Dangers of the Nanny State
08
February
Look, given this blogs tagline, I couldn’t let a blog post titled Nanny State go without comment, could I? Cicero’s Songs: The Nanny State:
Life should contain some risks- all of us have an unwritten expiration date on our birth certificate. The key is the find a balance- the “something must be done” brigade are driving our society to expect the impossible: complete safety, and to sue when this is not the case.
Agree completely, naturally, the rest is rather good as well.
4 posts in one night? Time to turn in methinks…
1. Tim Neale | February 8th, 2006 at 2:35 am
Well I read this after a hard night of binge drinking (3 pints in the whole evening) and just had to vent on the subject
2. Katherine | February 8th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Certainly some good points. I am generally suspicious though when someone labels anything or anyone a “brigade”. That immediately suggests to me that a straw man is being set up. What is this “something must be done” brigade? Such a moniker makes it sound like a powerful lobby group. The police force merger plans sound more like the plans of the “we must be seen to be doing something” brigade - aka New Labour.
3. MatGB | February 8th, 2006 at 6:55 pm
Katherine; essentially, I’m reading it as a tongue in cheek statement; you’re right though, the “brigade” of whatever is normally pointing at a bunch of disparate groups, but it’s nice, for a change, to see it used from a liberal perspective rather than in less, shall we say, inclusive terms.
I think the “something must be done brigade” are linked, inexorably, to the “we must be seen to be doing something cadre”, or at least, to the NuLab version.
It’s a mixture of ‘offended of Tunbridge Wells’, the Daily Mail/Sun leaders pages and whatever lobbying group wants to protect me from some danger that I want to make my own choices on thank you very much.
Example today in an ad in the Independent from Cancer Research, “passive smoken is proven to cause cancer”. No, that implies if you inhale someone else’s smoke, you will get cancer. In fact, it merely increases your chances.
I plan to spend a bit of the evening researching some ASA guidelines…
Still, sometimes they do the right thing (albeit for the wrong reasons), the 24-hour drinking liberalisation has, according to the front page, helped bring down crime, as I suspected it would. Article (well, venting rant) about it possible to follow…