My wife bought a Guiness calendar because she likes the artwork. On the back of the calendar is the web address drinkaware.co.uk and below that the text:
This product is intended for purchase and enjoyment to people of legal purchase age for alcohol beverages. Always drink responsibly.
My goodness.
I just caught part of a TV show called UK Border Force. Immigration officials arrest a man they think suspicious. A bystander gets indignant and starts yelling “this man is not a criminal”. The bystander is detained and rants and raves a bit, saying entirely understandable things like “people are trying to make a life better for themselves” and “I’m not a criminal, I’m only talking about rights”.
He ends up getting arrested for “obstruction” for his trouble.
An immigration official later talks about how the other onlookers reacted. Some of them applauded the immigration officials, others apparently “thought that it was morally wrong.”
She concludes, “but we’re here to do a job, so we do what we’re told.”
You can’t reason with authority.
Update: It gets better. Later in the same episode, immigration officials raid a spring onion farm where illegal immigrants from India are working. One of them actually says, “They are being paid £135 for a 40 hour week, which I reckon is about £3.75 an hour, which is a couple of pounds below the national minimum wage.” Another one says, “It’s horrible coming out to a job like this, where you see they’re working long hours for little money in conditions you wouldn’t want to keep animals in really. They’re not criminals. They’re here because they want to better their lives. We understand why they do it. If I had to feed my kids I’d do exactly the same thing.” The immigrants are duly shipped back to India. Well done! Okay, the barn they work in is not heated and the roof is a bit leaky, but they have a microwave and a radio and it’s not *that* bad. There is some concern that because they work for their accommodation and get driven to work in a van that this is forced labour, but I don’t find this convincing. The immigrants themselves say that they are doing this because they are poor back home. Shipping them back to India out of sight might make the socialists feel better but it ain’t helping no-one.
None of my readers would watch such low culture as Eastenders. Luckily, I watch it so that they don’t have to.
A couple of days ago, the devil child Dotty was caught mischievously pouring water on her stroke victim grandfather’s lap. Grandmother Dot Cotton, in an uncharacteristic pique of anger, gave her a well-deserved slap.
Then tonight, the cops show up at the local pub and arrest poor old Dot Cotton for assaulting a minor. At the police station she is interviewed and admits to hitting the girl. The police decide that as she is the “primary carer”, they will treat it as a “smack from a parent” rather than assault. But they warn her not to do it again.
Dot Cotton gets up to leave, but this is not the end of the matter. Oh no. She is to face interviews with social workers, and social workers will visit her home to “evaluate” the care of Dotty.
It’s a positively chilling story. Good on the BBC for raising awareness of the issues of state bullying, nosiness, and possibly even kidnapping.
In the (awful) film Nine Months, there is a scene in which Hugh Grant’s character child psychologist Samuel Faulkner is talking to his girlfriend Rebecca Taylor, played by Julianne Moore, about one of his patients.
SF: …he’s got very severe problems, and we know who to thank, don’t we?
RT: Huh?
SF: You know, his parents. The state requires you to take a written test to drive a car, but any moron can become a parent and just destroy a child’s life.
It’s funny, I keep having the same thought myself. That I am allowed to raise a child. It shouldn’t be allowed! I’m amazed it is allowed, given everything else that is controlled by governments.
And then in a bookshop the other day I noticed a book by psychologist Oliver James called They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life. The premise is that nurture is far more important than nature and how you’re raised determines your character. One page I read was about how parents can affect whether you grow up to have a “punitive conscience”, which means liking rules and respecting authority.
Then I skipped to the end, where Oliver makes “some practical suggestions” that he believes “should be seriously considered by governments”.
The first is that since studies of mental illness show that affluence is less of a factor than quality of childcare, “it is extraordinary that economic growth is the principal plank of all mainstream political parties.” If only that were the case! “It should be replaced by a raft of policies designed to improve the quality of early childhood experience, such as paid leave for parents who wish to care for their children when they are small, and good quality nursery care or subsidies for paid babysitters for parents who want to work.” Actually I think we are most of the way there. But, ugh!
