Posts filed under 'Rants'
Watching Last night’s Question Time discussion of bed & breakfast owners’ rights, or lack thereof, to refuse entry to homosexual couples was very disturbing. The opinion of a sizeable portion of the panel and audience seemed to be that the rights of homosexuals was infringing on “the rights of Christians” who believe that same-sex relationships are wrong. They seem to be suggesting that, because of their religious views, they have the “right” to discriminate against others on the basis of their sexuality. From the number of comments on the QT site, they’re not alone. Did I miss the announcement that its now OK to be a bigot?
Lets consider another case: was the taxi driver who refused to allow a blind woman’s dog into his taxi simply using his “religious rights”? Would it be the “religious right” of someone belonging to the Nation of Islam to hang a sign in his B&B saying No Whites?
Clearly the answer to both of these is “no”. Showing tolerance and love to others, even those who are considered wrong or sinful, is written into the scripture of Christianity, Islam and many other major religions. As the article above says, Islamic scripture does not prohibit being near dogs and, according to the Muslim Council of Britain one must wash before praying. I realise that I don’t understand the intricacies of Islamic doctrine, but the fundamental point is that the taxi driver used his religion as an excuse, possibly because it would be easier for him to refuse the dog than to perform the required purification.
The same is true of any Christian refusing homosexuals lodging in a B&B. I seem to remember the Bible has a lot of stuff in it about loving your neigbour (like Matthew 5:44-47, but thats only one example) – they’re using their religion as an excuse for not exercising their responsibilities as Christians to love their enemies as well as their friends.
Clearly, the rights of all humans should be upheld and the right not to be discriminated against (on the basis of their gender, race, sexuality or religious beliefs) is one of those fundamental rights. There is no basis in logic, law or even religious scripture itself for the “rights” of religious people to practise discrimination.
The one thing that a tolerant society cannot tolerate is intolerance.
December 1st, 2006
Just back from this year’s SuperComputing conference, which wasn’t as good as last year’s, but was still pretty good. Also, I thought I’d blog about being horribly jet-lagged and how unbearable it is to travel by plane, but after re-reading last year’s post, I really don’t have anything new to add!
So, instead, I’ll just make some short observations about Tampa, FL.
Firstly, Tampa is not like Seattle. Well, the buildings could probably have been transported from one to the other, brick by brick (if they weren’t all glass), and no-one would notice the difference. The street plan is a similar story, as there’s only so much you can do with a Cartesian grid.
On the other hand:
- No Starbucks! Absolutely none in the city centre and I only saw one (drive-through!) while on the bus to Busch Gardens. However, all the coffee places did “proudly brew Starbucks”.
- No McDonalds! Again, apart from one I saw while on the bus.
- In fact, there are very few shops in “downtown” Tampa at all. This might not be surprising, as it was 25 degrees in November, so its probably not a nice place to be in the summer. Everyone would rather be in the air-conditioned mega-mall(s?) in the suburbs.
- Plenty of homeless people, but they didn’t have the camping gear, like they did in Seattle. And fewer of them seemed to be totally crazy.
We had a little trip to Busch Gardens, which was pretty awesome. The rollercoasters there are pretty insane and scary – at least they were for me. There are also animals, but we went at night, so we didn’t see them. Also, Ybor City is worth a visit if you like bars, nightclubs or tattoos. It was clearly the centre of night-life in Tampa with lots of restaurants (Cuban, Colombian, even Greek), but its not in the “city centre”. According to our taxi driver, Thursday is the night to go, as all the students go out “half-naked and half-crocked”. So we did and had a few drinks, saw a fight get broken up by the police, but didn’t see an unusually large number of half-naked people. I guess thats what I see in a normal night out in the UK 
To be honest, I’m not sure I’d recommend Tampa for a holiday unless you were passing through for just day or two. The phrase “cultural wasteland” springs to mind, but I might be being unfair.
November 21st, 2006
It has been widely reported (here, here and here) that Accenture is subcontracting the remaining blame for the failure-to-be that is the NHS’s “Connecting for Health” project to CSC. My employer has outsourced all of the company’s IT, from cabling infrastructure to web management, to CSC and I can’t say that CSC’s involvement with the NHS fills me with joy. I’ll just post my CSC experiences…
Regularly, about once a week, someone in my department of forty will have their Windows profile overwitten or deleted for no apparent reason. You can see the expectation is that everyone will have theirs buggered about once a year, or more. What you have to do then is call the woefully mis-titled “Help Desk”, where someone who doesn’t really understand what they’re doing takes you through The Ring-Binder Of Questions in excruciating detail.
Maybe there are some people who call the help desk without having checked that their power, network and keyboard connections are plugged in. Maybe there are some people who aren’t sure whether this is what their desktop looked like yesterday, who don’t remember deleting all their e-mail. And I’m not saying this is easy – its really, really difficult to diagnose a problem on someone’s computer without actually being there. So, after about 15 minutes of pointless questions they give a reference number and send someone from the local office over.
Perhaps ironically, the CSC people from the local office are actually knowlegable and helpful. Its such a pity we don’t deal with them directly.
