Comments on: Cash-strapped UK local authorities spent £0.5B on CCTV in 4 years

By: awjt

awjt — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:32:00 +0000

IOW, we are the crap between God’s hand and God’s forehead. We are what is squished during His Almighty Facepalm.

By: James

James — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 23:26:00 +0000

’twas more a reference to the fact that, in the book, it’s a small portion of the population, whereas in the UK it’s a much larger one.

By: EH

EH — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 21:13:00 +0000

Why do you say that evil is “easy?”

By: Bob N Johnson

Bob N Johnson — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:50:00 +0000

I’m sorry, but your comment makes no sense at all.

Laws are our attempt to bridge the gaps between our disparate understandings and beliefs of what constitutes ethical and moral behavior.

If the laws have been hijacked it was by our archaic beliefs in what constitutes ethical or moral behavior.

The law is only a reflection of our own ignorance and beliefs.

Please feel free to blame any thing other than yourself.

By: Wreckrob8

Wreckrob8 — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 09:47:00 +0000

Logical laws sounds oxymoronic to me. Ethics and morality (although the word seems to have been hijacked by nutters) is what matters. The law is a one size fits all solution imposed from outside or above. Ethics/morality come from within, but are at present trapped within the fascism of the law. I blame God.

By: Wreckrob8

Wreckrob8 — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 09:07:00 +0000

Western scientific method cannot distinguish information from knowledge – God is everywhere! But this inability to distinguish is absolutely responsible for the fundamental shift in our relationship with money behind capitalism and the development of the separation of logarithmic from linear thinking and the development of calculus. Tricky fucker, God.

By: CognitiveDissident

CognitiveDissident — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 06:50:00 +0000

Those Right-Wing-Authoritarians are everywhere!
(I had hoped Bob Altemeyer was wrong, and NO, that’s not what he means by Right-Wing!)
P.T. Barnum said, “there’s a sucker born every minute”!
Is the terror threat REALLY increasing EXPONENTIALLY, or are only government contracts increasing EXPONENTIALLY?/
(More importantly, is our safety increasing exponentially??)

By: Eark_the_Bunny

Eark_the_Bunny — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 04:53:00 +0000

What more can I say? Humans are capable of great good but they are also capable of tremendous evil. Good is much harder than evil. It may take years to construct a building but only seconds to blow it up. Evil is easy. Evil is a lazy way out. People hardly understand the world around them. I suggest reading some the writings of Mark Twain on the subject of humans. “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

By: slayer1

slayer1 — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 03:59:00 +0000

I’ve got a Monorail that will solve all their transportation problems too! Shelbyville already has one!

By: toyg

toyg — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:35:00 +0000

You know what? Who cares. Stuff like the UK Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of Rights of Men or the US constitution, they were all written by and for rich “nutjobs” who wanted to be free from some silly rule or another. Sometimes (*sometimes*) even a rich right-wing nutjob can actually represent the general interest better than some democratically elected bureaucrat.

By: Wreckrob8

Wreckrob8 — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:48:00 +0000

Every time I see a smiley face on a government or council hoarding I want to get a can of paint and spray over it. It feels so good, but I am way too old now. They are not listening. Their cameras go hand in hand with the privatization of public space, perhaps that will be the ultimate justification. It can’t be the reduction of crime, can it?
Alternatively, in a post industrial Britain the university system has an important job creation function in teaching people to write meaningless drivel (who cares about content, the significance of writing itself is all that matters). They then start thinking that what they write is all that matters that it is actually meaningful and start to try and make it all come true. The ignorant masses would not understand. When I try to read their reports my eyes glaze over and all I see is ‘fuck you’. There is no need to invent conspiracy theories. They exist.

By: thecleaninglady

thecleaninglady — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:11:00 +0000

Isn’t it obvious? They just really like … to watch.

By: MB44

MB44 — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 19:10:00 +0000

Yes.

By: Bob N Johnson

Bob N Johnson — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:08:00 +0000

The best way to reduce crime is to legalize victimless crimes and non-violent offenses with the exception of theft of any kind and a very few other offenses such as drunk driving.

Then take the money saved from the reduction in police and prisons to improve education and fund job-training.

Crime is the result of illogical laws and ignorance. Without an education and skillz choices become limited, meaning crime becomes an option. When people are desperate and hopeless, and non-violent and victimless pursuits are illegal, we have the perfect excuse for a police state.

By: Lupus_Yonderboy

Lupus_Yonderboy — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:02:00 +0000

Are these really the people that you want having a Medusa circuit at their disposal?

