Facebook: the Private Government Database

Now I am convinced someone in the higher echelons is reading this blog!?

ID Cards by the Back Door?

Perhaps someone in the government is reading this blog.

I once pondered whether Facebook was a private sector solution to the ID card: people sign up to it involuntarily, it is free and the government (or Facebook) can keep tags on what you are doing and who you are in contact with.

It seems I was in the right area, but had the wrong website. The government are using Twitter.

While creating the Twitter account for this blog (feel free to follow me!) I decided to follow the Downing Street Twitter site to see what the government were up to.

They immediately put me on their follow list!

Unperturbed, I put out my first tweet claiming the ProBrum's presence on Twitter was another step towards independence. That should put the wind up the London-based navel-gazing ruling elite bastards.

Boycott London 2012

As the Olympic torch arrives in India, home of a largest exiled Tibetan community, on its round the world tour, there have been more demonstrations against China's occupation of Tibet following the ones in Europe and America last week. I think it is great that what was intended to be a propaganda coup by the Chinese government has ended up as being a great advert for the Free Tibet campaign. The truth is Beijing should never have got the Olympics, although it has to be said that part of the reason the IOC did award the Olympics to Beijing was because the government claimed improved human rights was going to be one of the legacies.

However, awarding 2008 to Beijing was not the last mistake the IOC made. They dropped an even bigger clanger by awarding 2012 games to London. Hopefully the run-up to two weeks of national embarrassment will be preceded by round the world demonstrations against the awarding of the games to this "world-class city". Here are some of the things one could protest about:

Operation Iraqi Liberation (do not worry, in four years we will still be there)
Free Afghanistan
Free the Chagos Islands
Libere Las Malvinas
Free Scotland
Unite Ireland
Free Wales
Free Cornwall
Free Birmingham

Or even better, perhaps the United Kingdom of Greater London could make the M25 into a moat and declare independence. Then we could all sod off. I am struggling to think of a catchy slogan for this cause however.

Any ideas?

School of Terror

All I can say is this is outrageous. It is generally known that an A level chemistry student can manufacture ecstasy and certain other banned drugs, and as part of the course will make aspirin and paracetamol. So, in order to strike a blow in the war on drugs as well as the war on terror, why doesn't the government go the whole hog and ban chemistry altogether? Then we can all do mickey mouse degrees in law and politics, like our Glorious Leaders.

Why has this story not been more widely reported?

You May Take the P*ss, but You Will Never Take Our Freedom

Nick Huhne and Chris Clegg have both pledged to lead a campaign of civil disobedience against the dreaded ID card should they be elected leader of the Liberal Democrats, but according to the Stirrer fellow Birmingham Yardley MP and failed prospective leader candidate John Hemming is planning a rather different form of civil disobedience against a particularly vicious attack on our civil liberties. He is planning a pub crawl to protest against police spying on pubs where they make astonishing claims that people are breaking the law - by getting drunk.

In a letter to the landlord of the Prince of Wales in Moseley, where JRR Tolkien reputedly used to court his wife, the police confirmed

"there is clear evidence in the premises…of numerous people who are drunk/intoxicated."

People getting drunk in a pub? Never!

Now, recently we have been getting used to the police taking the p*ss. But getting p*ssed to take on the police? Only on Broad Street on a Saturday night.

PRoBrum Right-Leaning?

I love these kind of quizzes which map out your position on a two-dimensional political spectrum and compare you with current parties and political leaders past and present. I find them useful because I struggle to find a mainstream political party I fit in with These quizzes give me an opportunity to find out what the differences are. I am surprised to be right-leaning in this version, but I think part of the problem is that it defines neo-liberal politics as being right-wing, an opinion I disagree with (I believe free-markets are a centrist position that have been adopted by the right due to the success of socialist economics during the middle part of the twentieth century). A previous version on an American Scale had me as a Democrat.

Comparing myself with the 2005 UK political spectrum I am closest to the Liberal Democrats which I have always suspected, but this can be misleading due to the fact that the party is polarised between the Liberal and Social Democratic founding traditions. Thankfully, I am on the opposing side of the quadrant containing the BNP.

Interestingly nearly all modern political leaders are in the same quadrant as the two main parties, authoritarian neo-liberals. Is this because this is the most practical form of politics? I hope not. I think it shows that politicians are inclined to award themselves too much power as it keeps them in work. I believe most people who take this test will find themselves in the libertarian half of the chart, indicating to me that the growing chasm between electorates and their leaders does not involve positioning on the traditional left-right political spectrum, but is instead a failure by current governments to recognise that most aspects of life do not need to be legislated over, and that citizens must be given the freedom to live the lives they choose to live.

Hat-tip to Some Random Thoughts.

Usi 9mm

There has been a lot of discussion recently about foreign takeovers of British football clubs. My opinion is that if football is a business, as we are constantly being told it is, it cannot protect itself from globalisation which is a natural part of free-markets. Having said that, we don't want any old Johnny Foreigner running our clubs. There must be a certain probity about the character of any potential investors.

I believe the two Birmingham clubs have done well here. I doubt any Villa fan would want to go back to the bad old days of Deadly Doug. Randy Lerner, as well as having a great name for a student of sex education, has humbly said he is a steward of the club and it appears that the club is finally moving in the right direction after many years of neglect. There are a few question marks over Carson Yeung, not least as to whether he will actually take over at St Andrew's, but he seems to have an understanding of the city and football and could be an important contact in the emerging superpower that is China, giving the city and the club access to the huge Premier League marketing potential available in the country..

