Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/14/greenpeace-and-baroness.html
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This is the new normal. The nerds and the weirdos have been bewailing internet privacy and the danger of centralized data and how INFOSEC was for everyone, honest, for ages and people have laughed at them—at us, really. And now? Now this:
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/infrastructures.png
No government that’s not on the other side of a political singularity will refrain from doing this if it is possible. We’ve made it possible.
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Do the Met Police have a deeply creepy sounding unit for everything; or just most things?
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The Met Police is one of the reasons I’m glad not to live in London these days. The answer is “probably yes”. For some reason, they seem to have a particular obsession with spying on anyone of remotely left wing views. Given that London is the most Labour part of the country, they are never short of work.
The big mistake was to make them head of the national police as well as responsible for London. But that’s our problem as a country, just like the political and financial capital being in the same place.
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All that and we have given them extraordinary new powers.
Of course it’s not enough so they want more, more, more…
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And as the NSA has shown us all what they don’t get by hook they’ll get by crook. Laws are nice but, apparently, if you don’t feel like it you can just do it and nobody gets persecuted and nobody is allowed to care, not in public at least. After all, caring about your civil liberties is giving aid and comfort to the Terrori…Russ…Emmanuel Goldstein. And you wouldn’t want that now would you?
As I like to remind people it wasn’t even Trump or the Tories who brought it all about, either. Totalitarian horror is a bipartisan issue.
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When I worked for Solihull Council there was a position open for an “Anti-social Behaviour Officer”. That job sounded like a hoot.
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Orwell was depressingly prescient.
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This is very much off topic; but whenever I hear/read aristocratic titles my skin crawls.
Is there any way this Baroness Jenny Jones could prevent the use of this title? Seems wrong to me that the Green Party allows the use of feudal titles in their ranks. As long as the H of L exists I guess the Green Party has an interest in being represented there, but still…
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So was Brunner.
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Weirdly, petty aristocratic titles don’t bother me much; “Baroness” just means “woman with a big house” to me.
The ones that do bug me, however, are the unearned faux-virtue titles. “The Right Honourable”, “The Most Reverend”, “Your Excellency” etc. Fuck that.
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Fight back! Grant yourself one or two!
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It’s just like Friedman said–the world really is flat!
While I don’t like the feudal titles much, I think the bigger problem is that people get appointed to the House of Lords for life or inherit the position from a parent.
It doesn’t even mean that anymore. I don’t think Doreen Lawrence has a big house. She is also no stranger to being surveilled.
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