By: Steve Miller

Steve Miller — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:37:00 +0000

And zero buildings have flown into planes, as well!

By: Steve Miller

Steve Miller — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:28:00 +0000

Security funding, like charter school funding, serves to solve only one problem: getting public funds into private hands.

By: EH

EH — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Too much simple, not enough thought.

By: EH

EH — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:13:00 +0000

3) How’s the crime rate doing?

By: Justin Forposting

Justin Forposting — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:48:00 +0000

yes 151 million is alot of money, but at the same time 0 buildings have been flown into by planes. Can’t put a price on that.

By: MrsBug

MrsBug — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:39:00 +0000

I’ve always figured God does a face-palm like we do with idiocies like this.

By: retepslluerb

retepslluerb — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:28:00 +0000

Yeah, but that was for minor party officials. The party didn’t really care that much when the proles cussed and beat themselves up.

By: awjt

awjt — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:22:00 +0000

It’s what we get for ignoring the scientific method. I blame God.

By: Brad Bell

Brad Bell — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:18:00 +0000

1984 has interior home surveillance and torture to back it up. I think it would work just fine. If by ‘work’ we mean replacing the metaphorical ‘cop in your head’ with a ‘police state in your head.’ It all flows easily into stories of people with paranoid schizophrenia convinced there are transmitters implanted in their teeth. It’s understandable. Mental patients in Montreal reduced to infantilised blank slates by CIA-funded experiments in sensory deprivation drifting with the tide to Guantanamo Bay.

Surveillance ultimately works by teaching people to watch themselves. Thankfully, judging by the UK experience, it doesn’t seem to have much effect. People blank it. They are like contestants on Big Brother who, after a while, forget all about the cameras.

By: winkybb

winkybb — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:10:00 +0000

The thing that annoys me more than anything about CCTV is the poor quality images they create/capture. These look to be big expensive cameras that seem to be deliberately specified to render any images they capture so low in quality as to be virtually useless. What is going on with that? When the cheapest phone now takes a MUCH better picture than these “professional” purpose-built cameras, I get all confused. Somebody point me to just ONE high-quality CCTV image and I’ll relax a little.

OK, that isn’t the thing that annoys me most. It is their existence and uselessness all in one.

I was at a small tube station in London a few years back. The station entrance that measured about 5m x 8m had about 12 cameras pointing at it. They couldn’t really have crammed any more in. I was going to take a photo of it, but then I remembered I was in the UK, and there was somewhere I needed to be rather than arguing with police (or security guards) about photographers’ rights.

By: SKR

SKR — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:51:00 +0000

except for the whole cameras in your flat part.

By: Mister44

Mister44 — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:02:00 +0000

“Pip Pip! What have we hear, Johnston? ’1984′? Is this the new manual for policing.”

*flip*

“CCTV everywhere – brilliant! Make it so! Cherri-O, let’s have some tea.”

By: Ambiguity

Ambiguity — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:00:00 +0000

We’ve got CCTV in our downtown, in BC.

Population, 7,700.

Crime must be rampant here.

We just got CCTV is our downtown (US town). Population: 800.

Sometimes I just hate living in this world. It’s just too fucking depressing and stupid.

By: James

James — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:56:00 +0000

’tis yet another case of putting a nice shiny patch over massive failings simply so that you can be seen to be doing something. “lessons learned” etc.*

The fact that it doesn’t work doesn’t matter because approved vox pops and official lines will repeat ad nauseam that “as part of our community safety initiative we’ve installed a thousand blah-de-blah to make everything super. A report that we’ve commissioned by a friend of our boss says it’s ace” and ignore all evidence to the contrary.

You see, in modern Britain it isn’t so much about having stuff that works, but the appearance of stuff that works that matters. Provided someone gets a backhander for the contracts and someone takes a cut as thanks for “lobying” then all is well.

The fact that the country is fast becoming an armpit because we can no longer make anything ourselves, repair our roads, operate our rail networks, police our streets properly or even count on the courts to do their job, is neither here nor there because there are lots of graphs and statistics that say everything’s just fine. And don’t you dare argue, you unpatriotic brute.

In light of that, half a billion on CCTV cameras that, in many cases, provide evidence that is inadmissible due to them being improperly installed, seems like a damp squib.
I mean, hey, as long as the NHS is “opened up to competition” we’re golden. Right guys?

* lessons learnt, surely?

By: hakuin

hakuin — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:54:00 +0000

whips in the head