If you do nothing else today watch this ten minute film and be afraid, be very afraid.
It would only be a few weeks ago that I was reading a crime report that made mention of some guy being charged with uttering terrorist threats (in a robbery) he probably said what every highway man before and since Dick Turpin has said when he uttered his imortal words "Stand and deliver you money or your life." At the time I had a "WTF was that all about" but then let it it pass, well now I know.
And it's not just the threat of physical violence, the bill says violence OR FORCE and goes on to include and describe force as "intellectual power especially as conveyed in writing or speech," and "a capacity for affecting the mind or behaviour as in the force of logical argument."
And there's a whole can of worms beside, please watch.
I will add a post script.
It's the potential in the likes of this bill that made the Jose Padilla case so important, the country should have stood up and said "you can't do this to a citizen" but no, just sat back on their collective arses and gave the government a free pass to do just what the fuck it wanted to do.
Forget about the bullshit you read in your newspapers
ReplyDeleteI don't read newspapers any more purely for the fact that, as you say, they're full of bs.
If people want the truth then they should take advantage of the internet available to them and dig.
Just venting ;)
Your analysis does not seem quite correct, although I stopped watching the video about 1/3 through.
ReplyDeleteThe dictionary, not the bill itself, describes "force" as "intellectual power", etc. I'm not a lawyer, but "force or violence" sounds like boilerplate language that may well have a stable legal interpretation.
There's plenty to be worried about, but this particular language does not seem especially scary.
It should be noted that the Jose Padilla case was alarming precisely because his arrest, imprisonment and torture was entirely outside the bounds of legislative and judicial justification: The Bush administration was implicitly saying that it was not bound by actual law in its actions.