If you google the name of my favourite band - Borderville - my LJ is currently the third hit. EDIT: Apparently, not everyone can see this. The Borderville Joy Through Work hits are real, but I'm the only person getting these results - google obviously thinks my ego needs stroking. This personalised searching thing is kinda creepy..I'm hoping the rain stays heavy, this weekend, so that I can stay in and read Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, by the delightfully engaging Rob Shearman who gave the Doctor Who Society such a good time last night. Even if I do end up staying in all weekend, I am still going to a cottage in the country, and so do need to go and pack rather than sit here listening to glam rock..
They've finally invented a top for superglue that doesn't cause the tube to weld iteself shut 30 mins after it's opened. this makes me happy.
The Home Office has just announced its revised plans to keep the DNA profiles of innocent people on the National DNA Database, despite an EU ruling that this constitutes a breach of human rights. The new policy, under which DNA samples can be taken from any individual stopped by police for an arrestable offence, permits retention of these samples for six years regardless of whether the individual was convicted or released without charge.
This directly contravenes the decision made by the European Court of Human Rights in the S and Marper case last December, in which all 17 judges unanimously ruled that the UK policy of indefinitely retaining DNA samples from people who had not committed a crime was illegal under EU law.
The Association of Chief Police Officers claimed that this ruling would seriously limit their use of DNA technology. They therefore advised chief constables to ignore the EU decision, and since the Strasbourg ruling, while the Home Office drafts new legislation in response to the EU's decision, police have added DNA profiles of over 90 000 people who have never been convicted of an offense to the database. Various proposals have been submitted, condemned by human rights organisations, rewritten, resubmitted - and no response to the EU ruling is yet to pass through Parliament. The current set of plans, if passed, are likely to be in contempt of the EU court, and will no doubt provoke another long-winded round of litigation. The Home Office is clearly making every attempt to avoid the strongly-worded recommendations of the ECHR, and while the UK legislators drag their feet, every day more innocent people are added to a criminal database.
( So what's the problem? )
It occurs to me that, when mental health activists talk about mental health difficulty, it's not so different from when women (and feminists in particular) talk about PMS, in terms of how we want to be treated. I've just got to the stage of recognising the symptoms of PMS in myself - I get wobbly, anxious and irritable, and I feel generally under the weather. PMS is something that happens to a lot of women - with varying degrees of severity. For the lucky majority of us it's a niggly inconvenience, and for some people it can be very severe and very painful. I know a few people who suffer dreadfully every month. What women who have PMS need is to be taken seriously - not to have our difficulties ignored, but DEFINITELY not to be told that we're incompetent, that we can't work or reason or think properly because of PMS symptoms. Like people with mental health difficulties, women do not want to be patronised with 'is it your time of the month'? jibes. Like mental health difficulty, PMS is not a sign of weakness - it's an extra hurdle that a lot of people have to struggle with to stay functional. The right way to react to minor-to-moderately severe mental health difficulty is not dissimilar to the way in which women who know discuss PMS, at work or between friends. 'I'm having a nasty PMT day' - 'Oh dear! Poor love. Lots of rest, chocolate and DVDs for you. Take it easy, hope you feel better soon'. No judgement; no patronising slurs on the person's higher reasoning. The analogy doesn't hold entirely, particularly because most people who get PMS are lucky enough not to have it disrupt their lives to the extent that they're unable to work. But it's an interesting way of thinking about it.
Last night, I signed up for Yuletide. I was sleepy as anything and completely overwhelmed by the list of fandoms but knew I'd only regret it if I wasn't involved. Santa, if you're reading this: please feel free to ignore the details that I listed. Some of them are a bit demanding and really I was just thinking out loud. Please bear in mind that I like everything. G to NC-17. Fluff to angst. Serious to silly. At the moment I seem to have a disproportionate amount of love for crossovers, but equally I love the canon-faithful. I've gone a bit random with my fandom choice this year, choosing "RPF: Oscar Wilde and Circle" (ooh, Santa, I'd be very happy for that to cross over with any Victorian or time-traveling fiction-fandom - sorry, thinking out loud again), "David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars" (how does album fandom even work? Actually, I should know this more than anyone, given that my number one fandom at the moment is a band. But I'm just so excited by the possibilities of this one!), and finally "Withnail & I" for a bit of I-love. And not just so that I can spend a few thousand words thinking about Paul McGann, either. I may have mentioned something about A Rebours in the 'details' sent to my Santa. I'm sorry.
I've been thinking about online democracy a lot since my post the other day. Some of it's pretty exciting.
