Feeling uncomfortable about the morality of gambling but wondering why?

Published on April 3, 2007 in morality and gambling. 0 Comments

It seems to me that a lot of people feel uncomfortable with gambling but aren’t really sure why.

Interestingly, the petitions against gambling on the Prime Minister’s 10 Downing Street site have garnered only a small number of signatures.

(Of course, this may reflect the lack of publicity skills of those organising the petitions rather than people’s lack of belief in the cause.)

When questioned about gambling, many say that they would feel at ease with participating in a small lottery or raffle but wouldn’t go into a casino.

When pressed as to why, they usually have difficulty in explaining themselves.

Perhaps the Gambling Act 2005 has now prompted many of us to look more closely into where our personal morality comes from in the modern age.

Like myself, many people in the UK seeem no longer comfortable with religious belief, and perhaps we need to understand ‘good’ or ‘evil’ from a different starting point. Otherwise, how do we make a judgement about activities which make us feel uncomfortable of which, probably, gambling is only one?

Most people would agree that gambling ‘hurts’ some people at least. But so do cigarettes, cars and food.

Many people say that it is ’stupid’ for anybody to gamble. They point out that the odds are always loaded against the punter who will almost certainly lose in the end. So, should we encourage people to do something that is ’stupid’?

Perhaps it is also a matter of where the hurt stops. Is the hurt limited to those who become ‘problem’ gamblers. Or is it limited to the families and children of ‘problem gamblers’ who suffer from the consequences of anothers actions? Or maybe everybody who gambles is hurt a little bit.

One might also ask whether it is even actually ‘bad’ to hurt people – after all a small percentage of the population rather appear to like it?

Certainly, it is easier to ask these questions than answer them but, surely, answer them we must, if we are to make our country and world a better place.

Perhaps the greatest danger we must guard against is exemplified in popular UK TV humour.

‘Awe … yer makin my ‘ead ‘urt … am ah bovvered!’

Yet how many of us ‘thinkers’ would actually say the same, but using rather posher words?

Bye for now

Rob

(Rob Hopcott – online author and openly committed to ‘being bovvered’

Online disinhibition, freedom, imagination and burgeoning laws

Published on April 2, 2007 in Politics of Internet freedom. 0 Comments

I was interested to read John Suler, Ph.D. and Professor of Psychology at Rider University discussing the online disinhibition effect and it’s causes. As he says:

It’s well known that people say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t ordinarily say or do in the face-to-face world.

However, how long people will regard the Internet as being a thing of the imagination in which they can freely and openly interact is very much open to question.

Laws have already been passed and much of the law that will probably be legislated in the near future is likely to be concerned with the breaking down of the anonymity felt to be enjoyed by many hitherto on the Internet.

Laws already exist to require sites to reveal ownership and contact details where there is a potential of commercial gain. The laws of defamation are already being used against the unwary and, in the UK, laws are in existence to prevent the promotion of terrorism.

Of course, little that is communicated on the Internet is truly untraceable. It is really just a matter of how easy it is made to follow the trail.

Arguably, it will not be long before any form of online activity will require overt identification.

An Internet of the imagination, where people are free to say and be as they will is rapidly disappearing.

Of course, few will not understand the need to chase people for taxes, prevent Internet users saying hurtful and inaccurate falsehoods about the innocent and penalise those who actively promote physical harm to the general population.

However, the Internet has been a wonderful paradise of free imagination and growth, since it’s inception, and many, including myself, will be saddened by the shackles that are rapidly growing on it’s freedom.

As Jean Jacques Rousseau said,

man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.

It would be a wonderful thing if the thinkers of this world, who have done so well in building the wonderfully free and open resource that is the Internet, could now turn their brains to finding a way of dealing with these problems and hold back the need for regulation.

Rob Hopcott

Online author and Internet liberal)

Petition to 10 Downing Street requiring UK elected paid Local Government Councillors to reply to reasonable communications from constituents

Published on March 27, 2007 in Councillors letters and emails and Local Government politics. 0 Comments

Totally fed up by Local Government Councillors who do not reply to my emails or letters, I have taken the plunge and set up a petition on the 10 Downing Street site. Please support this petition.

The petition submitted asks the Prime Minister to:

Require elected paid Local Government Councillors to reply to reasonable communications from constituents

The supporting narrative is as follows:

Elected local Councillors frequently do not reply to reasonable communications from their constituents regarding questions of Local Government policy.

A system of Official Public Local Government Forums must be set up to enable Local Authority constituents to publicly question Local Government Councillor’s about their policies and in which the Councillors will be legally required to make a written and reasoned reply.

A parallel system of email addresses must be set up for communications of a private nature to which there will also be a legal requirement for the Local Government Councillors to reply.

By opening questions of Local Government policy to forensic local public discussion, the quality of decisions made by Local Government Councillors on behalf of their constituents will be improved.

The individual quality of Local Government Councillors will be better audited by constituents enabling better voting decisions to be made during Local Elections.

Anger and frustration constituents feel when they spend time researching issues and composing carefully written communications to which they do not receive any reply will be eliminated.

I am not the only frustrated constituent in my Local Government Authority. Even the Chairman of the local Chamber of Commerce complained to the local press that he hadn’t received any replies to policy questions he put to ruling Tory Councillors.

One exception he recorded was a Councillor who wrote back to say that they couldn’t reply because they were on a committee that made it against the rules for them to reply to these questions.