The next suggestion: “The obsession with economic performance indicators should be replaced with much greater measurement of the effect of government policy on our mental health.” That sounds better. The government drives me mad! But here we have a psychologist asking for the government to pay more attention to psychology. It’s not very imaginative.
The next suggestion is somewhat imaginative. “All children should undergo an emotional audit during their sixteenth year.” Whether they want it or not. It’s for their own good. “The grotesque overemphasis on exam performance should be replaced by a version of cognitive anallytic therapy (CAT), in which every child is helped to evaluate the impact of of his or her upbringing on his or her psychology.” And then presumably de-programmed by the state into a perfect citizen. It’s terrifying.
Finally, he makes a plea for some taxpayers’ money for him and his buddies. “The government should commission a large-scale study of a representative sample of the population, following them from before birth to death, to provide a better understanding of the effect of early childhood experiences on adult traits.” And what might the government do with the results? What happens, for instance, when governments commission a big study into climate? Climate change becomes the biggest problem known to man and our lives must be micromanaged to control it, that’s what.
I’d take the IPCC over Oliver James’ government psychology commission any day. What a scary, scary man.
I honestly don’t know whether to vote for the party that will introduce more controls on alcohol, or the party that will introduce more controls on alcohol.
It’s a good job we get to vote on these things.
No they won’t. What a load of old rubbish.
Sir Humphrey burst into the office, with a large grin on his face and rubbing his hands together with glee. “Have you seen the front page, Minister?”
“Yes, sir Humphrey. Man tried to blow up a plane. Terrible business.”
“On the contrary, Minister. It is most excellent news.”
“‘Excellent news’, Sir Humphrey?”
“Indeed, Minister.”
“But isn’t it a terrible threat to the national security? All these people trying to blow us up. What if one of them succeeds?”
“Good heavens, no, Minister. Don’t you see? These people are idiots. They might have blown up some aeroplanes in the past, but now all their good people are dead. Our friends in the foreign office have seen to that. No, we only allow just enough of them to cause just enough trouble.”
“‘Enough trouble?’ I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“Well, Minister, do you remember those ‘full body scanners’ Sir Jeffrey is so keen to install in the airports?”
“The ones that the public hate so much? The ones that take pictures of people in the nude?”
“The very ones. Well, Sir Jeffrey has mentioned that if we can find a way to get the prime minister to give them the go ahead, it will be very beneficial for his department, and he might just be inclined to return a similar favour to us.”
“You don’t mean…? Ah. Hmm. Well. Sir Humphrey?”
“Yes, Minister?”
“I have an idea. This attempted bombing in America. The Americans must be very worried about it.”
“Indeed they are. And whatever is a problem for the Americans is a problem for us.”
“Quite. Quite. I think it might be time for a full review of airport security. How quickly do you think you can do that?”
“Well it just so happens, Minister, that I have in my hand a draft review of airport security already written up. I’ve added a paragraph about the full body… er, what I mean to say, Minister is that I’ve already updated it with the latest developments. It would only need some tidying up.”
“Excellent work, Sir Humphrey. I’ll call the Prime Minister, and you get that report ready!”
“Yes, Minister.”
My pregnant wife bought herself the world’s smallest bottle of wine for new year’s eve.
But then she spotted this:
Prompting some ranting and raving from me. It’s awfully patronising. Every bit of pregnancy-related bumf we get goes on and on about how important it is to stop drinking. But we all know that the advice was only changed recently because the previous advice was being ignored. We’ll seek our own counsel, thanks. But I have no doubt that social services would love nothing more than to snatch the fetus from the womb and put it into “care”, if only they could.
Here is another wine bottle.
Good grief. We must recycle, keep Britain tidy, not drink if we’re pregnant and beware of sulphites, whatever they might be. But not to worry, this wine is carbon neutral.
Another bottle wants me to visit a website called drinkaware, where I’m told that alcohol will give me all kinds of diseases including cancer, and affect my mental health. Frankly, my mental health is more likely to be affected by all the constant nagging we’re subjected to.
Insomnia-blogging. Man comes home to find three masked men in his house. They tie up him and his family and threaten to kill them. Teenage son escapes and fetches uncle. Burglars flee, man and brother chase them and catch one, subject him to a “sustained attack” with a cricket bat leaving him with brain injuries. Man and brother get 30 months in jail.