Mostly I'm just overwhelmed at how big the conversation is. I'm seeing new stuff everywhere I look. I think these next few months, the closing months of the failed New Labour project when no-one really wants Cameron to be Prime Minister, are going to be key for the conversation about democratic reform. I don't think there's time for anything to happen now but the energy is now, before the change happens, when everyone's excited by the possibilities. After the Tories get in I expect the fire will go out of the talk for a bit, but then we have the next four years to actually make something happen.
Anyway, so I've talked about Open Up, and linked a couple of the huge number of blog posts in the wake of the success of the Trafigura/Jan Moir temporary collectives. Seriously, these articles are everywhere. Here's another one. This isn't new, of course: people have been talking about reforming democracy online since Usenet, and I still think of MySociety as the pioneers in using online technologies to improve the quality of our democracy.
But recently ... I dunno, maybe I've just been getting more involved, but it feels like in the last twelve months it's really been gaining momentum. Our Kingdom has an ongoing conversation about democratic reform, and Guy Aitchison, the dude who runs it, is also heavily involved with the Power 2010 campaign.
Then there's 38 Degrees, and Louder, The Downing Street Project ... and that's just in the UK: worldwide it seems that new social innovation campaigns like The Girl Effect and the World Appreciative Enquiry Conference are springing up all over the place. Then there's thinktanks like IPPR which seem to overlap a surprising amount with the grassroots movements. It's inspiring and hopeful - so many people agreeing things need to change, and pouring so much ideas and energy and time into working towards that! - but also chaotic and dizzying. There's just so much of it! To what extent are all these different groups even aware of each other? Are they duplicating each other's work, are they all trying to reinvent the wheel? If none of this has any effect on the current system, is it so much shouting to the void? Are the messages reaching the people who need to hear them, or is it just a big echo chamber? With so many diverse groups, all with their own agenda, won't they just drown each other out? Do we need to get together and find points of commonality? Is that even possible?
Probably not, but today I've been thinking not about campaigns but about the tools they use. Yesterday I was utterly thrilled to read The Future of Politics is Mutual, which is by an awesome person I hadn't heard of before, called Hannah Nicklin. It's on the differences between the traditional press and online media, narrative vs information and the information economy, and the concept of wikipolitics.
( What is Wikipolitics? ) You should read the thread, because there's some really good stuff in there. I've been spamming the thread with comments and thinking lots. Like,
( some thoughts ) I don't think we've come close to hitting on the answer on it yet. I don't think a wikipolitics project as described would be likely to have wings: it would probably just turn into a community of hypergeeks bickering over details. I think Wave has the potential to be useful in the longterm but it's not ready yet, and neither is society.
There are a couple of "unconferences" on this stuff happening this week: Open 09 and £1.40. I can't get to either, but I'll be interested in hearing if the discussions went anywhere useful.
I don't know how to harness the energy of this conversation into action. I don't know how to get the disparate online groups to work together. But I think there's something in this, I really do.
I think the only way to fix our current broken democracy is to decentralise it to some extent. I think the internet not only offers strong models for governance in the form of open source ethics and the open source community, but also a unique opportunity for discourse, collaboration and development.
Anyway. This is me brainstorming. Feel free to join in.
This is a special plea for people who make icons: I would really, really like an animated pic of Boris Johnson saying 'I'd like to be king of all Londinium and wear a shiny hat'. Also if anyone can point me to more good feminist/political icon sites, that'd be awesome :)
8pm, Three Goats' Heads. (I would filter this to Oxford-only, but then it won't export to my Facebook..)
Police State UK have just run a special series of articles on public order policing, surrounding the inaugural public meeting of the new MPA Civil Liberties Panel last Thursday.
