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

‘orrible stinking kids

The continuing saga of our war with youth reached new heights of absurdity today with reports from The Daily Mail that a 3 year old girl in Wales has become the youngest pupil ever to be excluded from school.

Apparently the child was sent home from the reception class of her school in Caerphilly in South Wales after attacking a classmate.

demon children

‘She was given a temporary exclusion for assault on a pupil, disruptive behaviour and breaching school rules,’ Caerphilly Council told reporters, apparently without irony.

How can you hold a three year old responsible for those actions? I don’t think that when I was three I even had a fully developed concept of school rules. Three year olds are naughty, that’s just the way it is.

And it’s not like the end of the world or anything if two three year olds get in a fight. You grab one in each hand, tell them off, and tell them to make up. Nine times out of ten they’ll be best mates again in 15 minutes.

Do you think that this kid understands why she’s been excluded? Probably not. She’s probably just buzzing because now she gets to spend the day sitting in watching Bratz videos and playing with my little pony.

When I was a kid – not that long ago! – you only got suspended or expelled if you did something really bad. Getting suspended or expelled from primary school was almost unheard of. But from the reasons Caerphilly council gave above, I could have been suspended every day!

What do they hope to prove by excluding kids before secondary school age? The law doesn’t even count them as criminally responsible, so why can they be held accountable like this in school? Surely a worse punishment would be to make the child go to school and actually do some work, at this age I guess something like tidying up the sandpit.

There is a ridiculous breakdown in discipline, I think, but not amongst the kids, it’s amongst adults. Adults haven’t the confidence to deal with children when they are disobedient, they are only able to heap praise on them when they succeed. There’s a carrot, but no stick.

I guess teachers are scared that if they discipline children they face recrimination from parents – probably a justified fear. Many parents are so protective of their dreadful little oiks that anyone who upsets the kid is sure to be accused of ‘harming their emotional development’ or some such bullshit.

And most children know that if they get a smack then they can now go to the police.

Which doesn’t leave much in the way of discipline, except that imposed through state-affiliated hierarchical structures. Does the state have a monopoly on discipline? Are the police really the only people allowed to hit our kids? Is formal institutional punishment then only legitimate form of child discipline? How fucked up does it sound when you lay it out like that?

Filed under: Uncategorized , news, schools, youth

police cadets?

Yesterday Mayor Ken published his manifesto for re-election. As the Evening Standard spun it, his policies were unmistakeably focused on young people. As a fairly young person myself I don’t entirely disapprove. However, whilst some of his ideas were reasonable, like giving students reduced rates on public transport, his policy of rolling out a scheme for metropolitan police cadets in high schools across the capital is just crazy.

Just picture it. Schoolchildren across the capital donning police uniforms, eschewing the traditional after school splif to take part in law enforcement related after school activities and learning all about the traditions of our fine constabulary. Surely not.

Embarassingly, I was once involved in a similar scheme. In my early teens I had a scholarship to a rather posh London public school. There they operated a detachment of what was called The Combined Cadet Force, an afterschool club where little toffs could play at being a member of the armed forces. I was, to my shame, an army cadet. I still have the jacket.

We used to shoot guns, run around in forests at night, get shouted at by sixth-form “officers”, eat army rations that made you constipated, all kinds of fun shit. Eventually though the shame of having to go school on the bus in army fatigues every thursday got too much and I had to quit. In any case, I realised I would much rather be stopping off for a spliff in Brockwell park after school than standing in the quad, in the cold, getting barked at.

Nowadays I tend to dismiss my involvement as a result of a puerile gung-ho attitude fed by the media. But the army is arguably far more fun than the police (soldiers aren’t likely to arrest you or anyone you know in the UK) and it is difficult to see how Ken’s scheme could have much appeal amongst the yoot of today, or indeed of any day.

But there is something even more sinister about this proposal too. Of all the arms of the state to get involved with children the police seem the most inappropriate. The police are, after all, the coercive arm of the state, the government’s tool for maintaining order and rooting out subversion in society. Young people should no more be involved in this than they are in the armed forces, i.e not at all.

Such youth programmes are am echo of the great fascist youth programmes of the early to mid twentieth century, programmes that still exist in parts of the world. Recruiting our children in to the police is a disturbing neo-fascist idea with disturbing implications. Imagine little johnny coming denouncing his parents at school for smoking a spliff, or little Ahmed accusing his dad of saying someone should blow up the queen. The metropolitan police have a deeply damaged image through frequent victimisation of minority groups and young people in particular. They should be kept as far away from our children as possible!

Dx

Filed under: Uncategorized , civil rights, London, mayor, police, youth