Disturbing

A Drug Raid Goes Viral
A violent police raid posted on YouTube sparks outrage—but the only thing unusual was that it was caught on video.

In May a Missouri police raid that was captured on video went viral. As of this writing, the video had been viewed more than 1.2 million times on YouTube. It lit up message boards, blogs, and discussion groups around the Web, unleashing anger, resentment, and, regrettably, calls for violence against the officers involved. I’ve been writing about these raids, including some that claimed the lives of innocent people, for five years. There’s never been a reaction like this one. (You can see the video at youtube.com/watch?v=RbwSwvUaRqc.)

The Ten Commandments Are A Poor Substitute For A Moral Code

Whenever I hear Christians, even the more reasonable ones I work with, extol the virtues of the Ten Commandments, I end up having a rather heated and strange argument with otherwise sensible folk who ignorantly maintain that morality--and our democratic republican government--is based on them.

My arguments are not received well by these people. To quote Ayn Rand, "Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. " And any reasonable person can determine that virtually all of the first amendment to the constitution defies many of the Bible's top ten proscriptions.

Christopher Hitchens very deftly dissects the ten rules that will, in the end, purportedly determine whether any human is sent to an eternal torture chamber that makes Nazi concentration camps a comparative Disneyland. What is included, and what is left out, is telling of its origin. And nobody, and no court, and no governing body, needs them now.



Why has it never occurred to the religious that no society has made their Ten Commandments the law of the land and thrived or even survived?

From the land of Orwell....

Neil Harding and the DNA Database

"Timmy has already drawn this comparison, but I shall do so here too. Here's Sam Leith in The Telegraph, talking about the National DNA database (and the whole article is worth a read).

What this is actually about is the police asking the Government to extend the powers of the state for its convenience. The argument in favour of the establishment, de jure, of a compulsory national DNA database has been lost. This is the first attempt to sneak it in - without any proper argument at all - de facto.

That is why it needs to be resisted. It is based on the alarming rationale that there exists an absolute divide (one expressed in an abrogation of your right to privacy) not only between all those who have ever broken any law and the rest of the population but also between all those who have ever been suspected of breaking the law and the rest of the population. That's not the characteristic view of a free society. Our privacy is something that belongs to us: not something the Government gives us, on probation, as a favour. They serve us: not vice versa. This may be a matter of principle, but it is one that could scarcely have more profound practical importance."

Read it all at The Devil's Kitchen.