Where Worlds Collide

Bruce Schneier in The Guardian comes up with one explaination as to why photographers seem to be hassled more and more when trying to take pictures in public places out of misplaced fear of ‘terrorists’

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it’s a movie-plot threat.

A movie-plot threat is a specific threat, vivid in our minds like the plot of a movie. You remember them from the months after the 9/11 attacks: anthrax spread from crop dusters, a contaminated milk supply, terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats, from the news, and from actual movies and television shows. These movie plots resonate in our minds and in the minds of others we talk to. And many of us get scared.

At to this that many of the sorts of people employed as security guards are not exactly the sharpest tools of the box, are poorly-paid, poorly-trained, and recruited through a process that fails to weed out small-minded bullies, it’s not surprising that some photographers get hassled.

And I’m not willing to listen to the sheeple who bleat “it’s better to be safe than sorry” when authority figures overreact to largely imaginary terrorist threats.  If we do nothing, our freedoms will be slowly salami-sliced away.  If when they came for the railway enthusiasts with cameras and you did nothing, what will happen when they come for you?

Charlie Stross mixes E Gary Gygax with the US presidential election, and gives us D&D 1st edition Monster Manual stats for the three principle characters:

John McCain (Demon Prince of Republicans.) (Lesser God.)

FREQUENCY: Very rare
NO APPEARING: 1
ARMOUR CLASS: -7
MOVE: 3″ (72″ per flight sector on the campaign jet)
HIT DICE: 200 hit points (But first you have to defeat 4d8 Secret Service Agents)
% IN LAIR: 0%
TREASURE TYPE: All your NATO base are belong to us!

And it gets a lot better after that.  Go and read the rest of it!

Not only was it a setback for space exploration (yes, really!), but is also responsible for the rise of young-earth creationism, and innumeracy. So says Ken MacLeod.  Talk about the law of unintended consequences.

J Michael Neal has a great post about the importance of trust in economics, using the current mortgage crisis as an example of how American capitalism has gone off the rails.

The switch from the concern of corporations with various stakeholders to the approach where profit maximization was the overriding, and in many cases, only, goal, did drastically increase the efficiency of the economy. It did so at a cost, however, and that cost was trust.

At its most bleeding heart, this has been a critical change in the employer/employee relationship. There are all sorts of euphemisms for it, but the idea that your boss was only going to employ you so long as he didn’t have some other way to get the job done for more profit is corrosive. It eliminates the trust on the part of the employee that his employer has his interests in mind.

Read the whole thing.

Y’know, Dick, I know time is running out, but if you run those industrial-sized shredders too long, they can overload the circuits and start a fire. A word to the wise.

***Dave on that fire in Dick Cheney’s office.

The Blair regime has got this one down to a fine art, and they’ve done it again.

Look what we missed yesterday: The cost of the ID card scheme has gone up another £600m in six months. Yep, to a new total of five and a half billion, just so that Big Brother can stop you in the street saying “Your papers please”. (Link from NRT)

The Stalinist thug John Reid is to leave the Home Office when Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister. This is the man who may have renounced belief in the Marxist labour theory of value, but still dreams of turning Britain into an police state modelled on East Germany. This nasty piece of work can’t be gone soon enough as far as I’m concerned.

Whether the dour Scotsman will replace him with anyone less authoritarian has to be seen.

J Michael Neal has a longish post on the psychology of capitalism.

The idea that the system is designed to reward greed is the reason I find the rabid adoption of free market capitalism by the religious right as so mind boggling. Logically, one would think that the promotion of sin would turn them away from such a system, as they are usually easy to rile up about anything that they think promotes sin. So, it’s strange.

…

I got into a debate with a religious conservative one time, asking the very question of how he reconciles the New Testament with Friedrich Hayek. I didn’t think that the answer I got was very coherent, but it revolved around the idea that people must be free to sin in order to make the choice to be saved. This is probably true, but then why promote a system that makes the sin more tempting and the redemption less likely. I still don’t get it.

My response would be to point out a recurring theme from Slacktivist, the idea that large sections of the American Religious Right have fallen into deep heresy, and preach a value system that has little or nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Despite Margaret Thatcher’s complete misreading of the meaning behind parable of the Good Samaritan, there’s not much about supply side economics in the Gospels.

I’ve on record as describing American’s so-called ‘Conservative Movement’ as ‘the bastard offspring of Cyrus Scofield and Ayn Rand’. Two cults that ought to be completely incompatible.

No, not that Big Brother. I’m referring to Tony Blair’s galactic database which will merge all the data that exists on every one of us. Ian P tells a horror story about the likely result.

Tony Blair thinks that creating a super database for everyone in Britain is a good idea, then ponder that combined with all his new laws lets look at the story of Average Joe Soap, clean, honest living man.

When Joe Soap arrived at his local Jobcentre to look for work, he had little idea of the nightmare that was about to unfold.

What’s scary is that the story seems disturbingly plausible. The best-case outcome of this project is it ends up wasting billions of pounds of taxpayer’s money without ever actually working. The worst case scenario is, well, just read the thing.

Link from Charlie Stross, who adds

But remember: it could always be worse! We could have a BNP government instead of caring, sharing, New Labour. But of course, if you’re innocent you’ve got nothing to fear, as John Reid never tires of telling us. Sleep tight.

Yes, before anyone says it, I do know Ian P seems to believe 7/7 was a false-flag operation. I think Ian P is wrong on that count. But it doesn’t mean his story of Joe Soap should be dismissed as paranoid fantasy.

So Saddam is dead.

I don’t agree with the death penalty, regardless of how horrible his crimes have been. It’s never acceptable to take life in cold blood, and as far as I’m concerned that’s a moral absolute for which there can be no exceptions. There is nothing that his death will solve that wouldn’t have been solved by life imprisonment. Not that he deserves any tears. Norm Geras thinks much the same thing.

Saddam should not have been hanged. He should not have been, because judicial execution is not a morally defensible practice. Apart from other reasons, it brutalizes the community that inflicts it.

And Saddam should not have been hanged now, before having to come before a court to answer for his greatest crimes.

As for those greater crimes, Jim Henley doesn’t mince his words.

[T]he US and its Iraqi allies chose to try Saddam on one of his relatively minor crimes because if they did so they could get him safely hung before they had to try him for the major ones, the gas attacks and massacres that happened during The Years of Playing Footsie with the United States. The Dujail reprisals were a war crime, no doubt about it, a bigger sham of justice than Saddam’s own trial, by two orders of magnitude. They were also the sort of war crime that people like Ralph Peters and a hundred other pundits and parapundits think the United States should be committing. Every time you read a complaint about “politically correct rules of engagement” you are reading someone who would applaud a Dujail-level slaughter if only we were to perpetrate it. Those are the people who are happiest of all about tonight’s execution. Smells like — victory! It’s the pomander they don against the stench.

But there’s no point in accusing the Freepi of hypocrisy; that only works for liberals or traditional conservatives, people who possess actual moral principles, and have some sense of shame. This doesn’t apply to the wingnut right. All they recognise is power. Just like Saddam himself.