How laws really work

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Once more I’m stealing content via the much better informed Katabasis, but hey it’s easier than writing my own content :)

So without further ado, “The Ugly Face of Tyranny” by Matt Giwer (which means Katabasis borrowed it as well).

  1. Any law the electorate sees as being open to being perverted from its original intent will be perverted in a manner that is worse than the manner of perversion seen at the time.
  2. Any law that is so difficult to pass it requires the citizens be assured it will not be a stepping stone to worse laws will in fact be a stepping stone to worse laws.
  3. Any law that requires the citizens be assured the law does not mean what the citizens fear, means exactly what the citizens fear.
  4. Any law passed in a good cause will be interperated to apply to causes against the wishes of the people.
  5. Any law enacted to help any one group will be applied to harm people not in that group.
  6. Everything the government says will never happen will happen.
  7. What the government says it could not foresee, the government has planned for.
  8. When there is a budget shortfall to cover non-essential government services the citizens will be given the choice between higher taxes or the loss of essential government services.
  9. Should the citizens mount a successful effort to stop a piece of legislation the same legislation will be passed under a different name.
  10. All deprivations of freedom and choice will be increased rather than reversed.
  11. Any government that has to build safeguards into a law so that it will not be abused is providing guidelines for abusing the law without violating it.
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Climate sceptics the new Wikileakers?

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Via the ever well informed Katabasis my attention has been drawn to the rather worrying seizure of computers owned by UK climate sceptic bloggers. Apparently at the behest of the U.S. Department of Justice as other climate bloggers have received nasty grams (cache) from our friends across the pond. Last I checked the climategate e-mails where mainly (allegedly) pilfered from UK sources, and even ignoring that the emails are widely available so the US Department of Justice could just download their own copy. All in all a quite worrying development, state funded “scientific” research into climate change wasn’t a matter of national security last I checked. Rather generally the scientific method in the past has been to share research far and wide for verification and the like, so why are the powers that be on both sides of the pond going for climate bloggers?

I can’t help but suspect there may be more to this than meets the eye.

Do spread the word, and don’t forget to keep off site backups.

Updates: JoNova observes:
Now, more than ever, all the people that value their freedom need to stick together. Whistleblowers and radio personalities need blogger back up, big bloggers need small bloggers, every blogger needs commenter and emailer support, with letters to editors and friends. Every link in the chain helps. The establishment need to know that we will not be intimidated, there are many of us, and the more they push, the more we will tell the world.
and in the comments there:
They took away a DSL router? That would only be done by “experts” to frustrate access to the Internet.

And Watts Up With That? have been in contact with Roger (Tallbloke) and he tells me that he is not a suspect, and that they’ll clone his hard drives and return the computers to him.

Which is good news, and hopefully they’ll return everything quickly and undamaged (which doesn’t always happen) – this still seems really rather odd.

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Populism and democracy

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Despite all the fun and games happening in Europe I’ve been rather quite on the matter, and am actually going to continue with that with this post. So many other people are doing a much better job of commenting all I could really add is a “what they said”. I am however going to use the EU crisis and a post about it to pose a question that’s puzzled me for years and which The Snowolf just expressed in a far more eloquent fashion than I’d manage. What the Snowolf said was:

“Politicians get very sniffy about populist policy decisions, this is no surprise, because as far as they’re concerned, it is our job to accept their decisions, not their job to act on our wishes. But of course doing the popular thing makes you, well, popular.”

Which sums up rather what’s puzzled me for so long about politicians being “populist”, after all isn’t populism the whole basis of at least our electoral system if not democracy as a whole?* The theory is as I understand it that the wannabe politician makes loads of promises and the most popular or populist gets elected and then ignores those promises.

Then when they want to be elected again they do the whole popular thing again, and oddly we believe them. It’s just in between times both the politicians, the media and all sorts of activists seem to think that populism is a terrible terrible thing. Almost makes one suspect that they do view us as an inconvenience.

So what’s puzzling me is what exactly is the difference between bad evil “populism” and “representing the majority”? Or is it one of those irregular verbs, like:
I’m erotic
You’re kinky
They’re perverted
So:
I represent the silent majority
You’re populist
They’re a rabble rouser?

I do of course welcome both other explanations and improvements to my irregular verbs.

* Both populism and democracy have roots in words meaning the people? demos and populous?

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