The End of Justice

“These final amendments should now resolve all right thinking citizens of Middle England that this is a sensible, worthwhile Bill which they would give their support to.”

He admitted the plans to hold more hearings in national security cases behind closed doors in so-called closed material procedures were not ideal, but said they offered “the only practical means of delivering justice where otherwise there would be none”.

So saith Kenneth Clarke, just prior to the passing of the Justice and Security Bill in the House of Commons last night. David Cameron and other senior ministers were drafted in at the end of a four-hour debate to ensure the amendments were defeated.

Providing the entire Bill is passed formally later this week, it will mean that some civil cases involving national security issues could be heard in secret for the first time to protect sensitive information.

Existing terrorism statutes under RIPA have been used to prosecute people for putting too much rubbish in their bins, so there is no reason not to believe that this new statute will not see good, innocent people being gaoled on the whim of the CPS, with the gleeful complicity of police, parliamentarians and judges. This is, after all, an excellent way of getting rid of dissidents without the pesky requirement to show any evidence.

Kafkaesque might appear a fancy-pants literary term, but it's rapidly threatening to become a state of being in the UK.

For (Y)our Own Good: Denormalization

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. C.S. Lewis,  God in the Dock

And of all tyrannies, the most successful are the most covert, which work by stealth, through divide-and-rule, setting the majority against any chosen minority who are deemed 'dangerous' to the body politic.

The World Health Organisation's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control contains a central plank of global policy requiring signatories to engage in national activities which denormalize smoking, ie:

Denormalization strategies seek to change the social norms concerning tobacco consumption and exposure to tobacco smoke by informing the public about their negative consequences on health, society, the economy and the environment.

The programme to denormalize smokers has been so successful that the comment threads of mainstream newspapers all too frequently contain such gems as these:

33 Tartancult,
23/09/2011 00:54:29
I don't want smokers banned, I want them dead.
Cremation would be fitting

 Smokers are weak minded defectives. There's also plenty of fat smokers too. If I were consul and you smoked in public and/or your smoke was anywhere near a normal person you would be badly beaten.
Gordon Akman | Broadbeach - June 10, 2011, 10:49AM

JFW, 03/02/2011 16:43:33 I do hope never to be treated by an NHS worker who is stupid enough to be a smoker; it's worrying that some people that you might be forced to rely on in an emergency have such limited brain-power.

We could always just change the law to allow people to legally shoot dead anyone caught with a cig between their lips outside the four walls of their home, as long as it's not a rented home or presently under mortgage, since it's not technically their home. If people find a bullet through their head whenever they light up, they'll not light up. Simples. Probably won't happen. I can dream though. God, I'd have a field day if that ever came to pass...
- Ken, Kent, 6/4/2012 16:28

Breaking the smoking ban should carry the death penalty. Smoking is suicide and you will burn in hell.
Sent via tellyougov.com 16:48 on 4th March 2011

Never censored, although roundly condemned by other commentators, substituting 'smoker' for any other identifiable minority would constitute 'hate speech'. These statements are often attached, not to stories related to calls for a relaxation to bans, but to the fates of smokers who were forced outside by bans, defying bans, or the victims of denormalization itself.

Telegraph
Mrs Moss, 33, who had been a care assistant since she was 16, was found stabbed to death on after a frenzied attack at the back of St George’s Hospital in Hornchurch, east London.
    Friends said she had left the building to smoke a cigarette at around 10.30am on Thursday. Her body was found half an hour later by a woman walking her dog.

Eastbourne Herald
A 12-YEAR-OLD boy hanged himself with his school tie after a teacher caught him with cigarettes.
   David Arnett came into his Cavendish School classroom smelling of smoke on December 15. Teacher Joanna-Clea Burns told him off, confiscated the cigarettes and a lighter and gave him 24 hours to tell his parents.
   David told a friend the pain was ‘like a knife in his stomach’ during the walk home to Longland Road after school, and spoke about killing himself.

X Nomavayi

Boy, nine, died after his mother set him and his brother on fire as a punishment for smoking
A mother who killed her nine-year-old son by setting him on fire as punishment for smoking has been sentenced to 11 years in prison.
    Noluthando Nomavayi , 37, from Delft in Cape Town drenched her two sons with paraffin and set them alight when she discovered them smoking cigarettes in May 2011.

When socially-sanctioned hatred of a behaviour and a product tips over into hatred of the people using that product, no one should be surprised.

Aphorism #3

The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt, after all, was safe – that the god in the sanctuary was a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms.

               H. L Mencken

The Leaning Tower of Babel (b)

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted. (Franz Kafka)

'Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!' (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451)

 Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this. . . . The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. Thus boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand. (Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or 1843)

Those who teach sacred texts as the word of God often dishonor the wisdom of our ancestors and distract us from self-awareness.  The stories are often cautionary tales about human ego - calcified into commandments, bones without flesh, which distort, misinform and mislead those with good intentions.  Examples include the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel, and are found in all religions.  These are about human nature - not God. (Earon Davis)

I am pleased to inform you that the Basic Skills Center is henceforth, to be known as the Center for Developmental Education. Dr. Andreach, Coordinator of the Basic Skill Center will be known as Coordinator of Developmental Education. Increasingly, colleges are dropping the basic skills connotation that goes with the kind of center we have established and are looking to the developmental aspects since they have more of a positive connotation than do basic skills. (Monmouth County Council)

 

State of the Art

Stock-taking. Or taking stock.

As ever the brain runs faster than the hand. So a pile of partially completed drawings and a queue of half-written blog posts.

Breathe.

Thanks, Claire... I think.

Seeking consolidation in one direction (for now, today, this week), the PLAGUE DOCTORS WITHOUT A PLAGUE (LOOKING FOR THE DYING) have taken centre stage. And that's ok. Groping after a visual language for the 'monstrosity' of the masses and the monstrosity of tyranny the plague doctor is a fertile image, combining a legacy of courage and folly and horror (imagine that looming over your sickbed), with older resonances of carrion birds, righteous martyrdom and scientific knowledge in the midst of social chaos. So, as of right now, there is a set of 6 drawings sketched out, all featuring the same Plague Doctor-esque characters, all of which will get priority in getting finished.

The moths and grotesque children and clones and barcoded people and all other works-in-progress will go on the back-burner.

And now back to finishing those drafted blog posts....

Head/Desk

“Sitting is so incredibly prevalent that we don’t even question how much we’re doing it ,” Merchant told the TED audience. “And because everyone else is doing it, it doesn’t even occur to us that it’s not OK. In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation.”

Soft Paternalism...

...steals freedom of mind as well as of body, and is thus more insidious. To contest its grasp can be like fighting fog.

Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

Slavoj Žižek, How To Read Lacan