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Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested

The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.

Born with peak oil in mind? Or reading too much into it?

Remined me of these:

You could fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time, said Abraham Lincoln, but you could not fool all the people all the time. Yet for such crucial purposes as bringing about a war or exploiting an economic situation, this was manifestly a quite disastrous degree of foolability.

Behind them all the reader feels the sprawling uneasy presence of that poor invertebrate mass deity of theirs, the Voter, easily roused to panic and frantic action against novel, bold or radical measures, very amenable to patriotic claptrap, very easily scared and maddened into war, and just as easily baffled to distrust and impotence by delays, side issues, and attacks on the personalities of decisive people he might otherwise have trusted.

H. G. Wells, the Shape of Things to Come

How very pertinent. (Are you a fan of George Orwell too?)

GD wrote:How very pertinent. (Are you a fan of George Orwell too?)

yes 1984?

isenhand wrote:

GD wrote:How very pertinent. (Are you a fan of George Orwell too?)

yes 1984?

You mean 2004!

GD wrote:Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested

The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.

Born with peak oil in mind? Or reading too much into it?

More general I think, not just Peak Oil.

Certainly born with the thought of having to act very quickly without the nicelties of the law to act as a drag in the even to a major disaster.

Think two fully laden jumbo jets colliding over central London ...something of that order or greater. ... or maybe a one meter lump of rock spotted on two or three days notice incoming from space at 25.000mph at the heart of lLondon . A Tunguska event over Tottenham- entirely concievable.

There are some 'worst case scenarios' that are imaginable where the govt has to be able to act first and then argue about the legality afterwards - and those are where major loss of life can be avoided only by immediate action. If you dont have that in place then you end up with a situation similar to New Orleans. People drowning while those in charge at city, state and federal level were arguing about who was responsible for what, and stopping things moving till certain papers had been signed.Result, days of delay. Bureaucratic and legal constipation leading to loss of life. Bonkers. Appointing idiot cronies (incapable even of running an Arab horse association) to positions of authority running a major office of state didn't help either.

Those threats aren't specific to this time. So why now? Why push them through labelled "anti-terrorism" etc... ?

isenhand wrote:yes 1984?

Interesting that you should like 1984 isenhand.

Here is a section from Part 2, Chapter 5:

"In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'."

Perhaps this is relevant here.

Bozzio wrote:

isenhand wrote:yes 1984?

Interesting that you should like 1984 isenhand.

Always been interested in things like that.

Bozzio wrote: Here is a section from Part 2, Chapter 5:

"In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'."

Perhaps this is relevant here.

Perhaps it is

Another thing that could also be relevant is Animal Farm, where the pigs turn in to humans in the end.

GD wrote:Those threats aren't specific to this time. So why now? Why push them through labelled "anti-terrorism" etc... ?

Is this a rhetorical question?

The point I'm trying to make is why do this now? Why has Blair's govt shoved through a raft of legislation to clamp down on civil liberties? This wasn't necessary when, for example the IRA were bombing the UK, so why now?

I think they are getting ready for when British folk find out what's really going on.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politi ... 152047.ece

Police hold mother-of-three for reading 'Independent' outside Downing Street

Flippin 'eck!

Watch over your shoulder, you might get nicked for reading this thread!

Sorry to revive this thread but I'm new to this site.

Can you get the spelling right please.

Its BLEH!

Pronounced with a hint of disgust in the voice.

Bozzio wrote:

isenhand wrote:yes 1984?

Interesting that you should like 1984 isenhand.

Here is a section from Part 2, Chapter 5:

"In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'."

Perhaps this is relevant here.

I think Animal Farm is just as relevant as 1984 today, it turns out Orwell was aiming AF at the West just as much as the USSR. This from Chomsky's 1997 talk on 'What makes the mainstream media mainstream':

If you've read George Orwell's Animal Farm which he wrote in the mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It was a big hit.

Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later. Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about "Literary Censorship in England" and what it says is that obviously this book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and its totalitarian structure. But he said England is not all that different. We don't have the KGB on our neck, but the end result comes out pretty much the same. People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.

He talks a little, only two sentences, about the institutional structure. He asks, why does this happen? Well, one, because the press is owned by wealthy people who only want certain things to reach the public. The other thing he says is that when you go through the elite education system, when you go through the proper schools in Oxford, you learn that there are certain things it's not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite institutions and if you don't adapt to that, you're usually out. Those two sentences more or less tell the story.

http://www.medialens.org/articles/the_a ... media.html