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Policemen have started carrying guns – big, visible, frightening guns – quite widely. And I don’t remember us discussing that. Did I miss a meeting? The last conversation I remember was all about the pride we take in our unarmed British force. You know, the ones whose weapons (a truncheon, a whistle, who knows?) are tucked discreetly on to their belts, under their long jackets, beneath those slightly silly hats that make them taller than everyone else, because they are supposed to be reassuring figures, easily identifiable in a crowd, representing more of a help than a threat.
– Victoria Coren: He stepped out of the dark with a gun… | The Observer (via crowth)
Somehow, they have been reborn as a tooled-up army of Schwarzeneggers. And I don’t think we did discuss it. I think we gradually noticed it happen and we subconsciously thought: “Well, yes, terrorist threat, 9/11, 7/7, WMD, homegrown assassins in our midst, few more armed police about, hope I get to Tesco before the semi-skimmed milk runs out.”
But that’s not a reason. Even if you believe the country is riddled with terrorists waiting to explode, that shouldn’t spell official, widespread guns. When I was a kid, the newspapers fuelled our fear of IRA bombs. The impression was, you could hardly walk down Oxford Street without getting blown up. But I remember, I remember, how proudly people spoke about our unaffected lives. We shopped there anyway. We carried on as normal, assuming we wouldn’t get unlucky.
Not now. We accept, somehow, even though we must understand how vast are the statistics against our being at a bomb scene, that we will queue for three hours at the airport, won’t carry water, won’t carry toothpaste; we will fill in extra forms and hand out extra personal information whenever we hear the words “heightened security”; and we will see armed police on the street. Why? How will that help? Unless we put 20 armed police on every street, they’re never going to be in the right place at the right time – and if the right place at the right time is an underground train carriage where a man unexpectedly blows himself up, a gun wouldn’t stop him anyway. That’s just firing bullets into the stable door after the horse has detonated.
And he stood there, Tony Blair, he stood there, well, he sat there, and he made that little church-and-steeple out of his fingers and he said the Iraq war had “made the world a safer place”. Really? Really? If it’s so much safer, how come we need all these hired gunmen that we didn’t need before? -
Apple and Red Cross accepting Haiti donations via iTunes →
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Atheist Ireland Publishes 25 Blasphemous Quotes →
From today, 1 January 2010, the new Irish blasphemy law becomes operational, and we begin our campaign to have it repealed. Blasphemy is now a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine. The new law defines blasphemy as publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted.
This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic States led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.
We believe in the golden rule: that we have a right to be treated justly, and that we have a responsibility to treat other people justly. Blasphemy laws are unjust: they silence people in order to protect ideas. In a civilised society, people have a right to to express and to hear ideas about religion even if other people find those ideas to be outrageous.
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Gordon Brown accused of disrespect over misspelled name of dead soldier
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“The root of the matter is this: we have been ruled by men who live by the illusion that you can spend money you haven’t earned without eventually going bankrupt or falling into the hands of your creditors”
— Margaret Thatcher in her Conservative Party Conference Conference speech 1978.
The same sentiment works for Gordon Brown and the current Labour government though doesn’t it? From the handling of the economic crisis back to his raid on the pension schemes and the festering sore of private/public partnerships (which will blow up not in our faces but the faces of our children and grand-children) Brown’s “economic prudence” has been a total sham.
Labour has most probably handed the next election to the Conservatives and if they have, they have no one but themselves to blame. When they took power in 1997, they inherited many problems but also an economy that had been through a tough period but was now in relatively good shape.
Gordon Brown spent years talking about his prudent approach to the economy. But if you’d spoken to pension experts (as I did for a depressingly long time) you’d have seen that he was irresponsible and rash on many occasions during his time as Chancellor. His raid of the pension schemes has contributed to the misery of hundreds of working families and his approach to investment and the public purse was at times shockingly profligate.
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Extreme trigger warning.
But this Polanski thing, if you read the transcript of the little girl’s testimony on the Smoking Gun - I mean, go here and see the euphemism she uses on line 12, and then if anyone tries to convince you she was anything but a child, think of that phrase.
Goddamn, I’ve gone through only three pages of that transcript and it’s bloody disturbing.