Holding the Met to account - by me on Wed 4 Nov 2009 at 23:40
The key issue in the wake of the G20 is accountability. Of the 276 complaints made to the IPCC, very few cases have been investigated or upheld. The IPCC has instructed the MPS to discount any complaints where the officer in question cannot be identified. This is enormously problematic: in what appeared to be a deliberate and calculated effort, hundreds of officers removed their identifying numerals during the policing of G20. This alone constitutes grounds for complaint - Paul Stephenson has called it "completely unacceptable" for police on duty not to wear their numerals - but it also allows the IPCC to dismiss any allegations of excessive force made against officers who removed their ID. Any police inclined to use disproportionate force in a public order situation is thereby given a "get out of jail free" card. Read more »
A mandate for change? - by me on Thu 5 Nov 2009 at 18:17
"Today is all about listening to you - we're not here to speak for the Met, nor to defend them," said Victoria Borwick, chair of the MPA's newly convened Civil Liberties Panel, opening this morning's public meeting. The scope of the meeting - an evidence gathering session on public order policing, and more specifically the G20 demonstrations in April - had been unclear to some. Many people had brought questions demanding immediate answers, but instead their concerns have been 'noted', with no clear idea if answers will be forthcoming. Read more »
Whatever happened to peaceful protest? - by Anna Bragga on Fri 6 Nov 2009 at 14:04
After yesterday's inaugural public meeting of the panel, I am left with an all pervading sense of gloom that no matter how well presented our arguments, no matter how much documented evidence we produce (from citizen journalists to accredited professionals), and no matter how many lawyers and experts we bring in, little will change. Read more »
Deterring Peaceful Protest - by denny on Sun 8 Nov 2009 at 20:33
There's been some good news lately as far as the policing of protest is concerned... the well-established public-order policing policy of 'hit them until they stop, then hit them a bit more' seems to be going out of favour. This is certainly a good thing. Nobody likes being hit over the head, and any reduction in such violence is to be celebrated. However, one of the important concerns such violence raised was that people would be (and have been) put off attending protests due to the possibility of police violence - and while this one issue is now being addressed, there are still plenty of other factors being used to deter protestors from showing up to any given protest. Read more »
Damned if they do, damned if they don't - by me on Mon 9 Nov 2009 at 19:16
Anonymity is increasingly difficult to maintain in the UK. We are tracked and recorded everywhere we go, and the police have access to national databases. The basic precautions necessary to try and slip through the net of police information-gathering require a level of personal inconvenience which many would find off-putting. And yet the alternative is being entered into the FIT/NECTU/etc system of harassment; I can see how facing a choice between the two would put people off attending demos at all. Read more »
---
We've also updated the site design a bit to add our Twitter feed and hopefully make the articles a bit easier to read. We're still working on the changes - we eventually want fluid width articles, I'm nagging Denny for the option of longer lead text on the homepage, and I want to improve the usability of the sidebar links. But we're at the "it'll do" stage with a lot of this due to having no time at all.
Please do create a free account on the site so you can post comments and submit articles. We welcome all contributions from anyone interested in civil liberties in the UK.
Dear anyone who was at khalinche 's party tonight: somebody walked off with my coat. It is a big, black, size 18 woolen coat and it has my bank card and oyster card in the pocket. It is very much loved, I'm upset to have lost it, and I'd like it back as soon as possible.
This morning, I collided with a car at the corner of James and Hurst streets. On the one hand, I've written off my bike, will need to pay £200 in insurance excess, and have to go to the police station to "report my injuries". (Just finger injuries - tends to happen when you punch off someone's wing mirror - my head and body are fine.) On the other hand, being unable to cycle into town means that I can wear stupid clothes and drink a lot at the Borderville gig tonight! They've linked my review of their album from their facebook event. I'm sure this must officially make me a BNF! It's all about priorities.
I should probably come right out and admit that I love dystopias, and I love musical narratives. (An adolesence spent reading Orwell and Atwood and watching Rocky Horror and Hedwig will do that to a girl.) It will probably come as a surprise to no-one at all, then, when I say that I love dystopian concept albums. David Bowie's Diamond Dogs and Gary Numan's Replicas hold places in my heart from which they may never be ousted. Regular readers may also know that I am, at times, prone to hyperbole (ironically, this sentence is in fact understatement). So I really had to look closely at my thought processes when I wanted to log on here today and tell you all that Borderville's Joy Through Work is the best dystopian concept album that I have ever heard. On reflection, I want to modify that statement; Borderville's Joy Through Work is the only dystopian concept album which feels immediate to me. Replicas and Diamond Dogs are quite clearly set in some future: cyberpunk and post-apocalypse, respectively. But Joy Through Work is a dystopian concept album where the dystopia is the capitalist megamachine that I feel crunching us all into its cogs more and more each day. It's real, and it's now, and it's everything that distresses and depresses me about the world I see; yet it offers hope. I cannot stress enough how much what follows is half review, half creative response to this hope. Of course, I want to excite you all to purchase their album (either today from their website with a beautiful gatefold sleeve, or when it receives its multi-platform digital launch on 5 December), but this is more than that; I want to spread the beauty that they have built out of degradation, and the hope that they have built out of despair. ( Review )
Merlin: the anti-Shrek since 2008. I know that you all told me, that just because a show teases me with the possibility of slashiness it will never deliver, that does not mean it is actually a good show. I'm going to keep watching it, because apparently I am a tremendous masochist, but really; does your Big Bad absolutely have to be a fat wrinkled dark-skinned woman who speaks with a "lower class" accent and dares to have desires and bodily functions? I'm particularly taken with the fatsuit (hoho she gets stuck in chairs! her breasts don't defy gravity!) and the extended comedy scene about how ridiculous it is that Uther would be attracted to her. Urk. I should never have started this, should I...