What’s the libertarian analysis? Self defence is allowed. It would be perfectly right to shoot all three burglars dead on discovering them, their trespass being a threat to life, but the family were prevented by the state from having sufficient means of self defence. Attempting to apprehend the burglars after they fled also makes sense: they might come back, they be a threat to others, and they owe reparations to the injured family. But beating a man who is lying on the floor and either unconscious or otherwise no longer a threat is obviously not self defence.
So a lot depends on the exact details of the events. Was the burglar beaten after he was no longer a threat? Or was he a threat up until the point when he was struck the brain-injuring blow with the cricket bat? And did the brothers then stop attacking him?
The law allows for people to use reasonable force to protect themselves or others, or to carry out an arrest or to prevent crime.
[...]
A document jointly published by the CPS and Acpo says people are not expected to make fine judgments about what might be reasonable force in the heat of the moment, so long as they only do what they honestly and instinctively believe is necessary.
However, force used after chasing someone who runs off may not be considered to be reasonable. Acting out of malice and revenge with the intent of inflicting punishment through injury or death would not be reasonable, it adds.
Part of the problem is that when your weapon is a cricket bat it’s hard to moderate the level of force. I wouldn’t know how hard to hit someone with a cricket bat to incapacitate him. As hard as possible is the only thing that makes sense. It’s easy to imagine the burglar being hit once, trying to get up — oh no, he’s still a threat — and being hit again even harder. Is this a “sustained attack”? I imagine the case rested on details like these.
But I’d give these brothers the benefit of the doubt. They were put in the stressful situation by the burglars. Being in a blind rage after your family has been tied up is understandable, and the sort of thing you should expect from someone whose family you’ve tied up and threatened. The brothers arguably owe no reparation to the burglar and are not an ongoing threat to society, so putting them in jail can’t be defended from a libertarian point of view.
Update: Here is an excerpt from the judge’s sentencing. He has seen all the evidence, in particular the injuries and a eyewitness.
Salem was apprehended and cornered in the front garden of …[another house in Desborough Park Road] and brought to the ground.
Four men including, as the jury found, the two of you, armed with weapons then proceeded to carry out a dreadful, violent attack upon him when he was defenceless on the ground.
That attack involved kicking and punching him, stamping upon him and striking him with weapons, including a hockey stick and a cricket bat.
The witness, Miranda McCloughlin, who was at the window immediately adjacent to where the attack was taking place pleaded with you and the two others to stop, telling you that you were going to kill the man on the ground.
She was disregarded and the attack continued. She described you and the other two men involved as acting like a pack of animals. It is purely fortuitous that the man Salem was not killed.
As it was, he suffered a number of fractures, including a skull fracture, and brain damage, giving rise to permanent injury.
So they did indeed beat him to a pulp while he lay on the ground. If this had occurred in Texas he’d have been shot dead in the house and no charges would have been brought. He brought it upon himself, it’s hard to have any sympathy for him. But there comes a point when it’s not self defence any more.
Specsavers is a ubiquitous (in the UK) chain of opticians. The outward appearance is that it is all one company, but I suspect it is a fairly loosely connected collection of franchises. Inter-branch communication is all but non-existant. A combination of moving from one branch to another, while having had an eye test at a third branch, has caused all sorts of problems for Mrs Rob’s Blog. There’s a central call centre which doesn’t seem to talk to the branches, the end result being that you have to explain the whole story from the beginning every time you call someone.
The current problem is that they insist Mrs RB hasn’t had an eye test for over two years and they are now legally required to stop supplying her with her monthly batch of contact lenses. Her insistence that she has had an eye test recently is to no avail. Evidence in the form of her meticulously maintained diary is of no interest to them. They need to see The Official Prescription, which the other branch don’t seem to have.
Not so long ago eye exams as a precondition for receiving contact lenses were something opticians did because it’s a sensible thing to do. But around a year or so ago I remember getting from my optician a letter that this was to become a Legal Requirement.
Presumably that means that while once upon a time a customer’s insistence might have satisfied an optician that all was in order, there is now Paperwork that must Satisfy Government Officials. Mere reason is no longer enough.
