Another example of blowing the whistle leading nowhere useful

You can’t catch some interesting Australian News on the banking system by following the links in this David Malone post – http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2011/11/whistleblowerirl-revealed/ – the story is pretty much routine in terms of what happens to whistle-blowers and describes how farcical ‘honesty is the best policy’ has become.  I no longer believe rational argument is possible on the economy and banking until we understand the current system is about thieving by an elite group.

I haven’t actually believed in rational argument for about 20 years.  What we have of it is a sham – which of course leaves me with problems on how I know this and how I can communicate it as I can’t appeal to rational argument itself.  Habermas followed Weber in appeal to an ‘ideal type’ – in his case the special case of ideal speech situations.  Of course, Plato beat him to this with his Guardians and their intense training and communist free table – which can look like elaborate reasons for dirty old men to get to look at gymnastics in the nude!  So farcical is The Republik that the Guardians are presumed so dumb they won’t know even their reproductive activities are being organised behind their backs.  Our “advanced civilisation”, of course, relies on such mad stuff as ‘greed is good’.Economics is often perceived by adherents as ‘Dr.Strangelove’s Game’ (Paul Ormerod) and we have generally forgotten (I polite term for ‘never known because we are too idle to learn’) its roots are not in Adam Smith, Richardo and Marx, but gambling and war financing (really, I’m not making this up – you just don;t read enough).

My interest in policing and criminal justice has little to do with my time as a cop.  The CJS is an example of society trying to contain pathology and I’m looking to formulate a model that might be the basis of an economics that works for more than a tiny number who then also control politics.  There has to be a way that doesn’t create “Guardians” or knowing people who want to control others for their own ‘reasons’, however good they are at hiding them in “cool objectivity” (which we know is never as claimed).

I’m inclined to the blunt – if there was nothing wrong and a sensible system was in place, we wouldn’t shit on whistle-blowers.  That we do this in high-ratio is obvious.  The BBC’s most gawping loon, Peston, wheeled on to ‘explain the figures’ tells us people just sense something is going wrong.  No they don’t you turd – they are unemployed, under-employed or see their kids with no jobs, no prospects and worry about paying the rent.  The figures you don’t give us concern massive debt brought on by neo-classical economics as sound as anything preached in religious sects, a theory that was always about enriching a few by stealing from the many, looting by bankers and a lot of other stuff you could track down if you were a reported and not a stooge,  Channel Four finally produced a woman with an MA selling teas and coffees from a van.  ‘Politicians’, she says, ‘don’t know what they’re talkin’ aboot’.  My written Geordie is poor!  I believe they do and are lying to us.

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Typical academic consideration of police lying

Police lying is not best described as a "dirty little secret."' For
instance, police lying is no "dirtier" than the prosecutor's encouragement
or conscious use of tailored testimony2 or knowing suppression of Brady
material;3 it is no more hypocritical than the wink and nod of judges who
regularly pass on incredible police testimony4 and no more insincere than
the demagogic politicians who decry criminality in our communities, but
will not legislate independent monitoring of police wrongd~ing.~
Police lying is no "little secret" either.6 Juries, particularly in our
urban criminal courts, are thoroughly capable of discounting police
testimony as unbelievable, unreliable, and even .mendacious.' Judges,
prosecutors and defense attorneys report that police perjury is commonplace,'
and even police officers themselves concede that lying is a regular
feature of the life of a cop.g Scandals involving police misconduct-
brutality, corruption, criminality-are regularly featured in the daily
nei~spapers,'a~n d periodic investigation reports and blue-ribbon commis-
sions come up with the same conclusions: police scandals are cyclical;
official misconduct, corruption, brutality, and criminality are endemic; and
necessarily, so is police lying to disguise and deny it."
there has been a fierce
controversy on how the procedural requirements placed on police conduct
encourage police lying and duplicity in order to tailor the facts to these
legal requisites.I5 Specifically, scholars, judges, pundits, and law
enforcement professionals argue back and forth on whether or not the
exclusion of illegally obtained evidence actually deters police misconduct,
or rather encourages police perjury and "scamming," while rewarding
undeserving criminal offenders.16
Proving the Lie:
Litigating Police Credibility
David N. Dorfman*
Pace University
DigitalCommons@Pace

I take the view that police lying and the kind of stuff going on in the hacking scandal give us the paradigm case of much going wrong across society.  In this article, if you read long enough in the opening above, you can see part of the concern is that the apparatus of rules of evidence encourage lying.  This is not an attack on cops and it does not become one in the 50 or so pages that follow.

