Tag: law

The Law Breaker Part Two

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

If only I was in a position to go out and party this weekend I know I would be tempted. With new laws coming into force on Monday on there being no more than six people in one group at the same time, the media are reporting a police union’s fear that those reckless and irresponsible young people previously deemed wholly responsible for the spread of the virus, might take advantage of one last weekend of relative freedom. With the threat of all fun being put on hold until the spring can people really be forgiven. I know I would. And if there is such a fear of this happening then why have this new law start on Monday, why not Friday. Let’s all blame bureaucracy of course, but who’s willing to put a little cash on the Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph writing a piece on these devilish party folk and referencing this weekend if the government continue to fuck up at every opportunity and numbers increase. Scapegoat anyone? Ready made excuse. They’ll probably find a way to blame these revellers on the fact people had to drive hundreds of miles for a test. Or that Matt Hancock is still bizarrely in a position of power despite, well, everything he has done for the last six months. Saying that Boris, Dom and Mikey Gove are still the bouncing around full of beans. What’s that phrase about bad smells?

On a law breaking note, apparently Boris’s plans to avoid anymore of the “miserable squabbling” over Brexit, in other words do as he says or he’ll continue to squabble. He only plans on breaking international law in a “specific and limited way” as opposed to randomly and completely which presumably would be the bad way. The rumour is that the rebels in his party seem to be inconveniently perturbed by their own party damaging the integrity of the UK by “protecting the integrity of the UK” as Gove called it. It appears not even a stonking majority will allow this lot to completely do as they feel and in total disregard for the recognised ways of law abiding. The miserable squabbling appears to be returning as the rest of the country rejoices that not everything is going as planned. Is this the first step in a slight rebellion against a still perplexing government. The government has already had to make numerous u-turns since coming to power. If they are seen to be defeated by their own MPs then it quite significantly makes it clear to those in the party who don’t enjoy seeing their leader behaving in a less than legal and democratic way as being capable of crumbling. It may take time but once something can be seen as possible it inevitably becomes real. Time to get that deck chair out and prepare for the show.

Aeon

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Now feels like a good time to plug a favourite website of mine. Aeon is all about ideas and when you read though the titles of the different articles they publish, the mind illuminates with excitement. They generally publish essays and short videos. The essays are usually three to four thousand words and of a high enough level not to be considered light reading. For this reason I can get a bit lazy as I know it will involve a certain amount of mind effort to read one. It is things like this that allow me to realise that my use of the internet doesn’t go much further than looking at football, politics, buying things and generally killing time and shutting off my brain. The internet is the greatest invention and has the potential to revolutionise society on scale not obvious since the printing press and I use it to kill time and shut my brain off. I know I’m not alone in this. Humans are ridiculous.

Aeon then involves a little effort, if you’re me, but it is well worth it. They used to also publish Ideas that were usually around the one thousand word mark which my short attention span was more suited to but they unfortunately seem to have done away with them recently. They publish essays on philosophy, science, history, psychology, law, nature, education and every sub category within.

For example this is an article on Ashoka Maurya who was an Indian Emperor over two thousand years ago. Seeing first hand the horror of warfare he creating ‘an infrastructure of goodness’ which also included the spread of the teachings of Siddhattha Gotama – the Buddha – and changed the face of the Indian continent in the process.

This is an article on the spread of pathogens throughout history, from The Black Death to polio, and how they’re generally spread silently by the seemingly healthy.

This article discusses free will and determinism, using our understanding of the sometime random actions of molecules to give some answers to this age old argument.

This is an essay on the concept of ‘hysterical women’, how women’s pain is often medically overlooked and undertreated but that ‘believing all women’ is not necessarily the answer and oversimplifies the issue.

This discusses how not only is privatising public services bad economics but also how it undermines our social and political bonds as a community.

And finally this is an article about how fish are nothing at all like us but that they are sentient beings and that they finally deserve a real place in our moral community.

Ultimately these are just a few examples of articles they publish and even then they’re only the ones I’m drawn to. There’s a little of everything for everyone. I mention Aeon because they’re not a massive publishing or news company, they don’t have adverts all over their website and they produce really interesting work. It’s online magazines like this that people need to be made aware of in these times of sensationalism and factual inaccuracy.

Just because I can I’m attaching a video of sea life in the Ningaloo Canyons off Western Australia. The video is on YouTube but is from Aeon, or at least that’s were I found it. There is also a video on the creation of the police force by Robert Peel in 1829 and what that has meant for society up to the present day. Enjoy the fish for now though.

Red Wine CCTV

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I’m drinking red wine it’s really nice. I had a small thought at one point today and it was about whether we have trained a generation of human security cameras. It was based on a short five minute video of an older comedian talking about taking his granddaughter to the park. It was a slightly obvious joke in that it was critical of the modern day child being wrapped up in cotton wool and not playing with live open wires like the good old days. He was being critical of slides in playgrounds and how they’re designed to be shit and not really give any decent fun propulsion. While he wanted to give her a helping hand he could see all the other kids and adults watching him “Go on granddad I dare you” as they all take out their iPhone’s. But the reality is it’s true.

There have been seemingly endless revolutions over the last lets say five to ten years, all of which appear to have failed miserably. What has become evident and I first noticed this in the Arab Spring of X amount of years ago, was that the humble camera phone became an integral part of reporting. While I rejoiced at policeman being caught out beating up non-violent protesters and wondering how the media would be able to ignore such conclusive evidence, very easily it turned out, I praised these phones and thought they had changed the game in regards coverage of protests and such things. They changed everything of course, and were dutifully ignored by the apparatus of power, but is it possible it could go the other way? What happens if people become so used to filming and publishing any video online they collectively start recording every little incident of social existence. There are so many situations in daily life that people act outside of the law, that is the reality, but they’re harmless, nobody gets hurt and in reality nobody has a problem with them. But it’s on camera now. Or what about an innocent situation like Grandpa above, somebody films him being a little over exuberant but harmless, and he becomes vilified, shamed and doesn’t feel comfortable playing freely with his granddaughter anymore.

We’re such judgmental pricks that both these situations are plausible. The latter has become part of daily existence but is the evolution of this that we inadvertently become walking CCTV’s. It seems far fetched, and in some ways it is because it’ll never end up exactly like that, but there already are versions of this kind of behaviour. The power people have to catch each other and feel good about themselves. It’s enough to make humour vanish. Maybe I should stop drinking red wine.