Other cities have been less discerning however. Manchester City have allowed the former Thai Prime Minister, Thaksin Sinawatra with his questionable record on human rights to take over the club. Meanwhile in London, the probity of the Arsenal-owning hopeful Alisher Uzmanov has been questioned recently by quite a few blogs concerned at his recent efforts to silence certain online critics, which affected among others Tim Ireland and local councillor Bob Piper's fine weblogs.

Many club owners are now saying foreign investment is vital to be able to compete at the highest level. However, should we be more careful about the types of people who are taking over our national sport?

ID Cards and Segregation in the Real World

I have not been blogging much recently because I have become addicted to the phenomenon of web 2.0 know as Facebook. If you read blogs, you probably know that this is a social networking site where you can post information about yourself and associate with you friend letting them know you are alive and what you are up to. It got me thinking that if the government wanted to create a bottom-up version of a national identity database, facebook would be a pretty useful model - but let's not overestimate the intelligence of our democratically elected officials.

It was fascinating catching up with people I have not seen for the best part of 10 years. I was surprised to find that many of my asian friends were still unmarried. If you believe the press, at the age of 18 (or sometimes younger), they are shipped to the subcontinent against their will where they are forceably married to someone they have never seen before. Well actually, no. For second and third generation immigrants, the truth is closer to this - caught between two worlds that leave the individual at a loss. I should know - as an asian catholic I too have struggled to find a suitable future spouse.

While we are at dispelling media myths about ethnic-minority communities, particularly in the wake of the Glasgow-London terrorist attacks, you might be interested to know that none of my muslim friends appeared to be involved in terrorism, and many seemed to be more integrated than me! One was actually dating a white girl, while another had actually joined the group opposing the academic boycott of Israel.

But of course, these kinds of stories do not sell newspapers, so it will be up to blogs like this to inform interested British people what really is going on.

Taking Liberties

I went to see the film "Taking Liberties" today, which has been extensively advertised by bloggers and has been heralded as Britain's answer to Fahrenheit 9/11.

If you have not seen it yourself I would certainly recommend it. You probably will not find out anything you did not already know, but it is a useful consolidation of the many reports of heavy-handed policing in the British post 9/11 era.

I can't help thinking that someone was trying to prevent me from seeing the film however. When my friend and I went to purchase tickets for the film, we were helpfully informed "You do know it is a documentary don't you?" Yes, that was why I was buying the ticket. Did they ask potential viewers of Pirates of the Caribbean if they knew it starred Johnny Depp? How strange.

Then I noticed the paper flyers which give a description of the film incorrectly summarised the plot of Oceans Thirteen on the Taking Liberties flyer! Was this so people would walk out in disgust after five minutes? When I left the screen after the film, the flyer had disappeared! It's a conspiracy I tell you!

There was not that many people watching the film but it was a 3.15 showing. Regular readers will note that I have been posting a few articles on freedom of speech recently, but this one certainly did focus the mind. Instead of attacking the right about "the right to offend", perhaps I should be working with them to stop the erosion of freedom being perpertrated by those who seek to destroy our way of life; the Blair administration. On the other hand, it does annoy me that many opposition websites seem to spend more time defending the Iraq war and sticking up for the right to call people gay/black bastard/ ginger than concentrating on the very real threat to freedom of speech that was taking place in our parliament. As some might say, the rules of the game are changing.

Anyway, enough of my pontificating. The film has inspired me to do two things:

1) I am going to join Liberty (and I urge you to do as well).

2) I am going to join Amnesty International (unless I find out they have dropped their neutral stance on abortion)

If this is my last post, you know what happened.

Dale's End

I seem to have been removed from Iain Dale's Blogroll. It happened sometime after I posted this article attacking his position on, of all things, freedom of speech.

There would be an irony if I was removed from the blogroll of someone who believes freedom of speech is the right to offend because, well, I offended them by pointing out (using freedom of speech) that they were wrong?

I really do not have time for right-wing hypocrites. Iain Dale follows Guido Fawkes in being dumped from the select few who make the national People's Republic blogroll.

The Far-Right to Offend

Iain Dale wrote an article today regarding The Right to Offend. It repeated the right-wing myth, also proposed by the liberal hawks of Harry's Place that freedom, if anything, means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear. Interestingly enough, this is a position they share with those "great defenders of free speech", the BNP.

This is nonsense. Freedom of speech means the right to say anything you want without fear of persecution from the government. With that freedom comes responsibility. This means that although you can in theory say anything, some things are better left unsaid. If freedom of speech is not used with discretion, pressure mounts on the government to take it away in certain circumstances; and as soon as a government starts legislating on a certain area, they have a habit of not stopping.

A great example is holocaust denial. In my opinion it should not be an offence to deny the holocaust, because there should be the opportunity to have a full debate on the history if new evidence emerges. Unfortunately though, most, if not all people who deny the holocaust are idiots. Despite the overwhelming evidence that it occurred, they claim it is part of a Jewish conspiracy of one sort of another. So several European countries have made holocaust denial a criminal offence, and it is difficult to argue against it given the type of person who actually make these statements in public.

Freedom of speech is not an excuse to persecute minorities verbally, because they do not have any legitimate way of stopping you criticising them (although they can take the law into their own hands of course). The only organisation that can stop you saying something is the government, who can legislate against statements they do not like. I repeat then that freedom of speech is not the right to make offensive statements, but the right to criticise the government without fear of persecution.

To be fair, Iain's article is not about something as serious as holocaust denial. It is about a state-regulator criticising Jeremy Clarkson for calling something "a bit gay". It is not a surprise with this kind of ruling that more and more people are starting to confuse freedom of speech with the right to offend.

The First Step to Independence

Implement this now.