So, when one in forty patients are given the wrong drugs or the wrong operation, we’ll know to check that their catheter is plugged in correctly.
Sadly, I very much doubt that
October 1st, 2006
Why is my ADSL so flaky? Its really very, very annoying. Of course, the ADSL provider blames faults “on the customer premises” or BT. BT blames faults “on the customer premises” and the ADSL provider. So I guess it must be my fault, right?
I just wish there was some way of unambiguously identifying the fault. All I know at the moment is my ADSL modem doesn’t connect most of the time, bizarrely it seems to be fine once connected. So, it could be a software or hardware fault on the modem itself. Or in the wiring in my flat. Or in the wiring in the street. Or in the local exchange. How am I supposed to track this down without spending loads of money?
September 19th, 2006
There seems to be a lot of nonsense in the news recently. First off, there is the strange claim that magnets can create energy. Following close second, the claim that market forces are the best way to run a country is hidden within an article apparently about the lack / surplus of UK scientists.
Lets have a look at the perpetual motion machine ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H ^H marvellous new free energy invention. It is, of course, impossible to rule out, but it seems to run counter to at least 150 years of science and a good deal longer of observed natural law. This reminds me of the whole “cold fusion” thing. I guess its technically impossible to prove the first law of thermodynamics and what we’re seeing may be the first counterexample, which would be very exciting, but my cynicism is telling me (and some other people) that they’ve made some mistake; maybe they’re somehow extracting energy from the magnets or ambient (broadcast) electromagnetic waves. Anyway, hopefully it’ll be all sorted when their “jury” of 12 scientists is able to publish papers about it.
Moving on to the ill-thought-out scheme to extend the rule of market forces to every sector of society, which Ian quotes (maybe as a joke?). The central thesis of the article is that there is no shortage of UK scientists and we shouldn’t feel the need to “keep up” with the scientist-production of other countries any more than we’d keep up with the production of any other commodity, but seems to creep into the territory of extreme free-marketism. It ends with a couple of choice paragraphs, which I shall quote (with attribution totally to Jamie Whyte!) here:
Alas, the urge does overcome them when it comes to skills. Science degrees, like all degrees, are already massively subsidised. Students pay well under half the cost of providing a science degree, even though they receive well over half its benefits. So there is almost certainly a surplus of British scientists. Which would explain why scientists earn relatively little – a fact that the science lobby always complains about, except when it is too busy bemoaning the shortage of scientists.
Right. So we shouldn’t have state schools (school kids pay nothing, but receive all of its benefits?), a police, judiciary or armed forces? Maybe the government agrees, which is why it keeps trying to cripple the NHS? I completely fail to see his argument – is it that we should pay for all services we use? Should we pay proportionally to the amount to which it increases our prospects? Maybe our kids should pay more for their ‘A’ grades than for failing (on their huge student debt, of course)? I should have to send cheques to the BBC whenever I watch something educational on TV.
The next paragraph is even better:
Those who lobby for state support – be they French farmers, US steel-makers or British scientists – claim to be the backbone of the nation, the foundation of the future or something similarly fabulous. But it is a perverse argument. If what you produce is so valuable, why can you not find willing buyers at the unsubsidised market price? Let us hope that educational standards soon rise to the level where the producers of such self-serving nonsense can find no one willing to buy it.
This argument is facetious. These groups lobby for government support precisely because the products or services they provide are undervalued by the market. In the case of farming, this is usually due to the low wholesale prices offered by supermarkets in the face of cheap imports from countries where the cost of production is lower. In the case of scientists, it is because they may be conducting research into so-called “pure” areas where the commercial sector is not interested, or possibly because they want to work outside of “big pharma” and allow any discoveries they produce to be used gratis, for the benefit of all mankind.
I actually agree with some of the stuff he’s saying: Its true that there are easily enough scientists and engineers to fill the demand in the UK economy. (Thats why I’m paid so badly…) But I felt the need to refute the idiocy that the free market is always right, which is what he seems to be suggesting.
August 22nd, 2006
Last night I went with some friends to the the Comedy Store, which was really funny. This morning I got up and went to get some cash, but the machine told me I’d already withdrawn £200 today. That wasn’t so funny.
So it seems over the past few days that someone has siphoned just over £800 from my bank account. Since all the withdrawals are from cash machines and none in-store, I assume that my card was cloned and my PIN stolen. Needless to say, this is really, really annoying.
I phoned my bank and cancelled my card, which adds to the annoyance – I won’t have a valid card for the next few days. Meanwhile, some bastard is walking around with almost a grand of my money and will probably never be caught. (Mind you, the guy I talked to at the bank said I could fill out a form to get my money back.)
Wasn’t this what chip and PIN was supposed to help prevent? I guess that, while all stores are now using it, cash machines have yet to be upgraded. Also, it appears that cash machines will fall back to using the magnetic strip if there is no chip (as there would be on a skimmed card).
The solution? Maybe I should deface my magnetic strip on my new card. At least then it couldn’t be skimmed, but I’d still be able to use it in any cash machines that do have the chip and pin upgrade.
