Divine Right

Police defend de Menezes shooting. You know, it occurs to me that if de Menezes had been a suicide bomber, he could have set off his bomb while police were dragging him out of his chair to plant him on the floor and shoot him. If you have this "to save life, sometimes you have to take life" policy in effect, surely it'd have been better to just up and shoot him, risking hitting civilians, rather than dragging him out of his seat and risking the suspect not only martyring himself and the people he was sitting next to, but offing a few police officers into the bargain. I just don't believe that, in the wake of this, they are still defending the "shoot to kill" policy. Yes, I do believe that some kind of shoot to kill policy has its place in law enforcement. I am a liberal, but "bleeding heart" does not always go before that political spectrum description. However, if you are going to blow somebody's head off to save lives, I would like you to be sure that the person whose head you're blowing off is actually a threat. Yes, that might allow a margin for error in which people might die. Yes, I think that's a shame. However, how are the police who shot de Menezes on the personal belief that they were doing the right thing in killing him any different from the terrorist they believed de Menezes to be? The terrorists think they're doing the right thing too; that's what makes them so damn scary.

They've given final approval on the Patriot Act. There have apparently been amendments. No one says what these are. The Act has some opponents on both sides. Not enough, apparently. Of course, the absolute worst part about all this is that most of the subsections of that are amendments and additions to other Acts, and are merely referred to in the course of the text, which makes it entirely inaccessible to the common man. So I have found, after a bit of Googling, A layman's guide to the Patriot Act. For once, it's not politicians scaremongering people into supporting it or the ACLU scaremongering you into fearing it unconditionally. It's actual people giving a rundown, and I think that's a good thing. I wish government would do that more often. Anyway, the article makes a good point when it brings up the fact that the scariest part of Patriot is the fact that people are so cagey about how it's going to be implemented. If it really was this benign power which was going to be used only for good, wouldn't they have been more frank about what they were going to use some of those broader powers for? Yes, we'd probably accuse them of lying, but at the moment, no one's saying anything.

That's the disturbing thing about politics and lawmaking; no one's ever straight with you. It's another case of "We know we're doing the right thing, even if the whole world doesn't think so". When people get on that self-righteousness trip, reason goes straight out the window. "We don't have to tell them anything," say the politicians, "because we have the power and therefore we're in the right". Or something; I don't know, because I'm not one. This, I think, is why Bush and, just recently, Blair have got so scary all of a sudden; it's a God thing. There doesn't have to be reason if it's a God thing. If you believe that God told you that your course of action is right (whether He did or not), then that's all the justification you need and it doesn't matter if every fact in the world is stacked against you; you are not going to be shaken from that course of action. Never a thought that you might just be kidding yourself. Never even a nod towards the idea that it might be the Adversary talking. And certainly don't spare a thought for the people you're going to rob of life and liberty while you take your course, because "God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform". There is nothing more frightening in the world than a religious zealot, because there is no reason; there is only God's will.

Is that what this world is becoming? A set of Crusades; a constant war between various sets of fanatics? 'Intelligent Design' theory in schools, the 'War on Christmas' bullshit, criminalising abortion: why is America suddenly turning into a theocracy? And what does it mean for the country when it's being run, not by the will of the people or on any grounds of reason or logic but by what amounts to religious fanaticism?

The world, in general, scares me.

Headaaaache...

I am having one of those headaches right now. Ham-Fisted Editor is not helping matters.

He sent a list of things he wanted answers on, and I spent a good chunk of time on Monday looking them all up and writing down nice, neat, easy-to-follow notes on what's going on with them. So he just came by to go over that list. None of the ones he wanted to look at first were on said list, and yet he still expected me to know what was going on with them down to the last detail. Including one that, according to my records, had gone out to him some time ago but which he appears to have misplaced. So now I have to go digging around for a file that he has apparently lost.

When we finally got onto files I had searched for previously and had all the detailed commentary for ... some of it was stupid. First, the ones that haven't made it to stats reviewers yet because every time I'm about to send things off to stats reviewers, he screws everything up by telling me to send things to the very stats reviewer I planned to send the other stuff to - the only one who'll take things sent by email (seriously; the only two others who are even remotely reliable insist that we print them out and then spend the postage necessary to post them over simply because they don't want to be arsed to buy paper with what we pay them for doing the stats reviews), and the only one who's remotely quick about the procedure. It's a pain in the arse.

One was accepted and is awaiting revision, and he didn't even know. He makes those decisions, and deals with those letters. Mrrgh.

Michael claimed he sent one of the bits of commentary to Peter the week I was ill. He appears not to have done.

And then the doozy: we've been getting emails on emails about one resubmission, asking when they'll hear something about it. I have flagged up on a number of occasions the fact that, hey, it's ready to go for re-referral if the editors actually sit down and discuss whether the paper should be re-referred at all. Repeat: I HAVE TOLD THEM THIS REPEATEDLY. Apparently it has only just now sunk in, and I'm being blamed for the fact that it hasn't been dealt with yet. Something about how I shouldn't have put it in the filing cabinet until definitive action has been taken on the paper. Never mind the emails I have sent saying, "Have you two discussed that paper yet?"; it seems that those aren't enough of a reminder.

So my head hurts, my neck and back are stiff as anything, I am very tired and I want to go home more than anything else in the world. And yet I can't, because after I finally finish sorting through last week's mess (and I'm getting there) and the stuff that didn't get done on Friday (which was under last week's mess, because Michael took the stacks of supposedly helpful printouts and put them on top of my slightly more urgent stacks of "I'll do it tomorrow" work from the 22nd), I have this week's work and added mess and malarkey to get through because Ham-Fisted Editor loses file folders.

Shoot me. Shoot me now.