Please support this petition.
Bye for now

Rob

Judgement day looms for much criticised Tory West Somerset District Council

Published on March 21, 2007 in Local Government politics. 0 Comments

Since the last set of District Council elections, Minehead’s sleepy West Somerset town centre has seen a massed demonstration when locals demonstrated loudly against the policies of the local ruling majority Conservative Council to sell off local car parks, bring in local business bashing national retail supermarkets and build comfy offices for their employees.

Subsequently, during a packed public meeting, early District Council elections were called for from the floor by protesters but this was publicly ruled out at the time by the Tory Leader of West Somerset District Council.

At long last, after waiting many months, the May 2007 local elections will enable the people of West Somerset to make their judgement on the performance of the much criticised Tories.

West Somerset is considered an area blighted and in much need of regeneration with high house prices, low wages, struggling businesses and poor road access.

The local Conservative Party has over the years been repeatedly returned at local elections and many believe it is now time for them to take responsibility for the poor state of economic affairs in West Somerset.

However, many of the electorate are pensioners who are past working age and may not be too bothered about the local economy. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether the voices urging changes to Local Council policies, which are seen by many as damaging to the local economy in West Somerset, will prevail this May 2007.

West Somerset, UK holds breath hoping for political change in West Somerset District Council Elections May 2007

Successful political resolution of local community issues needs strong cooperative local communities but politics and other barriers often get in the way.

Published on November 23, 2006 in Politics. 0 Comments

Building a successful local community, arguably, depends on the support of a strong integrated local community who can become politically involved and hold development up or drive development quickly forward to a successful completion.

Building a successful integrated community must therefore be the starting point for local development and this applies to all people in the community, not just integration between different races or ethnic origins.

‘Fun rural communities can blossom through active social and community network building‘ provides a light hearted but challenging account of the continuing need for communities to work to remove the barriers to more social integration within rural social communities and a call for the support and encouragement for those working on bringing rural people together.

Examples of successful rural community workers are welcomed.

Bio fuels revolution must be demand led by ordinary people. Politicians will go slow.

Published on November 21, 2006 in Politics. 0 Comments

The bio fuels revolution has been scientifically with us since the days of Henry Ford. Ignorance of the harm we were doing the planet has led us to take the easy and non-renewable route of oil. Now we realize that we urgently need to adopt carbon neutral driving and transport habits, but the oil lobby has a huge vested interest in protecting their liquid gold reserves by lobbying Governments to proceed slowly.

Consequently, the bio fuels revolution must be customer led with ordinary people finding ways to buy their bio fuel that bypass traditional oil company dominated supply systems.

Read how farmers and farming can join directly with ordinary people to save the planet with bio-fuels

Official UK Parliamentary Discussion Forums would combat electoral detachment and perhaps even terrorism

Published on November 14, 2006 in Politics. 1 Comment

Official UK Parliamentary People’s Discussion Forums must be introduced forthwith because they would combat electoral detachment and perhaps even reduce the extremist’s resort to riot and terrorism.

Furthermore, It must be a legal right of every UK citizen to have their question, policy issue or point properly debated fully in public on the Official UK Parliamentary People’s Discussion Forums.

Is the UK Government likely to institute Official UK Parliamentary Discussion Forums? Anybody who has seen on the television or heard on the radio Ministers of the Government avoiding straight answers to straight questions from interviewers must doubt it.

Can straight answers to straight questions of policy be so dangerous? Even if straight answers are inconvenient, surely this is better that a detached electorate and vastly preferable to an angry detached electorate, riots and terrorism.

Official UK Parliamentary Discussion Forums in which the ordinary electorate can engage in dialogue with the State must be instituted forthwith with no half measures.

The current one way system of hierarchical consultation that favours lobbies, partners and cliques no longer works and will lead increasingly to social fractures.

Why Official UK Parliamentary People’s Discussion Forums must be introduced – full detail.

Young Peoples Community Facilities Are More Important Than New Local Government Offices

Published on November 6, 2006 in Politics. 0 Comments

My Local Government District Council wants to build new Local Government offices in the face of much opposition from a long standing local community campaign in our local area.

Our local ruling party District Councillors, who are mainly pretty elderly, seem to think that young people need no more than a waste paper bin to kick around our streets in the UK and that comfy offices for Council employees and Councillors are more important than giving young people somewhere to go and things to do in the evening.

I think community facilities for young people are more important than comfy Council offices and so do many others in our local area.

Local Councillors must be made accountable for their extraordinary decisions and must be required to defend their arguments in official and properly constituted public Internet forums.

Currently, you are lucky if they even acknowledge your email or letter. This is wrong and must be dealt with.

Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly as part of the White Paper discussion on ‘Effective, accountable and responsive Local Government’ and the UK Parliament must legislate to require Local Government Councillors to defend their decisions in official Council provided public Internet forums.

Those District Councillors who are unable to adequately debate these issues and who are effectively being re-elected on a blind party ticket will be exposed and booted out. A consequently more knowledgeable electorate will be empowered to elect District Councillors better able to do the job.

Welcome to my new politics and political dicussion weblog.

Published on October 27, 2006 in Politics. 0 Comments

Welcome to my new politics and political discussion weblog. Here I will record political discussion, opinion and information about local government politics and national (UK) government politics that I feel strongly about.

For many years, I have been writing to Local Councils and have received no acknowledgement or reply. I have also written on a number of occasions to my local MP (Member of Parliament) also receiving no reply.

When I have attended local consultation meetings about local matters, I have been appalled at the ivory tower attitudes of our elected representatives.

I believe that the more ordinary people like myself get involved in the process of democracy the better it will be. This blog is an attempt to get involved and hopefully make the world a better place.

Rob