I’m watching a documentary on BBC1 about South Yorkshire Police. They have set up a road block and are pulling over Transit minibuses in search of illegal immigrants being ferried from Sheffield to surrounding farms where they work illegally. Well, we can’t have strawberry pickers roaming around the countryside un-checked now, can we? What a good thing South Yorkshire Police are protecting us!
One suspect is told, “if you’re claiming benefit you’re not allowed to work.” That should be, “if you’re working you’re not allowed to claim benefit”, surely?
Another cop picks up a couple of guys walking along the motorway. This is dangerous, the narrator explains and, more importantly, “illegal”. While sitting in the back of the police car, one of them lets slip that he’s from Uganda. The narrator continues, “but now that Brown has discovered they’re asylum seekers, he wants to find out if their IDs are in order.”
Traffic cops like PC Brown should be doing something more useful that worrying about people who come to the UK to pick strawberries or process poultry. Here we have the law getting in the way of policing.
Later Brown goes on to patrol the A616 where dangerous drivers are known to cross double white lines to overtake. This is far more useful, even if it would more properly be done privately and paid for by road owners and insurance companies!
Posted by site admin as Civil Liberties at 9:15 PM EDT
2 Comments »
I’m sitting in the sun in the garden of my parents’ home, sipping coffee and using my dad’s laptop to work on my web site and read blogs. It strikes me that there is something wonderfully synergistic about the web, Wifi, laptops, PHP, MySQL and content management systems that makes it all so pleasurable. I just wanted to share that thought. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, give the laptop, web, Wifi and sunny garden combination a try sometime; then you’ll know.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 2:30 PM EDT
73 Comments »
Like many others, I’m switching from Movable Type to WordPress. But there are all kinds of changes going on round here at the moment. It started when I got a phone call from my web hosts, XCalibre, telling me that I’d gone over my 1Gb per month bandwidth limit and offering to upgrade my account, for a fee.
Some investigation later, (which mostly consisted of consulting a friend who never misses a bargain), and I discovered Powweb. They seemed too good to be true, with ten times the storage and 150 times the bandwidth allowance, for slightly less money. This is probably possible because while XCalibre are in the UK, Powweb are in the USA where presumably overheads are lower and competition is tougher. But it’s a global market, and since I run this site as a hobby and have never had to speak to web host staff in person, I can’t see any disadvantage to being hosted in the USA.
It was during the move that I discovered how hard it can be to move a Movable Type blog from one host to another, especially when using the Berkeley database and the host you’re moving to has a different version of the Berkeley DB libraries.
And what with all the kerfuffle about Movable Type’s new licensing, which wouldn’t have affected me much if I hadn’t lost my original tarball for 2.661, and could only now get hold of of version 3 without paying, I started to look around for alternatives.
WordPress appealed immediately because it is released under a GPL license. Mark Pilgrim sums up some of the advantages of this quite nicely:
WordPress is Free Software. Its rules will never change. In the event that the WordPress community disbands and development stops, a new community can form around the orphaned code. It’s happened once already. In the extremely unlikely event that every single contributor (including every contributor to the original b2) agrees to relicense the code under a more restrictive license, I can still fork the current GPL-licensed code and start a new community around it. There is always a path forward. There are no dead ends.
I discovered that not only was it easier than I thought to transfer all my content across to WordPress, but I could also keep all my permalinks too. And WordPress is slick. It has an extremely nice interface full of simple touches that you may not notice until you start using it in earnest, such as the “Save and Continue Editing” button combined with a preview at the bottom of the edit screen.
Finally, while there have always been loads of add-ons for Movable Type, moving to WordPress has spurred my interest once more, and I have found plenty of cool add-ons that will appear here before long (once I’ve sorted out the template and style sheet), including Amazon Media Manager, email notifications (ok, Movable Type has this by default but it’s the only feature I used that WordPress hasn’t), WP Photos, and Mobile Edition.
Posted by Rob Fisher as News, Open Source at 3:34 PM EDT
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I’ve been busy, so it’s been quiet around here lately. By way of filler, here’s a round-up of some articles that have taken my fancy of late, from my two favourite blogs.
David Carr comments on the shocking story about the use of sniffer dogs in schools to catch kids with drugs:
I am sincerely at a loss to comprehend the volcanic eruption of outrage and revulsion over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners when schoolchildren in this country are subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation as a matter of policy.
I feel a bit nervous just going through security checkpoints at airports - there’s an oppressive feeling, a sense that making one wrong move will land you in a cell. Being searched for drugs would be quite an ordeal for me, never mind a bunch of 15-year-olds. I suppose getting ‘em used to the police state while they’re young must have its advantages; catching a teenager with some dope surely can’t be worth it.