Couple of good articles on the sacking of David Nutt, which I find abhorrent for all the obvious reasons, plus those articulated by JQP in his two "Expertease" articles written at the start of this year.
This isn't the first time this issue has been on our radar. Drugs legislation is one of the easiest targets. Then there was the debate about Green Party science policy earlier this year. Now this, which some commentators have compared to the way policy on ID cards continues to ignore expert advice. Detecting a bit of a theme?
[Democracy] relies on one very important variable, which British society has utterly failed to deliver: accurate information.
In theory, democracy works for the benefit of mankind because the government responds to public demands. This requires two things to be fulfilled. The public have to be rational, which sometimes pertains, and it has to have access to reliable information, or else its demands rest on false assumptions. But the media, its main source of information, does not deliver. It provides truth, yes, but it also spews out myths and nonsense to substantiate its editorial agenda.
(Drugs policy and the death of reason, politics.co.uk, Monday, 02, Nov 2009 12:00) Ah, everyone's favourite rant about democracy and the media! Excellent: I always enjoy having someone else do this one for me. It even includes references to Plato, if not to the process of Athenian democracy itself.
You all know this already, but just in case: Athenian democracy worked because it was tiny. Something in the region of 60,000 adult male citizens had the right to vote at any one point in the mid-5th century BC - a figure that dropped during wartime. Start with a small city-state and then exclude women, children and adolscents, immigrants, slaves, criminals and anyone who hasn't completed military training. The result is a direct democracy, where those involved are small enough to sit in a single assembly, watch political speakers and satirical theatre as a single audience, and participate in the same big debate. More oligarchy than democracy by modern standards. (Is more complicated than this, but you get the idea. Feel free to comment if you think I'm misrepresenting.)
Modern democracies which aim at representing the demands of the whole population - including, even more recently, women - can't be directly representational (until we develop secure tech for remote voting) and they can't be directly informed. Our representation is a mess, and so is our information. I mean the internet is great and all, but so far it mostly seems to be resulting in more people sharing opinion than data. (Peer-reviewed science has massive class and accessibility issues - is wikipedia the closest thing we have to democratic information?)
Anyway, so I'm sure you all know my feelings on policy and the meeja. What I found kind of interesting reading the post-Nutt-sacking commentary (har) is the fact that no-one's thought to relate this issue to climate science. Which seems a bit odd. Look at this paragraph from that Nutt vs ID cards article:
That's not to say politicians should blindly and slavishly heed scientific advice without any other considerations. Of course not. The whole nature of politics is about balancing various constituencies of interest. But politicians should be able to explain the reason for their decisions when they choose to ignore independent expert advice and press ahead with proposals that potentially put the UK population at greater risk. O RLY?
Governments have been ignoring expert advice on climate change for, gosh, several decades now. I'm outraged about that, but I'm not surprised. It's not even really news, apart from in the "shit continues to hit fan" sense - but that's not unusual either.
If the outrage over the Home Office not only disregarding the recommendations of its chosen experts, but actually punishing those experts for telling the truth, leads to it happening less, well, great: perhaps they'll start listening to expert advice on environmental policy. Drugs legislation is a relatively quiet issue - you don't get many people willing to protest about it, and most public figures avoid speaking out on it unless they're happy to be branded a filthy munter.
Climate change should be a considerably less risky thing to talk about: surely most people believe that saving the human race from extinction is a generally good thing, even if they're not willing to act personally to help the cause. I mean, to oversimplify dramatically, this is one of the reasons we have laws, right? To encourage people to do the right thing even if they might not always want to?
Not only does policy fly in the face of scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, those who complain loudly about this are treated far worse by the state than those outraged at scandal of David Nutt's illegitimate sacking. Climate change doesn't seem to make it into any of the commentary on governments ignoring their experts. Is the issue becoming so marginalised that no-one's willing to include it in their analysis? Perhaps they're all just trying to avoid being labelled domestic extremists. In which case, the re-branding of climate activists as a marginal, undesirable group by the police is clearly starting to take effect. |
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
sugar_and_space's Friends Page
