i don’t know how to make napalm

Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Fight Club, has several different explanations of how to make napalm at home.

Today, a Muslim British teenager was sentenced for two years for downloading and possessing information of a similar kind two or three years ago.  I bought Fight Club from Waterstone’s a year or so ago, completely openly.  I’ve not heard of any mass book burnings to take my copy down to recently.  What’s going on?  I just don’t understand.

It’s no wonder that British Muslims feel victimised.  According to the rationale supporting this conviction, surely everyone who owns a copy of Palahniuk’s novel – or even perhaps a copy of the popular Brad Pitt and Ed Norton movie – should be locked up for the safety of the public.

Am I missing something here?

Filed under: cops, racism , muslims, police, UK, youth

Police harass kids, as per usual.

[The title of this is one of them six word stories.  I was reading about them today innit]

This is a funny one.  Well, kinda frightening funny.  The Daily Mail reports today that police hope to catch graff artists by snooping on kids’ schoolbooks to try to match their doodles up with pieces up around town.  ‘Doodle Squad’, the Mail dubs it.

probably not by a school kid

Apparently they’ve already had some success with the strategy, a police press officer reporting a ’series of positive arrests’. Because like, arresting kids is really positive.

I am incredibly sympathetic towards children, they take a lot of shit from older generations.  Now they’ve got the pigs inspecting their school books just in case any display any artistic promise, which can then be summarily quashed with a community service order.  Graffiti is no bad thing, graffiti artists like Banksy and their work have become socially accepted, even celebrated in the last few years.  We should be encouraging kids to be artistic, and teaching them that expressing themselves is a good thing.

Most kids scrawl all kinds of shit on their school books – I remember getting bollocked for it at school all the time.  Kids are naturally creative, at least until the weight of conventional education and cultural indoctrination kills their imagination once and for all.  But they’re not stupid; as soon as they work out that the police are going to be inspecting their exercise books then they’re just gonna stop drawing on them, and probably accelerate the deaths of their own creative sides in the process.

Contrary to popular belief, most graffers are a little too old to be sketching on school exercise books anyway.  While graffiti is popular amongst a lot of youngsters, their interest rarely extends beyond sketching a load of outlines and maybe doing a couple of dubs in out of the way places.  It’s the older guys who are really prolific. Maybe the police should try targeting them, or is that too hard?

In any case, I’d rather see the city covered in graffiti than all the crass advertising currently emblazoned across available flat space.  People complain about graffiti, but it isn’t as offensive as the advertising shoved down our necks practically everywhere we look.

Filed under: cops , police, youth

cops and, er, journalists

I have finally woken from my blogging slumbers. Oddly enough, it’s always when I seem to have other writing to do that I am drawn back to wordpress. Well, that and actually having access to a computer that can display the bloody site properly…

But this is really something worth spreading – tell your mum. The NUJ have published a video about how police have become increasingly obstructive to press photographers covering demonstrations and public protests. The findings of this well produced short documentary will ring true for anyone who has been on a protest in the UK in the past few years, whether in a press capacity or as a genuine malcontent. It shows the pigs generally bossing people about, pushing and shoving as if they actually owned the fucking country, and tellingly shows that they are not afraid to try to quote dubious sounding pseudo-legislation to justify it.

Unfortunately WordPress won’t let me embed it, but you can link to the film here to watch it. In fact I recommend that you do watch it.

The conclusion to the film, with which I am broadly in agreement, says that the behaviour of the police is indicative of the general erosion of civil liberties that began with Thatcher and has continued through successive neo-liberal governments. Deny dissent the ‘oxygen of publicity’ and it can’t catch the public imagination. Instead we get people showing their dissatisfaction through simply refusing to get involved in politics or political life at all – leading to the common attitude that ‘it’s all shit, but there’s nothing I can do about it so I’m going down Wetherspoons to get mindless on WKD’.

Filed under: cops, media , media, police, UK