hear, the people that go on prostitute killing sprees are overwhelmingly white British. We don’t get anyone asking why or what are we, as a ‘community’, are gonna do about it?

Straw carries on…

These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically,

So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care… who they think are easy meat.

Because they’re vulnerable they ply them with gifts, they give them drugs, and then of course they’re trapped.

Let’s break that quote down.
Young men ‘fizzing and popping with testosterone’ need to find an outlet. Girls of their own background are off limits. Being married into a similar culture, the idea that the girls are pure and sweet and don’t like getting drunk and stoned and having sex is laughable. The sweet innocent girls are, just like in the ‘western society’ a veneer for parents and elders.

Let’s take it at face value that Pakistani girls are off limits to these young men, why don’t these guys just date other girls? What’s wrong with that? The elders don’t have to know. There’s the old ‘just with her for the fuck’ reason to tell his mates.

Jack Straws comments make this case sound like these guys were just going for white girls because they felt they couldn’t pick up girls of their own culture or background. If that was the case they would’ve been picking up and shagging girls of a more appropriate age, not girls as young as twelve. They would probably have picked on any other subset of vulnerable girls as well, but being a predominately white country, vulnerable white girls are the most abundant.

These guys, in whatever culture, whatever society, are nasty bastards. As the judge of the case and the chief exec of Barnardos say, the race of the victims and abusers are coincidental.

The only reason Jack Straw is getting his big wooden racial shit stirring spoon out is because it’s brown people doing stuff to ‘our’ girls.

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

The Deputy Prime Minister is going to scrap control orders… so we’re told…

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, today confirmed that the control order regime will be replaced by the coalition government, ending the “virtual house arrest” of terror suspects.

In a keynote London speech on civil liberties, Clegg said no final agreement had been reached by ministers on a replacement of the controversial control orders, which were introduced by the previous government.

Control orders are an abhorrent piece of legislation. They remove the right to a fair trial, they rely on a presumption of guilt, are a punishment for what someone might do rather than what one has done, they remove freedoms with no proof of any wrongdoing and are completely self-defeating.

They can be applied without a conviction because of what someone is saying or doing or who someone is associating with. To get a control order you don’t need to have done anything illegal, only to have done something that the state doesn’t like. I try not to invoke stuff like this, but it is truly Orwellian.

How one is supposed to go about getting a control order lifted I’ve no idea. How can you show that you’re voluntarily not going to do something unless given the chance not to do it?

If someone is suspected of plotting an illegal act, how does placing a control order help the situation? For a start, that person is given a heads up the the authorities are onto them. Secondly, the suspect may not carry out the act in the end. Wouldn’t it be better to let the suspect carry on and then when there is sufficient evidence to carry a prosecution, arrest them and then, well, prosecute them?

But Clegg isn’t going to get rid of control orders. He is only going to modify them…

While Clegg signalled that key elements would be reformed, he admitted that they would not be removed altogether because a “small number” of dangerous terror suspects could not be dealt with by the traditional justice system.

And these dangerous terror suspects were so dangerous that just going about their daily business was going to bring the country to it’s knees? These men may have their movements restricted and have a list of people they can’t talk to but if they are that dangerous, wouldn’t the counry be safer with them behind bars rather than out in public, albeit with certain restrictions?

How can someone not be dealt with by the traditional justice system? Why can anyone, no matter who, be labelled a criminal without actually having been found guilty of anything? Why not slap control orders on people to stop them talking to house burglars? After all one might get talking about various methods of house-breaking and it might give one ideas…

The only way to stop dangerous people is to put them on trial. How that is done, for example with intercept evidence, is another debate, but the fundamental right of a trial and innocent until proven guilty must be held onto. Like our life depends on it.

Modifying control orders is not enough. Nick Clegg needs to scrap them altogether.

Update: Robert Sharp at Liberal Conspiracy…

[control orders are] a rude and obvious short-circuit of the very basic legal principles. If a Minister ‘knows’ that someone is a danger, then they should be charged and convicted. If there is not enough evidence to convict, then neither politicians, the police nor the general public get to use the word ‘know’ in their rhetoric. There simply is not the epistemological certainty for that kind of claim, especially not in the context of political arguments. A control order is an extreme form of accusation, and Deputy Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries must not be allowed to make such ‘accusations’ and leave them hanging.

As the Home Secretary conducts her review of control orders in the coming months, look out for examples of this rhetoric, “we know, but we cannot convict.” It is a half-formed argument, a question not an answer. It is a cowardly fudge for those who do not want to make the tough decision: do we let these suspects go, or do we allow phone-tapping evidence to be admissable in court? This is the issue at stake, and the phenomenon of control orders is simply a clever device for punting the decision. If Nick Clegg is really serious about restoring civil liberties to British citizens, then he and his Prime Minister need to stop using bad rhetoric, and start making tough choices.

I’m sorry to have another rant. I don’t intend to be all miserable and negative here, but fuck it. It’s my blog and I’m getting really pissed off about this. I have to say something before I pull some one over and ram their faux leather driving gloves down their fucking neck.

I want one of these on the front of my car:

(image originally from here)

I am sick to fucking death of going down a slip road, seeing some doddery old cunt in front potter along at 45mph with traffic screaming past me at 70+mph. I am sick to fucking death of having that ‘we’re going to die’ feeling every time I try to join dual carriageway or motorway.

I say old bastards, but these people that seem too fucking scared to use the loud pedal don’t seem to be old any more. Or women (why do some women, and it is only women, drive with their nose pressed up against the windscreen?). There’s still the slow old gits about but it’s not the exclusive domain of the old to be doddery anymore. Dodderyness, when it comes to driving seems to have been democratised. It is now the domain of, it seems, just about fucking anyone.

Cars in general, and especially modern cars, have good brakes. They stop quicker than they accelerate. So why do these fuckwits seem to think that it is ok to fuck off down the slip road slower than a dead frog and expect to be able to pull into traffic that is doing at least 25mph quicker than themselves? Why the fuck doesn’t it occur to them that if they get their fucking arses up to speed they will be able to fit into a smaller gap? Or that it’d be easier to slow down to slip in behind a lorry than to speed up to get in front of Mr BMW travelling at the speed of fucking light.

I want a spatula on the front of my car to flip these cunts, just like a burger, out of my way. Flip them into the grass verge where they explode in dramatic fiery ball of death. The end reslut needs to be this severe so it serves as a warning to people who are slow as fuck as to what happens when you, not necessarily don’t go quickly enough, but fucking dither about and don’t get out my fucking way.