see nerd) blog
the puritan uk
The UK is not a relaxed society. I relaxed when I left, and after a while I realised it was because I wasn’t constantly being watched. I am not comfortable with the continuous surveillance, the officious paranoia. I don’t want some fucking camera watch me scratch my bottom. This is mass generation of polluted data; how long before people are prosecuted for such pollution, if it’s not happening already?
Since I left the UK, the police have started raiding parliamentarians who discomfort them. This, also, is evidence of descent towards a police state.
Most continental countries treat people as though they’re citizens, not as though they’re prospective criminals. If people are treated as prospective criminals, idiotic laws can easily be introduced to make them into the real thing.
And this is what’s happening. The Register has an interesting article showing how the UK government, which pretends to base its anti-sexuality laws on evidence, actually manufactures the evidence to fit its desired result.
‘When it comes to sex and censorship, Government’s insistence that laws are "evidence-based" is little more than hot air.
The statistics quoted in support of any given case are frequently misleading, partial, and - according to one expert in this field - subject to highly unethical collusion of interest between government and researchers.
From rape to lap-dancing, from internet harm to obscure sexual practices, "evidence" is used to back a narrow politicised agenda, rather than as a basis from which to develop policy.’
‘The other way in which government manages to skew evidence for its policies is in the careful selection of the criteria it sets out to measure. Following on from an original assertion that there was no evidence for harm resulting from extreme porn, it put in place a Rapid Evidence Assessment which quickly concluded that after all, there might be some evidence.
This report has been widely criticised, not least on the grounds of the assumed bias of its authors. However, a far more serious criticism of this work is that it was scoped to report only on evidence for harm.
According to the Royal Society for Prevention of Accidents, Christmas trees, household linen, and underwear are all associated with some degree of harm. So should we ban underwear?’
Laws are being introduced based on plain and simple prudish bigotry justified by corrupted research. Laws are being introduced to criminalise people born with a particular birthright. Bigotry based on sexuality is not that far off bigotry based on skin colour; they’re both based on fear of difference, a difference of birthright. These are laws based on cowardice, based on fear. Their introduction shows a country moving further into excessive authoritarianism.
It doesn’t surprise me the UK government’s been caught out fixing the evidence to support their position; remember the nonsense about 45 minute Iraqi missiles? It doesn’t surprise me that prudes fix evidence to support their puritanical nonsense; life is never as simple as they pretend. Combining the two together creates repressive laws. The UK is continuing its descent into a police state.
It’s nothing new, of course; the UK desperately needs a liberal (notice the small ’L’) government to get rid of a century of authoritarian crap.