As Emmett has raised the question of the pervasive snoopers who surround us all these days - there are no CCTV cameras in the Burrow, btw - this seems a good moment to voice my distaste at one of the most obnoxious government broadcast announcements I've ever heard. It is directed at benefit fraudsters, and tells them that they are being WATCHED and have nowhere to hide. "We will track you down", the message says; "we may even be standing next to you at this very moment".
If this squalid threat doesn't reek of Big Brother, I'll eat Dame Barbara's handbag. I have no time for benefit scroungers, and certainly wish them to be caught. But not with this creepy, spine-shivering stuff from a government agency. I grew up during WW2, when we were rightly admonished that 'careless talk costs lives' and that we should 'keep mum'. There were spivs and swindlers around then too, who were viewed disdainfully. But SNOOPERS - government or private - who spied upon and informed against their fellow-citizens were regarded with far greater contempt, as the lowest of the low in fact. That, surely, was a far healthier attitude than this brazen , bullying brag that "we know where you are, and are coming to get you".
Most of the time they don't, of course. And the culprits know they don't. So why waste public money on this STASI type stuff? It's high time this ghastly government grew up - or better still, got thrown out.
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ONE Expects that old Freud might have had something to say, about society & its discontents; although, in my estimation, old Jung was closer to the mark, certainly as to the question of /evil/. In society, it is clear to me that there is /always/ a need for some group or other to 'play the Jew'. Now that Jews aren't having any, and at a time when the Zionists certainly are rather successfully tarring Arabs with the semite-brush, the question for state-liberalism then becomes: /who/ can we give the un-credentialled & sub-professionallist, recipientised, to kick in the face, now? This is difficult because of the very nature of phantasies of progress & universal uplift which, like Christianity and Science and Islam and Nu Labour, are exclusively pure & 'healthy' on the face of it; but, just as societies /need/ scapegoats, so the therapeutic state must needs forge its own projection-hooks: smokers, the obese, those who drink alcohol, layabouts behind on their child-support payments. And, occasionally (although not often enough!), the state /may/ fling an Ian Blair to the plebes, stripped of garter and truncheon.... Ultimately, this diagnostic stuff of liberalism's is pretty thin gruel -- whereupon we bring in loads of Mexicans & Pakis, to bear the cleverly mis-directed BNP-ire. These professionals /are/ a wonder, I tell you, an absolute eleemosynary WONDER! 'My goodness, Rat, how ever did you figure it all out?'
Well said anti: it's insiodious and ever-more pervasive, and yours is the kind of response it should be generating rather than fear and paranoia about being "found out."
Oh bugger: I *do* know how to spell insidious, honest.
One of the big responses now, after the Finnish killing fields, is that schools must be made safer through cctv style --- inspid I say.
That should be insipid
Waiting for CCTV a Becket play?
And of course, when CCTV cameras are installed, they are more often than not inoperative when most needed.
It's not more technology we need, but a better culture, and more human awareness of the danger signals of psychopathy.
Anticant : whatever next.
Technology and culture are surely linked in a less than black and white way.
This is not you.
Wake up there in the back....
But another tack : some years back at an "educational" establishment one girlfriend was thrown out from her studies. Her crime? She did not report to the administration that her boyfriend was on the weed.
Long story short. I was asked to help. I tried and managed to reverse that judgement at the board level.
The big boss man never forgave me.
Guess who got it next.
No regrerts
Always hated creeps and spies and I take my hat off to your sentiments me old Anticreep.
We prefer to keep this grisly real-life stuff out of the Burrow, which is a refuge of frolic and fantasy for world-weary Snuggers. But occasionally Anticant's fury at the post-Orwellian age we live in which he regularly expresses in the Arena and on others' blogs erupts here too.
The key trigger is bullshitting Blair's infamous pronouncement that civil liberties were all very well, but belong to 'another age' than this of the [phoney] War on Terror. This fatuous comment has opened the floodgates for the nefarious activities of the bullfrogging jobsworths and sinister snooping creeps who infest the brave new world of GordiBroon and now have over 360 legitimate powers of entry into private homes.
Did you notice recently that schoolchildren at some schools are being fingerprinted WITHOUT THEIR PARENTS' KNOWLEDGE and have to provide an impression before they are allowed to borrow books from the library?
This sort of thing makes Anticant want to vomit. He did not become Hero of the Year by twiddling his thumbs - in a small though effective way he interfered in history [see forthcoming post on this topic in the Arena]. It's high time we all did, and sent these barmy Big Brothers packing.
[End of message from Anarchistic Anti.]
Go for it, Anti !!
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