I’m sure a few extra copies of the Standard fled that day.

Hat tips, Adrian Monck and NoCommentNews.

I finally got around to listening to this brilliant podcast yesterday. Its a nice antidote to the “Islamic problem” - the problem being why all the Muslims on TV are setting fire to flags or being arrested for not being terrorists. The last two episodes contain some brilliant audio flourishes - including a moment where the presenter was harassed by some unpleasant types for being a woman at a protest, and an intro where she denied having anything to do with the South Yorkshire floods. It also seems to be managing to keep a grip on a the enormous number of muslim groups which have arisen in the last few years or so. Ignore at your peril.

If I’d made assumptions like this about the actual fascists in Nazi Germany at A-Level, I would have failed the course. Johann Hari obviously has more patience than I do with Nick Cohen’s new tome:

“I am very sceptical,” he says, “of people who think irrational movements have rational causes.” So if you talk, as virtually all serious scholars of jihadism do, about the role the US played in smelting jihadism through supporting torture in Egypt and a Wahabbi clerical establishment in Saudi Arabia, you are in Cohen’s eyes an apologist. Jihadism is in his account a spontaneous theological psychosis sprouting in the void, with social and economic factors playing no role at all. Its irrationality means it cannot be explained or discussed; it can only be defeated.

Nazi Germany, by that reasoning, had no root cause. It was an “irrational movement” which sprung out of nowhere in the happy happy Weimar Republic where children played with banknotes. Hitler was never angry about the Treaty of Versailles, he was a crazy irrational nut with no grounding in the history of Europe at all. Anyone who claims otherwise is an appeaser.

Or, err, not.

Hat tip Tampon Teabag.

BBC - Australia terror laws under scrutiny:

laire Macken, a legal scholar from Deakin University, is sympathetic to a 28-day detention period, because she says it would ultimately be more humane to the suspect.”If you know you are going to be held for 28 days, you can prepare yourself mentally, and that protects your human rights.

Part of the problem in the Haneef case is that he never knew what was going to happen and the process was so unpredictable,” she says.

How is locking anyone up without charge for a month protecting your human rights? If you’re stuck in a jail cell for a month you can’t work, you have no free access to your family, and you can’t go anywhere without the permission of the police. It may be fairer, but its not Amnesty International fair.

This is London:

Furious neighbours of Tony Blair’s £3.6million London townhouse are to complain to the Home Office after being quizzed at gunpoint by police outside their homes…

Mr Foughlaia, who is of Albanian descent, said: ‘I was getting out of the van when I saw two police officers running towards me, one of them with his gun raised at me. It was very frightening.

‘I think they were panicking because it was the day of the car bombs in Central London, three weeks ago. One of them told me they had received a call saying there was an intruder in the communal gated gardens.’…

One resident said: ‘The police appear to be gun-happy and we feel it is only a matter of time before an innocent person gets shot. This sort of behaviour is totally unacceptable.’

From Bloggerheads.

Not much time to blog today, but kudos should be given to the Citizen, Gloucestershire Echo and the Forester who seem to be among the few local papers who have learned what the internet is for. The papers have been updating This Is Gloucestershire practically every hour or so since the crisis hit the region, and online there isn’t any better source of information. Users have used the site to give thanks to those who have helped out in the crisis and ex-pats from all over the world have been able to send their thoughts to readers. There’s a strong use of photography throughout and the site is loaded with video.

This is great - this is exactly the sort of thing local papers need to be thinking about - using the internet as a direct connection to their readers and keeping them updated when the newspaper cannot. Now Northcliffe needs to think about their web design and how it can be adapted for extraordinary events such as this. At the moment the site simply lists stories as they are uploaded - there’s no hierarchical system indicating the most important story or a scroll with breaking news. This is a common fault across the Northcliffe stable. The drive to make the most of the internet is certainly there - now designers just have to pull their fingers out to meet their journalists’ ambition.

If a circle doesn’t go into a square, do you keep hitting it with a hammer until the square turns circle shaped? BBC:

Gordon Brown is considering doubling to 56 days the period terrorism suspects can be detained without charge. He is expected to try to extend the 28-day limit, when he unveils his strategy on counter-terrorism.

A few weeks ago a few people commented on how Brown’s language had changed in contrast to Blair’s - namely that the words ‘war on terror’ were no longer being used and that the religion of the chaps who left bombs around London and threw themselves into Glasgow airport was also not mentioned. It was dealt with as a criminal act and not a ideological war, and it was a conscious effort in response to complaints from the Muslim community that the wider group is often made to feel responsible through the language used when talking about extremists.

