Today I was impressed by the government. It doesn’t happen often, but today it did. What was impressed by? I was linked to an online petition through the Open Rights Group I am a member of, hosted by the Downing Street website. I went on to discover that the website is running a trial of an online, automated petition system that allows any British Citizen to submit a petition to Downing Street and let any other British Citizen electronically sign it.

Petitions have long been sent to the Prime Minister by post or delivered to the Number 10 door in person. You can now both create and sign petitions on this website too, giving you the opportunity to reach a potentially wider audience and to deliver your petition directly to Downing Street.

The system is run by mySociety and the software used is open source and can be downloaded by anyone.

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David Mytton is having a kind of themed week on his blog. On Monday, today and Friday he is posting a discussion/analysis of certain moral questions interspaced by two posts yesterday and tomorrow with business advice.

On Monday the topic was:

Is there any difference between lying to someone and withholding something from someone?

and today the post is:

If a friend did something illegal, would you inform the appropriate authorities?

The latest post by Geeklawyer, specifically the first paragraph, caused me to think about the differences between inciting hatred and violence.

Geeklawyer is glad that the ultra right wing extremist British National Party (BNP) leader Nick Griffin was acquitted of charges of using words or behaviour intended to stir up racial hatred. He is of the view that only speech which incites, or is genuinely immediately likely to do so, violence & discrimination should be unlawful. If hating $(todays_unpopular_group) is lawful, and even this government is not proposing to make it illegal to hate Muslims, then inciting hatred should not be an offence either. Inciting violence yes, inciting opinions no. Criminalising incitement because it makes it easier to prevent violence is not the answer since it has knock on effects on free speech.

What is basically being said here is that hate is a feeling and/or opinion – it is not something physical and is many cases results in no detriment to the hated object so far as physical action is concerned. In the UK we have the right to free speech and so we can enjoy hating whatever or whoever we want without fear of being arrested. Even when the hatred is voiced it still counts as opinion and we still have the right to freely say what we want.

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…the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion;

This is an interesting quote from a treaty with Tripoli, drafted in 1796 under George Washington and signed by John Adams in 1797 (the first president and vice president respectively) because the common perception is that America is perhaps the most religious country in the world. This may or may not be correct, but as the BBC reported:

A survey done in 2001 by the City University of New York Graduate Center found that 85% of Americans identify with some religious faith. In contrast, in Canada and the United Kingdom, two societies often perceived as quite similar to the United States, only 28% and 17% respectively described religion as similarly important in their lives.

This clearly presents us with a paradox – despite the founding of the USA as a secular country, religion has far more of a part in daily life than in England where the entire constitution is based around a central church, a monarch as head of state and religion influencing many aspects of society including law and education.

Over the last few weeks I have been reading the latest book by Richard Dawkins, Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Previously, I have read The Blind Watchmaker which goes into great biological detail about evolution, with the specific intention of countering creationism – and it does a very good job. So based on my experiences with that title, I immediately purchased a copy of The God Delusion which takes aspects from all of his books and presents them in a logical format in order to completely disprove religion.

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When I showed the Military Commission article on The Register to one of my friends yesterday he said that it’s a sign of things to come here in the UK. I disgreed because in the UK we do have an effective parliament and safeguards in place. The government might try and instigate the likes of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill but they have so far, and I hope always will, fail.

Another perfect example of how this is the case is when the detention without trial idea was suggested only to be scrapped because it is against human rights laws. It’s ironic that it was this Labor government that passed the Human Rights Act in 1998 and now things they are trying to get through are being blocked because of it! I’d like to think that anything similar to this in the future will meet the same fate and our judicial system will ensure that even if something suspect does come into force, it doesn’t have much of an impact upon the freedoms we take for granted.

And I’m glad the Lord Chief Justice thinks along the same lines.

I hate the American media. I can’t stand their “news”. And I use “news” in the lightest sense. You only have to watch Fox News to see what I mean – a show of pure drama and hype. The news as I see it in the USA is purely for entertainment value and rarely shows an unbiased or independant view. Contrast that with the BBC News and even ITV or Channel 4 news and it really becomes aparrant. We are so lucky in the UK to have the BBC News providing real impartiality in their original news broadcasting.

However, despite my dislike for news reporting in the United States I am actually going to link to a 9 minute clip from an MSNBC broadcast which mirrors some of the points I highlighted yesterday. But even this clip that assults the Military Comissions Act and the government that passed it caused a shiver down my spine in the way that it was presented. If this had been reported by the BBC News (it may have been, but I don’t have a TV) I would have expected a summary of the points of the legislation covering both sides and possible impacts and perhaps a comment from the US political correspondant, but certainly no personal opinion. This MSNBC piece did none of that and focused entirely on what had happened in history and how it was the beginning of the end of America.

The media always hype things, particularly the destruction of freedom and liberty (rightly so?) and that is even more so in the USA. But on this occasion if you can put up with that, it’s worth watching.