Secret Squirrel, in the comments section, has the right idea:
I haven’t consented for my children to be sniffed, and have instructed them to spot opportunities during the “hand search” to make allegation of “feeling up” etc.
Meanwhile, Perry de Havilland sports a rather excellent T-shirt in a photo accompanying Michael Jennings’ article about Piers Morgan’s “resignation“, and Brian Micklethwait makes the case for watching the TV series Make Me Honest:
And whereas the political (in the broad sense) message that they got across last week was that individuals – both Greg Foxsmith and the people he was trying to help – can, by their individual efforts, change both themselves and by extension the world for the better, this week the message was: that the law is an ass.
Lawrence, it seems, is known as “lucky Lawrence”, because at the critical moment, when a half-sensible legal system would be sending Lawrence to prison for six months, with a stern warning to the effect that if (when) he did it again it would be more like six years, our actually existing legal system would, in the form the risible (in this show anyway) “Crown Prosecution Service” would either lose the papers, or, more basically, simply fail to do the necessary work.
Over at The Daily Ablution, Scott Burgess does a great job of revealing poor research in the press, in this kind of tone:
Leo’s dishwasher is a big problem, though - it’s made by Siemens, a company that’s “involved in nuclear power.” In the very next paragraph Hannah [Berry, of Ethical Consumer magazine] inadvertently reveals why Siemens should be applauded for their involvement, referring to “the inherent inefficiency - 30% at most - of conventional electricity production.” It’s doubtful whether many Guardian readers will note the irony.
Don’t miss his article about The Day After Tomorrow (a film I hope to avoid), from whence the above quote comes, and read all the comments too, especially the ones by Anthony, who writes:
http://www.thedayaftertomorrowmovie.com/ allows visitors to set up profiles. People are invited to answer several questions
[…]
Some of the answers at the DAT site are rather against the message of the film. When asked You may never have the chance again… What is the one daring thing you wish you had the guts to do today? Several people mention skydiving. I’d be hard pressed to think of a more pointless use of aviation fuel.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties, Links at 10:14 PM EDT
63 Comments »
Dispatches: Keep Them Out, a documentary about Lee On Solent’s Daedalus Action Group was very enlightening. DAG are campaigning against the government’s plan to open HMS Daedalus as accomodation for asylum seekers.
If people have genuine fears about the effects of this on their community, then that’s fair enough. What I didn’t expect was for the great majority of DAG members to be so dim-witted, xenophobic and bigoted. They have vague fears of rape, HIV (a bizarre fear given the way that disease is transmitted), terrorism (as if terrorists need to use asylum to get in the country) and changing the whole nature of the community.
The nature of the community, incidentally, is one in which dissenters who disagree with DAG get bricks thrown through their windows and are otherwise harassed.
Here are some quotes from DAG members:
- “Just shoot them.”
- “Why don’t they empty out the Isle of Wight and put them all there.”
- “They’re quite likely to have a hostile look about them, and a foreign look about them.”
- “Enoch Powell was right.”
- “At the end of the day, they’re worried about getting tortured and killed, but they believe that when they die they go on to a better place.”
- “In those countries women are completely covered in burkas. When they come to this country they’ll see scantily clad women on the beaches. What parent of teenage daughters won’t worry about that?”
Now for some balance: The anti-DAG types weren’t interviewed much, but from what I saw, I got the feeling they were mostly do-gooding socialist types. Yes many asylum seekers are vulnerable and in need of help, but that’s not reason enough to force other people to help them via taxation.
My personal view is that an open border combined with abolition of the welfare system would be the best approach to immigration and asylum. Let anyone in, but let them make their own way. The more well-motivated, productive people we have in the country the better. There is certainly reason to think we need more immigration, as the falling birth-rate leads to demographic problems.
But neither side, as represented in the programme, wanted to discuss economic issues like these, preferring to worry about whether or not being against asylum seekers is racist. Ho-hum.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Reviews at 10:18 PM EDT
66 Comments »
Here’s a selection of links from Jason Kottke’s blog that tickled my fancy (including his remaindered links section):
Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 9:30 PM EDT
1 Comment »
Yesterday’s Evening Standard a banner runs across the top of page 18 that reads, “CCTV Footage Shows Man 15 Minutes Before Assault On 64-Year-Old.” Below this the headline reads, “Caught on film, the prime suspect in rape attack on grandmother”. To the right is a photo of a man. A man who, if innocent, should be outraged.
What’s to stop a photo of you appearing beneath a headline like that?
Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties at 1:42 PM EDT
2 Comments »
The Alan Bown Set Before and Beyond
