Comments on: Do policemen dream?

By: dearieme

dearieme — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 22:36:27 +0000

That loathsome wee twat is really rather dim, isn’t he? How about:- “Our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety and THEREFORE we protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted”?

By: ben

ben — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 10:32:12 +0000

Paradigm was the in vacuous word during the dot.com nonsense of the late 90s. I had a friend who went to dot.com press conferences and would always ask the CEO if his or her company had a new “para-dig-m”. It was priceless stuff watching the CEO trying to work out if they were having the piss taken out of them, or if it was just an ignorant hack who didn’t know how to pronounce the word.
It’s a bollocks word and one that usually betrays a terrible paucity of thought.

By: Backword Dave

Backword Dave — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 15:27:40 +0000

I agree, great post. (I hate saying that in comments; the point is to disagree in an interesting way.)

Blair reads to me like a literal-minded plodding student trying to make an essay on something he doesn’t understand by the generous use of buzz-words “paradigm”, “denial”, “community” like currants in a Christmas cake.

Of course, a lot of people think Kuhn is not worth a great deal. FWIW, I think there’s something in it, but he’s over-rated. But “any evidence which might point towards a new set of theoretical assumptions would be deliberately and systematically ignored” reads more like a description of the Michelson-Morley result than anything in Copernicus’ time. And I’m sure Kuhn was thinking of the Einsteinian revolution, anyway.

By: Jarndyce

Jarndyce — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 10:18:53 +0000

Great post, Phil. And not just your Blair, the other one too (via), from his conference speech last week: The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me: that must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.It means a complete change of thinking. Scary. But I veer from you when it comes to the "Muslim community". Absolutely, not every British Muslim (in fact a minuscule fraction of the whole) is a terrorist. But all terrorists aiming to kill on a mass scale in London are Muslim, at this point in time. So, as you've written in a previous post, the "Muslim community" is to a degree stuck with them. Further, I'd argue the solution, if one exists, will lie within that community. Not because they should "inform" any more than anyone else who discovered a nascent terrorist plot but because it's Muslims who are in a position to get hold of that information. They have a comparative advantage in helping wider society. A (slightly wonky) analogy: it's equally incumbent on all of us to rescue a drowning child if we can do so without unreasonable risk to ourselves. However, if I walk past a lake and see that child, and nobody else is around, it's no longer incumbent on all of us equally to save the child. That duty falls on me alone. I don't know if that's how Blair looks at the "Muslim comunity's" duty to fight terrorism, but that's how I see it. So, crudely, for me a responsible community leader is one who is prepared to snitch on terrorists before they get the chance to kill.