ChristopherWhite.info

A while back, I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Identity and Passport Service, asking how many ways there are that they know of in which it is possible to compromise the security or integrity of the proposed ID card scheme.

I mentioned their reply here, when they claimed that disclosing their strategies and tactics for dealing with fraud would not be in the public interest. Naturally, I requested an internal review of their decision, on the quite reasonable grounds that I didn’t ask for their strategies to deal with fraud: I asked simply for a number.

Following this internal review, the IPS now claim to have misread my original request, and that they “do not hold information on the number of ways it may be possible to compromise the integrity of the proposed identity card scheme”.

Spot the subtle difference.

They deny holding information on the number of ways in which compromising the ID card may be possible; I asked for the number of ways in which they know it to be possible.

It’s not actually possible for them not to hold the information that I did request. At risk of starting to sound like Donald Rumsfeld:

Either they know of ways to compromise ID-card security, or they do not. If they do, then they must therefore know of x ways to do this. If they do not, then they know of zero ways, which means they still know of the number ways – zero. Else they are claiming not to know whether they know of possible security issues.

Question: are they genuinely this stupid, or are they doing it on purpose?

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Oh, what a freedom-loving country we are.

First some poor sod gets put on the sex offenders’ register for having sex with a bicycle in the privacy of his own hotel room.

Then an unfortunate woman, Samina Malik, gets banged up for writing shite poetry. Alright, shite poetry about terrorism:

On a mirror were found the words “Lyrical Terrorist” and on one piece of paper she had written: “The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom, the need to go increases second by second.”

In her poems she wrote about killing heathens, adding: “Kafirs your time will come soon, and no one will save you from your doom.”

In all probability she’s as mad as a bag of wasps, and there’s every reason to keep an eye on her. But given that she hasn’t actually done anything, prison seems a bit extreme.

I’m hiding my copy of Paradise Lost.

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I don’t normally write posts about humorous search terms.

But to the person who stumbled across this site by googling “computers web internet”: welcome to the modern world.

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Andrew Mueller:

“[Bob Marley’s] canon is bong-addled nonsense from soup to nuts, much of it barely elevated nursery rhymes: whenever one hears, again, him riffing about being “iron, like a lion, in Zion”, one braces for the shout out to his mate Brian, with his tie on.”

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“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more, nor less.”
– Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass.

There’s a lot of that going on in the argument over Andrew Anthony’s book, one of many questioning what’s happened to “liberal values”.

This post of Gary’s (synopsis: “What the hell is a liberal anyway?”) pretty much speaks for me too, and has attracted a monumentally stupid comment, which I’ve just spotted is exactly the same as a comment on the blog to which Gary links.

“Liberals are socialists”, it says, and instantly pushes my rage button.

What the commenter presumably means is that in the US people say “liberal” when they largely mean “socialist”. But calling one thing another thing doesn’t make it so, no matter what Humpty Dumpty might say. It’s like Newspeak, only dimmer.
Sunny Hundal — despite being one of Comment Is Free’s best contributors — seems to be having similar difficulty. In this latest piece, he writes:

“To be socially liberal, in my view, is to be more mindful of compassion and empathy for others. On the basis of that compassion we choose to make lifestyle choices (taking public transport, boycotting Nestle, going vegetarian, donating to charity for example) and do our bit.”

That’s what I’d label “crustyism” rather than liberalism.

For instance, of the examples that Hundal gives I only take public transport, and then only when I have to. Yet on the Politcal Compass test I come in at around (-1.5, -6):

(Click to make image bigger. The dot’s in the bottom-let quadrant.)

“Liberal values”, if we must define them, boil down to: (a) not telling people what to do, and (b) not accepting being told what to do. Or as Tim puts it: “Being liberal is to agree with JS Mill: freedom and liberty are the things policy should encourage, to the point that people should have as much of both as they can manage without actually popping.”

The rest — the generally Being Nice espooused by Hundal, etc — might be associated with certain expressions of liberalism in Left-ish circles, but to claim that they’re the same thing is doubleplusungood.

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Khaled Diab is rapidly becoming one of my favorite contributors to Comment Is Free¹. And on his personal blog², I rather liked this, following a debate with some sort of fundamentalist in the Finsbury Park area:

He conceded that I had a point. Depressed by the state of sexual liberty in people’s minds, I cheered myself up by with the thought that I’d dropped a small sex bomb into their cosy bigotry. Ahh, when the sexual revolution comes, they’ll realise that making love makes the world a better place.

Lessons in how to talk to those with Conviction there. Perhaps, should Andy and I ever again stop for a late-night chat with Christian evangelists they won’t tell us how much they’d like to kill us.
_ _ _

1 With apologies to the estimable Dave Hill
2 On which it would appear that I disagree with Mr Diab about Borat.

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This is thoroughly, grotesquely, stupid.

“An Australian man was denied permission to board a connecting flight within Australia unless he removed the T-shirt titled “World’s #1 Terrorist” with a picture of U.S. President George W. Bush.”

Becaue it’s a security risk and because it might offend people, apparently.

a) No it isn’t.

b) So fucking what?

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Channel 4 race row: version 2.

“Channel 4 has become embroiled in a new race row with scores of complaints to Ofcom about racist comments made on its new reality show Shipwrecked, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

“Lucy Buchanan, an 18-year-old public schoolgirl from York, praised slavery and said she would get a black person to do her ’slave work’.”

So reality TV actually shows some reality and people complain about it. Bizarre.

Some people will have views that others don’t like. That’s no reason not to broadcast them. Besides which:

“A Channel 4 spokeswoman said the comments - which were filmed five months ago - came from a ‘very young woman’ who had led a ‘closeted existence’ and that, after interacting with the other contestants, she changes her view.

“‘Other contestants reprimand her and say they disagree with her,’ the spokeswoman said. ‘Over the course of the series it becomes clear that her views change. It is quite a justified portrayal.’ “

John Milton would have approved, I’m sure.

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Keith Allen, for Channel 4 documentary Tourette de France, promises to find out what makes the programme’s subjects tic.

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