digital.goth.geek

Paraphrased for British readers.

I can’t believe that Charles Clarke is holding onto both his job, and the ridiculous NID scheme.

He can’t even keep track of a thousand people who are already in the system, yet he expects us to believe him when he says that he can (and will) keep track of 60 million British citizens, and that we have to pay for the priviledge?

Go and piss up a rope.

*Tut tut* You are a deceitful, double-dealing, duplicitous pile of crap, aren’t you?[1]

Let’s examine a little of your fourteen page tirade agains Simon Carr in The Independent yesterday, and let’s compare this with what we already know to be true (or false) and with some interesting information that’s come to light today, shall we?

You assert:

Those…who suggest that Labout is steadily turning British democracy into a dictatorial power are guilty of a particularly permicious untruth.

Have you seen some of the fundamental rights that you’ve recently criminalised/legislated against? Are you aware of the information that you want to hold on us, the British public, in your NID? Do you know about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill you’re trying to force through Parliament to give you, the Home Secretary, the power to make or change any law you like, as you see fit, without having to go through Parliament? Did you hear that it’s now illegal to protest within 1km of Parliament? Did you know that we can be held for up to 28 days (not the 90 you wanted) on just the suspicion of a crime?

And I particularly like this one: The National Identity Register may be used to record every sort of personal information — such as…applying for a fishing licence. Wholly untrue, I am glad to report.

No! Check your Bill. Section 4 of Schedule 1 (4)(l) states the number of any designated document which is held by him and is a document the number of which does not fall within any of the preceding sub-paragraphs; It clearly states that you can associate any document that isn’t explicitly mentioned in the Bill with the entry in the NID.

You’ve also made mention that one of the points of the ID card/NID is to prevent voting fraud. While this is, I contend, simply a ruse concerning postal votes to create yet more paranoia about not having the NID, so you yourself have already confirmed the voting [omitted] item in the aforementioned list. Therefore, it is not wholly untrue, is it?

The National Identity Scheme is being introduced to safeguard people’s identities…the information that can be hold on the register covers only basic personal information roughly the same…as a passport.

Lies. You also want to store current and previous places of residence, fingerprints, biometric data, NI number, driving licence, and a whole lot more. While this may be the same information as required for a passport, it is a passport of the future, not of the now as you imply. This should have been clarified and made obvious, but then clarity and honesty don’t seem to be part of the Home Office’s repertoire.

And let me conclude with Varr’s most ridiculous statement: The presumption of innocence is no longer a fixed legal principle. This is complete nonsense…

Yes. Is suppose it is. Unless we want to talk about your lovely ASBOs, whereby an order can be made, without a conviction, that can be turned into the equivalent of house arrest. Yes, let’s forget about those for a moment; they’re very inconvenient for your diatribe.

Finally you close with the sentence:

Ordinary people also have the right to be protected.

Well said. Until…

…you have the bollocks to stand up and bleat on and on about how we, the law-abiding majority of the UK populace, should thank you for standing up for our human rights, for protecting us from the bad elements of society, and then it comes out that you’ve knowingly released over 1,000 foreign nationals (many of them here illegally in the first place) from prison without deporting them back to their country of origin, in some cases contrary to court recommendations of exactly that! And you’ve known about this for what: six years I seem to recall you saying on the news this evening?

Well, thank you, Clarkey. You’ve probably, single-handedly, just boosted the BNP’s cause by about 10 additional points (when compared to the results of the recently taken YouGov/Sky News poll).

Yes, it’s all your fault. Step down. You’re not doing a good job.

[1] This is rhetorial.

While I’m at it:

Here’s another idea for you Clarkey: take your unwanted ID cards, fold them until they are all sharp corners, then shove them where the sun doesn’t shine. Seeing as we all want one it shouldn’t hurt too much, should it?

Have you resigned yet?

Oh, and this is hilarious (yet strangely true)! I don’t know why they missed you out. Maybe because they we’re expecting your predecessors early retirement from the post. I guess they won’t have forseen yours either.

It appears that it’s de rigeur to update one’s weblog’s appearance at the moment, I thought that I’d better do so.

Acutally, I’ve been meaning to do so for a good while now, and the new WordPress 2 installation seemed to be as good a time as any. I’ll also be incorporating a number of plugins and other jiggery-pokery too, so that I’m still ‘up’ on the game.

If you notice any weirdness in the layout, it’s probably due to that.

Marcel Molina Jr. made mention earlier about using the params accessor method of the controller, rather than the previous @params attribute. Makes sense to me.

However, he also mentioned that the @content_for_* controller attributes have been deprecated in favour of using yield.

To be fair, this can only improve performance (a bit) by removing a layer and relying on Ruby rather than Rails, but I feel that it’s also removing one of the lovely syntactic sugary bits of Rails that makes it so easy to pick up, by having DSL features.

I’m sure in time there won’t be any difference in the minds of Rails developers, but it would be nice to be able to look back at old code (<%= @content_for_layout %>) and immediately think Oh yes, I remember, that displays the layout and content rather than trying to mentally backtrace through Rails’ MVC framework (which will probably have become a lot more complex by then) and try to work out what yield is doing.

