The (non)future of citizenship
March 29th, 2006“I take the view that it is part of being a good citizen, proving who you are, day in day out,”
The words of Andy Burnham, the treacherous pirate in charge of the NIR/ID card scheme, whose poison is can be read here.
Mr Burnham was asked why Labour had not told voters that the cards would be compulsory. He replied: “Actually, we did. […]
Whilst this is true of the actual legislation and there have been many posts on Blogdial and elsewhere to highlight this, the Neu Labour lie machine have also remorselessly spun the concept of a ‘voluntary phase’ and a secondary vote being required (before punishments can be implemented). It is a tragedy that the mainstream media have largely been unquestioning (I mean *real* questions) in the spun accounts and only now that the House of Lords are providing a wafer thin bulwark against the legislation are the government being asked to account for the true picture.
“The irony is that if we were to listen to what the Lords are saying, we would actually create two biometric databases: one for the passport system and one for the new National Identity Register. […]
This is another deception, the international requirement for biometric passports can be satisfied by simply having a machine readable version of your passport photo – there is no need for any other extra information to be collected by the passport agency to fulfill this requirement, and certainly not the level of information the government wants for NIR.
Secondly only last week it was announced that the government were looking at distributing the NIR database between various companies in their cackhanded way of addressing a ‘decentralised’ database.
Additionally this morning he came up with the old chestnut of the ‘unelected chamber defeating the will of [20%] of the people’.
Now back to ‘being a good citizen’, his words describe the sort of country where people will have to use ID cards to access public/stakeholder services – imagine that you have to submit your NIR number to;
gain tax credits – and every time you actually want your child to use a nursery or pre-school creche you have to have your ID card scanned (for quality control);
or what if petrol (or travel mileages) were to be rationed, every time you buy a train ticket or go to the petrol station you have to submit ID;
Access public buildings – e.g. borrow a book from a library;
Use an internet cafe (ID already required in Italy);
These and other scenarios may seem bizarre, but I ask, in what other sorts of circumstances will ‘good citizens’need to be “proving who you are, day in day out”.
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Admin – how do you get large text to work in wordpress?
March 29th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Im getting used to wordpress myself; it has a different set of behaviours all controlled by the template, and am fitting my posts into its constraints; its working for me as a platform, what do you think? The reliability is very refreshing; no lost posts, no servers down etc etc.
As for andy burhnam, he is a total scumbag sovietesque piece of human garbage. It is not his place to impose his view of what good citizenship is on free people. He is a computer illiterate lying sack of shit, and the polar opposite of what a public servant should be.
March 29th, 2006 at 10:47 am
I’m getting used to wordpress but the font sizes behind the scenes are all over the place and far larger than the blog text.
I keep forgetting to categorise my posts and there should be a quick preview for the vanilla editor.
But in the main it feels more ‘pro’.
I managed to lose one post but that was my fault, and looking back it took some doing.
As for specifying text sizes I have no feel for how WP will respond to my tags- the large text now looks OK to me/FF at “4pt” but it’s obviously not that size, and screws up on a ‘user’ resize. Specifying em values seems to nothing.
Is it simple to add a ‘big text’ value to the css sheet?
March 29th, 2006 at 11:17 am
I have not had a look at the stylesheet, being rather busy. Personally, i just use the standard type tools and combine them newspaper (!) style to create emphasis. Its the reading that we need – big text is beautiful, but we should be able to live without it…. do you think?
there is a preview window buried at the bottom of your ‘write a post’ page. ‘save and continue editing’ your powst (yes ‘powst’) and you can see the preview of what it will render like in that box.
As for the categories, do you have the categories tab permanently expanded? also you can drag and drop these tabs into any order you want so that you dont forget.
Jave you been reading jultra? that guy is firing on all cylinders. It seems that the self restraint is on ‘off’ at the moment, with many bloggers and even mainstream newspapers taking the gloves off and using appropriate language for the subjects they are writing about.
March 29th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
I can generally live without bid text but there are some moments off such crassness (or delight) that demand BIG TEXT, maybe it’s just there’s not enough thump in the ‘milk’ theme.
Categories are just new to me that’s all.
Jultra is teh r0x0rzzz, you can feel the blood surging from your eyeballs to your brain to your fists, a remarkable antidote. And yes, the near hatred in the newspapers is quite amaxing (yes a-MAX-ing), even today Simon Jenkins virtually calls UK politicians a pool of piratical scumwank.
March 29th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
and take a look at the letters in response to andy burhnams response to the telegraph Nazi jibe; no one is buying their bullshit anymore – this time, its personal. im posting it now…
March 29th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Take a look at this from the guardian:
They’ve taken your power. Now they want your money
The loans-for-honours scandal should not be used as an excuse for state funding of parties – or for an elected Lords
Simon Jenkins
Wednesday March 29, 2006
The Guardian
Don’t give them an inch. Not one inch. They are a bunch of knaves. They have taken your power, abused it, and now they are after your money. Don’t let them. I refer of course to Britain’s political parties. They have been caught with their fingers in the till. They have broken the law on the sale of peerages and refuse to admit it or take the consequences. Government ministers have spent two weeks telling lies. […]
Guardian
The calls for revolutoin are not far off!
March 29th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Is revolutoin a revolution taking place in one’s loins? Hells yes!
In my experience WordPress seems to take whatever html you throw at it and conform it to the template. Which makes me think, if the big text is left, and the template is changed to one that supports big text, the big text will then appear as it should.
As it is, I rather like how posts are conformed to the template. It gives a wonderful look of uniformity and professionalism, making us look like the pros we really are!