Our legal system has long relied on fictions like ‘witness credibility’ and our business system.  Journals on business ethics carry similar papers on the dirty world of commerce and banking.  For that matter, none of us in the UK or US know why our soldiers died and are dying and why we’ve been killing people in wars we don’t understand.  There are questions about our institutions, education, media and the state of public knowledge and how it is influenced we should be asking.  The repeated problem might be described as the ‘back-fire of ignorance’ – what should be dialogue turned to adversarial debate.  How can an MP, after the expenses scandal, be fit to ask a former Met detective about cover-up and corruption when they all so singularly failed with their own – a matter that only came out by whistle-blower leak for money to the press?

Scandal blows away – otherwise how could Keith Vaz be chairing a committee on, essentially, corruption (as Dickiebo despairs if you need reminding)?  There’s a better way to be doing this kind of thing.  It isn’t academic debate, though should be much better informed by this – a difficult matter as most people don’t read and are very set in their ways.  We still do public debate through Idols Francis Bacon outlined more than 400 years ago.

We have the technology (a combination of IT and ideas) to change.  History always throws up ‘cheating’.  Central banks all cheated the gold standard when it was being used, practising “sterilization” to prevent gold entering the money supply – a direct contravention of the rules.  They had ‘noble cause’ excuses just like the Met.  The ‘Innocent Project’ has thrown up at least 50 cases where DNA proves innocence and yet the defendants confessed (these are people without low IQ or mental problems).

My own belief is we are scared of transparency, partly because all our cupboards hide skeletons.  When the ‘red witch’ placed at the heart of the hacking scandal admitted she knew her organisation had paid police officers, this was seen as a blunder and admission of ‘criminality’.  This is not the right approach and seems to be putting people we want to tell the truth in the same position as the police officer having to ‘game’ in the legal system.

Our own IPCC (four words all made lies by the first?) privilege what police present in a manner that can only suggest they are ignorant of academic material – and they are well-populated with graduates (this is not contradictory to me as I mark graduate submissions and find little critical ability or evidence of reading).  For all the blather about not wanting a blame culture, they (and the rest of us as public) remain clueless about what one is.

If we didn’t live in such a medieval society, I’d be a rational optimist.

Some substantial literature (free) on drugs

http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c3360.full?ijkey=xIwckDCjknVi9wn&keytype=ref

http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S0256-95742011000200001&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en

http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/6/999.short

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA517911&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10594&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ca

toRecentO

http://julianbuchanan.wordpress.com/

Our problem of course is that very few of us read or even watch current affairs.

Most people taking drugs don’t consider themsleves as addicts.  One study explored the perspectives of low-level drug market users on the availability, purchase and consumption of illicit drugs within the social context of drug prohibition. A snowballing technique was used to recruit 16 participants consisting of nine males and seven females aged between 17 and 43. A semi-structured interview process elicited their views on their use of drugs, where they obtained them, their views on the impact of the criminal justice system on their drug use and finally their views on how drug users were perceived by non-drug users. While some negative consequences of using drugs were reported, no participant considered that their use of drugs made them an addict, a criminal or antisocial. The findings from this study suggest that current punitive drug policy, which links drug use with addiction, crime and antisocial behaviour was inconsistent with the experience of the participants.  The rest of us, with ‘television consciousness’ probably do.  We need discussion that includes relevant views.  I don’t agree with these ‘druggies’ and suspect they don’t see the problems they cause – but I’m hardly bothered if someone wants to ‘skin up’.

I have no wish to see drugs decriminalised – I want to see proper policing and a system that helps our cops and social workers sort out problems the system is in denial about.  The links above worked at 6 p.m. Monday.

Decriminalisation really means strengthening administrative law and treating human rights in proportion to decent, law-abiding people ahead of some of the ludicrous abuses we’ve been seeing lately.  My worries are mostly concerned with our crap administrative abilities and administrators.  NuLabour changed nothing through legislation, so why should we hope for much from the current ‘business-as-usual’ turkeys?