Or maybe, I should just be much, much more careful when putting my PIN in.
April 9th, 2006
So Steve and I were talking last weekend about the government’s plans for creeping totalitarianism and he blogged about it. This is very, very scary because it totally bypasses our democratic safeguards: our MP’s and the Lords. (Never mind that they’re increasingly being eroded.)
Ian blogs about the increasingly mandatory nature of ID cards. This is also very scary for two reasons:
One: First, the cards are optional. Then, the cards are mandatory, but you won’t have to carry them or present them on demand. Finally, you have to swipe them to go into pubs, pick up your benefits, check into hospital…
Two: First, the database (the National Identity Register) “just” has 49 items. Then, they “just” add a few more, extend access to all public services. Finally, anyone can subscribe to to the database commercially and it stores your medical records, psychiatric results, school history, every journey you ever made on public transport or through the congestion charging zone…
Add the two pieces of legislation together and its basically all over: we have to trust that ministers won’t abuse their power, that public servants won’t abuse our private information. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel very trusting.
March 28th, 2006
The Power Inquiry report was published and has some interesting suggestions. Apparently, they’ve analysed the reasons why voter apathy is on the increase and its not due to “the supposedly low calibre and probity of politicians”. I guess its always been like that. And like this, this and this.
They have some really good ideas:
We should be creating a culture of political engagement in which it becomes the norm for policy and decision-making to occur with direct input from citizens. This means reform which provides citizens with clear, entitlements and procedures by which to exercise that input – from conception through to implementation of any policy or decision.
Or, in other words: The politicians we elect should actually do what we want? Thats never going to work – it presumes that politicians actually care about what their constituents want. I think when they’re first elected they might, but then over several years they get the taste of power and slowly, surely they turn into two-dimensional, amoralistic control-freaks.
Tony said:
But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed.
The Power report suggests that the modern world is different from the world for which current political processes were designed. It goes on to suggest such gems as:
A rebalancing of power away from the executive and unaccountable bodies towards Parliament and local government.
Don’t make me laugh. The current political system appears to thrive on the drippings of power handed down from the Prime Minister and cabinet. I think it would be highly unlikely that the PM or his heavily-whipped party would sign away the status quo just on the basis of morals, scruples or ideology.
It has been previously reported that a “key cause” of increasing religious extremism is disillusionment with the British political (specifically: foreign policy) system. The question MP’s must ask themselves is; do they love their corner offices, perks, kickbacks and power more than they care about a well-adjusted, empowered Britain?
March 1st, 2006
I’m sure this has been much-blogged-about, but Tony Blair’s monologue really saddens me. I just get an overwhelming sense of you’re wrong, I’m right from this article, which is totally the wrong attitude for someone who has been elected.
But first, the true record.
Because we’re incapable of finding out the reality of what Blair has been doing for ourselves? The freedom of information act? Yeah, right. That seems to be working really, really, really well…
Antisocial behaviour isn’t susceptible to normal court process.
And the evidence for this is…?
Modern organised crime is really ugly, with groups, often from overseas, frequently prepared to use horrific violence.
Because, of course, old-fashioned organised crime was genteel, civilised. And, of course, bugger all has actually happened to the crime rate, which has been rising for the last 20 years.
For me, this is not an issue of liberty but of modernity.
Once we’re all owned by public-private partnerships will we be modern enough? Private sector good, public sector baaad…
People should be prevented from glorifying terrorism.
People should be prevented from ignoring the opinion of between three-quarters and two million electors. But thats just my opinion, which will be ignored, like always.
Most people already have a range of different cards, for workplace, bank or leisure.
Yes, but they’re federated. I can choose what information they have (by only sharing so much information with the companies – this is why I don’t have loyalty cards). The government is shouting loud that ID cards won’t have information about “race, religion, sexuality, health, criminal record or political beliefs” stored on the card. They say nothing about the database for “joined-up government services” – i.e: DNA, fingerprints, national insurance, income tax, the NHS, driving licences, vehicle owners, passport holders and voters. Read all about it.
If the nature of the threat changes, so should our policies.
And if the threat is your policies?
February 27th, 2006
So the government decided to ban smoking, impose limits on some free speech and want to keep tabs on us whatever the cost…
Don’t worry, Big Sister is looking out for you: Making sure you don’t hurt youself. Or say anything naughty. Or do anything without her knowing.
I’m not going to repeat all the criticism of ID cards, smoking bans, etc… because anyone with half a brain can see the problems with proscribing citizens’ freedoms.
The sad thing is: I didn’t protest any of this. Well, I couldn’t protest within 1km of Parliament anyway, because that is now also illegal (Big Sister doesn’t want you near her room?). I’ve written to my MP before and he has voted more-or-less the way I’d have wanted him to.
I’ve made no difference. My MP and his whole party made no difference. Somewhere between 750,000 and 2,000,000 people marching through London made no difference (in 2003).
Ergo, nothing will make a difference. I might as well stop caring. Or emigrate.
February 16th, 2006
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