Tuesday, January 17, 2006

More Cheers for Peers

Lords-a-leaping. Two days in a row. Remarkable.

Outlawing the glorification of terrorism is a stupid, unworkable idea. I started to explain why, but can't quite nail it down to my satisfaction. Honestly though, it's a stupid idea. It's comes down to that old problem of defining terrorism again. I'm going to write a post on the underlying reasons why it's so difficult to define at some point. In the meantime, the challenge* is always open to doubters

You can be sure that this won't put the government off though. Tony Blair doesn't think it's a problem at all - "I mean, it is the, it’s the, killing of innocent people, um, deliberately, innocent civilians". As Justin pointed out over at Europhobia, "It's back to the old question: is it incompetence or mendacity that drives New Labour?" They were discussing the government's attitude towards the cost of ID cards but the question seems to apply equally well here.

* Navel Gaving again - Having read that post back, it seems that I was slighly irritated when I wrote it. I think it was the disovery that the comments had gone from the post linked in that post. It was my favourite (and longest) thread on this blog and I thought it did a really job job of explaining why terrorism can't easily be defined. I was pretty hacked off to discover that the comment were no longer there. Sigh.

Anyhoo, please don't let the irritated tone of the post put you off.

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