If you use a Mac, there are worse things that you could do than get yourself over to macZOT this weekend.

Rowan Pelling, in The Independent, whines that belief (has) become socially unacceptable and that it’s better than nothingness, proving once again that certain theists have absolutely no concept of either a) a logical argument, or b) what it means not to have a blind faith.

She expounds the virtues of beliving in pixies, yetis, werewolves, spontaneous combustion, alien abduction, the Tardis, David Icke, oh, and god, yet denounces a lack of faith as being concerned only with such matters as NHS, bird flu, global warming, golf, Ken Livingstone, Richard Dawkins and the knowledge that you are but an infinitesimally small speck of dust in the infinite expanse of time and space that is the universe, soon to be obliterated for ever.

Just because I don’t think that the world (or indeed the universe) is made up of elves, fairies, ogres, invisible pink unicorns, giant slver flying space toasters, lizard people or pasta-based meatball-eyed squid-like supreme beings doesn’t mean that all I (and non-theists in general) think about is the mundane, the depressing and the insignificant, which are then rendered pointless anyway by the ultimate end of the universe.

Is it really such a terrible thing to dream of angels, clouds and a tea party with your dead nan instead of all this dread nothingness?

This is classic fearmongering, commonly used to frighten children when they start asking awkward (i.e. completely warranted yet ultimately unanswerable) questions of theist parents, as well as making assumptions about what non-theists accept as their fate. If you want to frighen someone show them (or create) an enemy (in this case dread nothingness) and personify it. This then leads to the obvious conclusion that, if it’s an enemy, it must be evil. Oh! Evil. How that stirs the blood!

The universe will continue on it’s merry way without me, giving life and choice and pleasure and pain and experience (and, yes, ultimately death) to anyone and anything that happens to come along. What those that have existence do with their time, I can’t say, but I hope it would be well spent in taking a bit of time to enjoy themselves and not spending the entire of their span in supplication to some imaginary divinity.

And they wonder why mental illness is rapidly becoming the largest public health issue of our time in the Western world.

With this one statement you’ve just declared that you believe that sanity is the dominion of the religious alone (which can in no way ever be true - how sane is it to believe in any of the supernatural nonsense you list above without any evidence whatsoever) and then proceeded to insult those that have some sort of real mental instability (something that they have to live with every day) as being a product of not having belief. Your arrogance is coming along in leaps and bounds now.

We would think it mean to tell a small child that their imaginary friend doesn’t exist, and yet we think it’s perfectly reasonable to debunk God in front of happily credulous adults.

1. Children need to be educated, not indoctrinated.
2. Gullibility and naïvity are not good qualities for adults to have, especially when they’re leaders of countries. You know who I mean.

Skepticism in extremis is not healthy (nothing is) as it ultimately boils down to nihilism. But if I see a cabbage, I think the cabbage is there. If I see a closed box, I’m justified in saying that I doubt that there’s a cabbage inside until I can check for myself. If I’m told that there is a closed box with a cabbage in, somewhere in the universe, yet I can’t see it, feel it, touch it without just believing that it’s there because you say so, then I’m going to have no choice but to flat out refuse to believe that the cabbage inside the invisible box is nothing but a figment of your imagination. This all assumes that said cabbage in a box is also all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving and created the universe in 6 days. Oh, and it’s also it’s own offspring.

Atheism is not nihilism. Atheists don’t think that life is pointless. We think that life is for living (see the words are related). We just don’t do it by the rules of some mad old man in Rome, a 2000 year old book of increasingly decreasing verifiable veracity, or lights, music and/or voices in our heads. Nor just because some intellectually lazy misogynist in a frock tells me so.

You don’t need to worry about not being a child of the Enlightenment; I, for one, am glad you’re not.

When typing URLs directly into the address bar for the Liberal Democrats‘ web site, make sure you use http://www.libdems.org.uk/ (with the s) rather than http://www.libdem.org.uk/ (without the s).

You’ll see why.

The Home Secretary today made noises that compensation for miscarriages of justice should be capped at £500,000.

With recent changes to the law to allow the State to now hold people for 28 days without charge (thankfully it’s not the 90 days that the police wanted) (and it’s not the indefinite and illegal methods of the US) this is basically an option

The Government thinks that it can save about £5m a year in compensation claims. £5m?! £5m is nothing in terms of State expenditure in the UK. There’s just been an announcement that the Government is to spend an additional £800m on Iraq/Afghanistan (which, coincidentally, is the same as the current NHS deficit).

This is obviously not about the money (although the Daily Mail et al will probably frontpage it as such) it’s about control and responsibility. The Government wants to be able to hold one, uncharged, for as long as possible, and then limit it’s own liability when they’re forced to let one go (through lack of evidence, etc.) or when they’ve just got it plain wrong.

This is, in my opinion, just another example of Blair & co.’s attitude to the British public: they’re not here for us, we’re here to do what they say. I think it’s only a matter of time before there’s such a backlash against this government that it’ll make their heads spin.