Amerika

On Monday the Guardian carried a letter from Nick Gibson who told how he had taken over a pub in Islington, London, and had to apply for a new licence, which required the approval of a number of organisations, including the police.

“I was stunned,” he wrote, “to find that the police were prepared to approve – ie not fight – our licence on condition that we installed CCTV capturing the head and shoulders of everyone coming into the pub, to be made available to them on request.”

CCTV has its purposes but the idea that someone going for a pint must give up their privacy by having their image taken and stored is repellent to all notions of a free society.

The Guardian

I don’t think you understand. Society is organic.

That means that if you and your urban liberal friends figure everyone else is like you, e.g. not committing crimes, you are denying the fact that there’s a huge population of yobs, ghetto dwellers, chavs, defectives and Homo Erectus hybrids out there who commit crime whenever the opportunity arises.

Because you defended their rights just as strongly as your own, you’ve now got a society wracked by crime. Yet you still demand the cops solve these crimes. How are they going to keep herd on this huge population? Why, by creating a surveillance society, because otherwise they’d need one cop for every thirty people.

Your insistence on rights for all is what has caused this problem, and now you complain? Good luck, because everyone else is more afraid of the criminals than the government. You didn’t read Plato, I take it. He points out how tyrants always are selected by The People, when The People’s desire for “freedom” and “independence” causes them to do chaotic things and make society a hive harbor for parasites and criminals.

See, dude, you’re the cause of the problems you whine about. How’s that make you feel?

The People wanted freedom from any kind of laws regulating their behavior, outside of the obvious no murder, no rape, kind of thing.

To defend this, they demanded equal and stringent rights for all — for all! — and forced governments to acquiesce.

Governments backed off, and now we have an emboldened criminal element who commit crimes whenever the opportunity arises.

And when that happens, regular citizens complain.

There cannot be enough cops when 1/5 of a population decides it’s time to steal something every other Saturday night.

So they turn to surveillance. Crimes are on the rise, cops stay the same, so we get CCTV.

Who made this happen? As always, The People are the cause of the problems of which they complain.

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And now in the USA, we have another story of interest:

Before Austin police officers click on the handcuffs, they may make a request that could save certain suspects a trip to jail: provide a roadside fingerprint sample.

Around March 1 about 100 officers will begin using mobile fingerprint scanners to help identify suspects in crimes, from felonies down to traffic offenses when motorists don’t have their licenses.

Austin police plan to use the devices when investigating a range of crimes, particularly cases in which suspects could be cited and released but do not have valid IDs. Such offenses include running stoplights and possessing small amounts of marijuana.

In those cases, Eells said, officers would seek voluntary fingerprint samples and then generally issue citations if a person’s identity is confirmed. Officers, who will receive special training on how to explain the devices to suspects and to seek their consent, probably will warn that a refusal could lead to an arrest, Eells said.

The Statesman

This story is probably baffling to anyone from outside Austin or who is not cynical about Austin.

Austin is the Texas oasis of liberalism and tolerance. Almost everyone here votes democratic; people are notoriously tolerant of every type of action.

Problem: that leads to parasites, like a large homeless population, a large population of “moneyless” crusties who get relief checks from Dad, and a huge number of itinerant workers who drift through for the easy scores and easy crimes.

Did I mention that since the University of Texas, most of the Texas government, and most of the USA government’s presence in Texas is there? Yes: most people are working government jobs, or indirectly supporting those government jobs.

In other words, it’s a socialist paradise, except for the fact that crimes keep increasing. That’s because the city is now home to almost one million people, and at that point, anonymity becomes a fact of life — and so crimes skyrocket.

Specifically, crimes of vandalism and petty theft or mugging by homeless, violent, drug/alcohol-addicted people.

So… tolerance (of dysfunction) leads to dysfunction which leads to the opposite and equal reaction from the citizens, which is demanding fingerprint readers to get the bums off the street.

A judge in Canada has ruled that Internet users have no expectation of privacy and police can use track people through Internet protocols without warrants.

Ruling in a child pornography possession case, Leitch found that the Canadian Charter does not provide a “reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding subscriber information retained by Internet service providers.

Police asked Bell Canada in 2007 for subscriber information on an IP address used by someone who had allegedly accessed child pornography. Bell provided the requested information without inquiring whether police had a search warrant.

“There is no confidentiality left on the Internet if this ruling stands,” James Stribopoulos, a law professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, said.

UPI

When there was confidentiality on the internet, pedophiles proliferated. Tolerate a bad behavior, and you get more of it. This is why liberty leads to tyranny and a third approach (instead of pro-government/pro-liberty) is needed: aim for a goal, and reward those who strive for that goal.

From the The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions department:

Game wardens had put a hidden camera in a tree, pointed at VanKesteren’s soybean fields, after receiving a complaint about protected birds getting caught in predator traps. The wardens had to walk or drive off a road, past a hedgerow, and travel about a quarter mile through one field and past a second hedgerow. VanKesteren said it appears they cut a swath through some brush to get to the tree.

In late 2006, someone – VanKesteren doesn’t know who – called the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries to report seeing a protected bird caught in a trap on VanKesteren’s farmland.

The officers had to walk at least 400 yards across one field to get to a hedgerow where VanKesteren had set some traps. The area where the traps were set isn’t visible from the road.

The Virginian

None of us wants protected birds to die.

But we also don’t want agents of the state looking for a way to bust us, especially when the real danger to protected birds is the expansion of cities and suburbs, not rural farmers.

However, those housing projects make us money so… let’s bust the farmer.

People act like the surveillance society comes about because big evil government decides, at the whim of Satan, to do it.

The truth is that it comes about when we’re so careless as a society that we allow destructive acts to become the norm.

Tags: civilization life cycle