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There’s a fine line between police brutality and police duty

August 8, 2010 in News & Politics | 1 comment

From the Telegraph, via Mark Reckons:

Footage captured on a police dashboard camera shows one officer striking the driver’s seat window with a baton up to 15 times and another officer jumping on the bonnet of the car and kicking the windscreen in an apparent attempt to crack it.

Police pulled over Robert Whatley, 70, for not wearing a seat belt as he drove through country lanes in South Wales. The 8-mile chase started after officers tried to give Mr Whatley a fixed penalty notice but he drove off.

The video is embedded below:

What I find intriguing is Mark’s take on the subject:

The Police officers involved have been suspended pending an investigation but frankly I am not sure what needs investigating. They terrified a confused pensioner with as far as I can tell no justification, acting like utter thugs. The man has a heart condition. We could easily have been looking at something much more serious here. Next time maybe we will. That’s why we need to try and make sure there is not a next time.

I’m not saying for a moment that police brutality is in any way acceptable, but it seems quite obvious, to me, that there definitely was a cause for chasing this gentleman and arresting him.

Not only was he not wearing a seatbelt, he also drove off when the police tried to give him a fixed penalty notice. If this is down to him being “confused”, then to be honest, I doubt he should be on the road at all: if he’d been thinking straight, surely he’d have understood that trying to give the police the slip was a bad idea.

Whilst there’s no doubt that the police were heavy-handed, and the two officers involved have, quite rightly, been suspended for smashing the car’s window and dragging the accused out, I find it very hard to feel any sympathy for Mr. Whatley.

The fact he was a “terrified pensioner” had nothing to do with it. The bottom line is that he has been charged with several driving offences and drove off from the police. The law applies to everyone, terrified pensioner or not: it is plainly obvious (to me at least) that this is hardly likely to be as black and white as either the Telegraph or Mark make it out to be.

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Eggs no longer to be sold in twelves, Mail panics

June 27, 2010 in News & Politics | No comments

Image - Rasbak (Wikimedia Commons), modified under licence

Naturally, the Daily Mail’s swallowed this story whole (as has the Telegraph) – but then again, neither of these publications have been known to allow the facts to get in the way of a good EU-bashing. Iain Dale’s post seems to have been written when he was drunk and in the middle of a daydream about Dick Littlejohn: it opens with “you couldn’t make it up” and gripes about the “E bloody U.”

Essentially, the Mail says that new regulations, which would require the carton to display “322g of rolls” as opposed to “six rolls”, therefore means that eggs will now be sold in evil metric fives and tens, and shoppers will be confused into oblivion.

…except it’s a bit more complicated than that. First, there’s no reason that you’d be forbidden from buying eggs by the dozen: the idea that a change in the headline figure would result in the actual quantity changing is a complete non sequitur.

So what if the packaging doesn’t say “six eggs” any more? Eggs aren’t exactly packaged in a way that makes them difficult to count. Two times three equals six, therefore I’m getting six eggs that total x grams.

If anything, the new system, if there is one, makes more sense. When using eggs as ingredients in cooking, something like “100g of egg yolk” makes a lot more sense than “the yolk from 3 medium-sized eggs” which is an absurdly arbitrary measurement. And if you’re buying them to eat as eggs? Well, you can count them!

That said, I’m beginning to sense a pattern here. The Mail often gripes about falling standards in education, but then has the temerity to complain that the public should be asked to do simple tasks – namely, sorting rubbish, or counting eggs/rolls. That said, let’s also consider the countless other EU non-stories the Mail’s pumped out – straight bananas and all – and consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this story might have been spun from nowhere to flog their sodding paper.

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The dinosaur media has learned nothing

June 3, 2010 in News & Politics, Television | No comments

Watching this clip from Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe, if you ignore the contextual news snippets you could have been forgiven for thinking it was thrown together yesterday, rather than last year.

Of course, the chance that anyone in the media would have listened to it is virtually nil, given that it just wants to draw in more readers/viewers: however, even now, in the aftermath of the Whitehaven shootings, the papers, in particular, have demonstrated that they’re willing to veer once again on the side of acrimoniously bad taste in order to flog their outmoded rags.

They’re known as the vulture press for a good reason. While I’m not pretending for any moment that the Whitehaven massacre was a minor event, as Brooker mentioned in the above video, blanket coverage only serves to turn this murdering twat into a nihilistic antihero – and, as far as the media’s concerned, it’s a great way to sell more papers.

There’s a longer discussion of these at Enemies of Reason (incidentally, one of my favourite blogs about the dead-tree press) but my attention was drawn to this one: specifically, how absolutely fucking horrid it was.

The headline in question

It’s physically sickening to think that an editor greenlit that: someone, presumably a well-educated human being, thought it was perfectly acceptable, less than twenty-four hours after a lone gunman senselessly murdered twelve innocent people, to be printing photographs of his fucking family.

Oh well, it’s not all doom and gloom – hey, look! On the side! That’s Kelly fucking Brook, in a bikini! Hah, the presence of her tits almost makes the voyeuristic murder-porn on the left acceptable. (or not, in case your sarcasm detector’s got dandelions stuck in it).

Need we need any more evidence that the dead-tree press should be left to rot? No.

Will people continue to read it? As long as there are gullible people who actually find this sort of thing acceptable, yes. Sad, but true.

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