Brown and Smith were applauded for their approach at the time, but the changes have been entirely cosmetic. Brown is still allowing policemen - who believe the solution to the problem is locking people up without charge for as long as possible - dictate government policy. If we allowed these wannabe-internmentists guide the rest of the criminal justice system, where would we be? Without jury trials because they’re inconvenient to sentencing? Should we allow hearsay evidence?

As Tim says, the complicated rhetoric used by the Government to justify the review suggests they can’t think of a good enough reason for how-ever-many-days-they-want-now (I suspect they picked a number out of the air). Anything more than a couple of weeks can be damaging enough to a person, but 58-days is like a unpaid holiday in hell. If you were arrested and detained for that long, do you think they’d have you back at your job? There would always be the possibility that, well, if the police could have held you for longer they may have found something - and there’s no smoke without fire.

If they want to deal with this problem - and stop young guys from being radicalised - then it needs to dealt with it head on. Crazy legislation like this, which ends up affecting only young Asian males and doesn’t help defending Britain against the charge that We Hate Muslims, needs to be nipped in the bud.

More here.

Hello Mr Muhammed, thanks for coming in for your Asylum interview. I’m sure you understand we have some targets at the Home Office which we need to fulfill, and we don’t want any nasty Romanians seeping through the net! I’ve got a list of questions to ask you - I hope you don’t mind. 

So let see… your country is at still war. Ooh thats not very nice is it? That must be quite tough for you, I’ve never been in a war - maybe I should try that some day. Now it says here that your job, where you have been helping the British army, means you’re likely to be killed by radical insurgent groups. Sounds reasonable enough for Asylum, but have you checked this with their head office? I’m sure they, like us, have a feckless bureaucratic procedure that reduces people to documents and names to categories. It could be what has happened there - I’m sure its a misunderstanding.

Oh, I’m sorry, we couldn’t possibly let you in. You see, you’re from Iraq. Now you guys are meant to be staying and rebuilding… now now Mr Muhammed, I know that it was the British and US army which did a lot of the dismantling but you guys aren’t going to live in a liberal democratic paradise inless you give us a hand. There’s no need to get angry. That Saddam chap was a pretty scary guy after all and he’s not there now. My kids used to have nightmares whenever he was on the news. Your kids were killed in a roadside bomb? We had a few wet beds but nothing that clamatic. Was it a nice funeral?

Getting back to the point, Mr Muhammed, they need you there. Think, if you’re killed and what remains of your family are buried in a mass grave the nutrients from your rotting carcass could be used to fuel a burgeoning agricultural sector.

No?

I hear Syria and Jordan are nice at this time of year.

(See here, here, here, here, here and the petition here. I will be sending a letter to my MP).

Via PP, an Aussie news site has picked up on a little reported story that the map used during the Iranian hostage crisis might have been less than accurate:

A BRITISH map of the northern Gulf where Iran seized 15 naval personnel in March was not as accurate as it should have been and Britain was fortunate Iran did not contest it, a review into the crisis said…

A British Ministry of Defence map published during the crisis showed a territorial water boundary extending from the Shatt al-Arab waterway that separates Iran and Iraq out to sea.

However experts say no maritime boundary between the two countries has been agreed and the line was based on a 1975 land boundary that could have shifted over time if the centre of the waterway had moved due to natural causes.

This was the map that was quoted as gospel by newspapers and broadcasters. It was frequently used as a way of explaning how the British patrol boat was still in international waters and, by connection, that the Iranian action was illegal. It often appeared as a graphic, or was quoted without attribution by reporters. Its credibility was reified as an irrefutable fact and almost like a pack British journalists seemed reluctant to look into this with any detail. At the time I remember only Craig Murray dissenting from the party line.

It was a crap time to be a consumer of news. Sure we all wished the safe return of the captives but for a newspack that’s said by its worst critics to be ‘feral’ and ’cynical’ it was anything but during the crisis. The emphasis in coverage seemed to back the official position, with no questioning early on of how the negotiations were proceeding or whether the British case was cast iron. The smallest chance that the Iranian action may have been legitimate was dealt with as an impossibility. I can understand that journalists may have thought that it wasn’t the time to undermine the government’s handling of the crisis, especially as lives were involved, but I can’t think of any other time where a hack has sat down and thought ‘I won’t run this story, it might upset the course of government business’. It was patroitism at work here - of a kind we rarely see, and that if not controlled can let us loose from our criticial facilities and print uncertainties as certainties and lies as facts.

I have about 7 browser windows open, together with my email and some explorer windows.

On the macs I was using over the last week, i could just click the scroll ball and have all my windows zoom out whenever I needed to switch over.

On this old backwards XP PC, I have to navigate a head-ache inducing taskbar button to do the same job. A visual representation would be a lot easier to handle, instead of loads and loads of text. It’s a small thing, but Windows’ piss poor handling of applications is enough to put me off work. Ho hum.

I think this is another way of saying that I want an iMac.