I have yet to post anything on Syria, and what the international response should be to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons. This omission is mainly because I was away when the House of Commons voted on whether to join in with any military action, and I missed all the debates over the morality of intervention. By the time I began consuming media again after my time in a communications blind spot, the conversation had become about whether David Cameron and Ed Miliband’s political fortunes had been helped or hindered by the parliamentary vote. I was coming to the issue with fresh eyes and ears, and such parochial analysis felt incredibly crass and wholly beside the point.
For the past ten days, there has been much discussion about how our collective democratic experience of the Iraq war in 2003 has affected our political judgements a decade later. Clearly the sense of betrayal that many of us felt back then still remains. The brutal aftermath in Iraq, and our lengthy, corrosive presence in Afghanistan has made everyone wary of more military action in the Middle East. Continue reading
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This blog has moved servers. Thanks Lucid Networks for a fantastic service since 2005. Hello Bytemark, who support the Open Rights Group.
The switch meant a blogging hiatus while the nameservers were changed. I have also taken the opportunity to update the WordPress Theme to Twenty Thirteen.
Normal service will now resume. There’s lots to talk about.
An interesting comment from the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, at the Edinburgh Book Festival:
Christians in Britain and the US who claim that they are persecuted should “grow up” and not exaggerate what amounts to feeling “mildly uncomfortable”, according to Rowan Williams, who last year stepped down as archbishop of Canterbury after an often turbulent decade.
“When you’ve had any contact with real persecuted minorities you learn to use the word very chastely,” he said. “Persecution is not being made to feel mildly uncomfortable. ‘For goodness sake, grow up,’ I want to say.”
True persecution was “systematic brutality and often murderous hostility that means that every morning you wonder if you and your children are going to live through the day”. He cited the experience of a woman he met in India “who had seen her husband butchered by a mob”.
This blog has previously tried to track examples of the language of persecution being appropriated by interest groups. Is implicit in the whole Winterval bollocks, and most complaints about political correctness equate someone disagreeing with you, or telling you they think you are an unpleasant person, with genuine free speech violations.
I’ve also noted how its funny that everyone, everywhere, seems to think that they’re culture is under threat. This is born out of a lazy solopsism, where people percieve only change in, and criticism of, their own culture, whilst assuming (incorrectly) that all other cultures are monolithic and stable.
Straight Pride are a ridiculous campaign group with excellent graphic design. In a bang-on-trend website in the ‘scroll’ style that has become popular this year, they put forward a case for why ‘straight rights’ need defending.
Oliver Hotham, a student and a journalist, sent Straight Pride UK a list of questions, and they responded with a ‘press release’. When he published the answers, along with a couple of questions that were not answered, Straight Pride complained to WordPress (who host Oliver’s blog) to take the posts down. As Oliver explains in a follow-up post, this was extremely bizarre behaviour by Straight Pride UK. If you are having an e-mail correspondence with someone who claims to be a journalist, who has contacted you for the purposes of an interview there is no expectation of privacy in your communications… especially if you send them a document marked ‘press release’. Continue reading
How should a parents keep tabs on their kids?
On the technology site GigaOM, Matthew Ingram has posted two of a series of three articles about his “experiences of snooping on my kids and their online behaviour over a period of years.” He installed a ‘keylogger’ on his daughter’s computer everything she typed was e-mailed to him. When he confessed this to friends, they were shocked.
Is such parental behaviour justified? Children have fewer civil rights than adults (they cannot get married or vote) and its unreasonable to expect that they enjoy the same level of privacy as an adult – Parents should be aware of their medical conditions, for example. However, the transition from childhood, to the place where you take responsibility for yourself, is long and grey (see a previous post where I recommended aligning the age of religion with the age of consent).
When teenagers are concerned, NSA-style eavesdropping feels creepy. I think having secrets is part of what makes us a rounded and mature human being, and accepting that there are things that you do not know about your child is part of the parental process of ‘letting go’. However, much of their discourse takes place in public and semi-public social media spaces. It is less creepy to register an account and ‘follow’ a tween’s online discussions. I think that even doing so under an alias would be acceptable. What better illustration of the pitfalls in online discourse can there be, than discovering that the kid with the cat avatar you’ve been discussing Zac Efron with, was actually Your Mum?! Continue reading