Archive for April, 2007
Idealism? What’s that?
I’ve always looked forward to the first election I can vote in, but at the moment I’m not sure there is really going to be a lot of difference between the various choices on the ballot slip. The reason for this, of course, is the total lack of idealism in British politics at the moment, something which has left a situation where voters are being asked to pick between variations of one way of running the country. This is the almost universal politics of the centre.
Certainty is a very dangerous thing, but holding a socio-economic ideal is, in my opinion, vital for forcing politicians to make progress in the gradual improvement of the organisation of the human race to the optimum situation. By this I mean that this centre, non-idealist system is even more about simply winning votes and keeping people comfortably, falsely happy. Some would argue that it is realistic, that ideals cannot be achieved by their very nature. This is not true because if we cease to strive, we can never get anywhere. Many great figures across history have created that this was thought to be impossible at one point or another in time.
My hope is that the Labour leadership contest will push the winner over to the left, and this will then push the Tories nicely over the other way, returning to the age-old battle that *will* be won one day.
PS – my about page is open. Go there for political overviews of me, with my move towards a more serious blog. Keep the red flag held high, Comrades 
The Mental Health Bill & sectioning
The recently proposed changes to the Mental Health Bill has shown me a different set of opinions: in my experience people are more for the so-called ‘protection of the public’ than the rights of the person in question. However, the Lords have shown their worth this week by saying no, and it now winds its way through the legislative system, to be debated by the Commons this week. I believe that there are bigger, fundamental issues of our justice system that are undermined by effective imprisonment by the NHS. Yes, one of the purposes of imprisoning people at all is to protect those outside, but this is not the be all and end all.
To summarise the facts, as the law stands at the moment, doctors are able to ‘section‘ patients against their will and, aside from a few exceptions, apply treatment without the patients consent. The argument is that the patient is unable to make a rational decision against treatment in their mentally inhibited state. The key change with the new bill is that a wider range of conditions will be sectionable, notably untreatable ones, which under the current rules patients cannot be detained for. For any of these the requirement is that several (in emergencies however this can be reduced to one) medical professionals must sign to say that the sectioning should go ahead, and appeals can be made to a mental health tribunal. Indefinite confinement has long been possible (giving rise to the ‘loony bin’ concept).
This of course leaves the power to hold people against their will in the hands of doctors and psychiatrists, which is something that I do not believe they should have the power to do – notably, the patient is not allowed an advocate as they are in all court affairs. I can understand situations where a deranged person could cause damage to people, but again believe that doctors are not the people to make this decision. Additionally, the final point of appeal of the tribunal is again medical professionals.
I would propose a legal way forward, requiring a hearing before a court of law, with a judge and possibly jury, with the NHS prosecuting of a sort. It has been said that legal professionals cannot deal with this kind of situation because they are not qualified in medicine to understand the patient’s condition, but this is exactly my point – if the doctors had a truly strong and decent case, they would convince the judge/jury, allowing a second opinion to be had on the entire proceedings. In any case, compulsory treatment is not something that I think the state ought to be able to impose – mental illness, unlike something like a broken leg, is almost impossible to pin down (with exceptions where neurological changes are visible) and it is only someone’s opinion that someone is mentally ill. What if it’s just that they don’t fit the normal standards of behaviour? Who are we to deny that in a liberal society?
A further argument is that sectioning undermines one of the cornerstones of British justice: innocence until proof of guilt, which I think is incredibly important to sustain a fair system. Interestingly, this also contradicts the theory of the seperation of powers, as doctors are part of the executive, rather than the judiciary and therefore the power to imprison is in the wrong hands. I think that it would be all too easy for those high up to abuse this (despite the fact that the secret services already do). To conclude, I believe that the new bill is going in the wrong direction by adding power rather than taking it away as sectioning is an infringement of human rights that undermines key concepts of this country’s legal system.
Online identity
I’ve recently started to move away from using a pseudonym on ‘serious’ sites and communities to using my real name. The main effect of this was my Wikimedia accounts needed changing, which I got done quickly enough. However, I am now experiencing the pain of having to move links over, and also getting non-MediaWiki usernames changed requires lots of running around and finding people who can get it done. I knew this would happen, but in general it is way easier to use your real name for things like this – if you consider that at some points in the project you are going to have to use your real name, it just simplifies things by allowing you to simply use one thing all the way through. I’m getting other usernames changed to swhitton or spwhitton, and intend to use these in the future, mainly.
I’ve also changed my main IRC nickname on all networks from xyr to seanw which has been even harder as it is more difficult to leave redirects etc. I’ve had to edit my cloak (leading to a few believing that I’d left fn staff, for a reason I cannot fathom as yet) and get privileges moved over from old stuff. As RichiH pointed out, a lot can happen in a year and so it’s better to change now (roughly one year in to Wikimedia and freenode) than later, and that it’ll all be forgotten about in a year (metaphorically speaking, of course).
As my exams roll up closer, I’m starting to be more and more concerned that I’m not doing enough to ensure that I get the grades I should be getting. For this reason I’ve marked myself as restricting myself to a few more important jobs with Wikimedia, and this should allow me more time. I’ve realised that I need to be careful to avoid whittling away time on things such as messing around with this blog’s name and design (ahem) and that I need to manage my time better to ensure that I get everything done. Now, this may seem strange coming from me because as far as homework and coursework is concerned I always (i.e. 99.9% of the time) get it in, but revision is often forced to the bottom of the pile. This is why I need to be more careful with how I lay my time out. Unfortunately, activities like general chatter on IRC are likely to decrease, but I intend to get more actual freenode staffing done by simply remembering to go ‘on duty’ more often.
With all this name changing I realised that xyrael.net wasn’t really an appropriate domain anymore, and so I’ve changed over to using seanwhitton.com for my main blog, and as you can probably see a new design has been introduced, which I’m now pretty happy with but may tweak a bit. And yes, I didn’t do it – it was a Blogger template. I’ve created a space for static pages, because I do still want some form of a website. That’s hosted over on SilentFlame whilst this is on Blogger’s servers. I think I’m pretty happy with my setup now, once I get those static pages working and somewhat organised (and transferred over at least partially from the old xyrael.net, which aside from the front page is still fully operational).
I’m also trying to move more towards intelligent discussion on here, and as I’ve recently got a new way of keeping up with the news I think this is going to be easier. I need to stop talking about this blog and actually do some of the stuff I have planned! In life in general, I’m trying to balance my arguments and opinions well and argue them fairly. This is of course something that the debating society helps with (particularly Debating X-treme, a special club for a more formal style held after school). I’m fond of well-written persuasive, balanced writing, the kind found in commentary sections of newspapers. I hope that I can improve my skill in this, which will help with the kind of things I want to do in life. It’ll also help with my contributions to Wikimedia Planet, which picks up posts that I tag with ‘wiki’. Look forward to a selection of things I intend to write about in the near future (I have a list of titles at the ready).
Attempts at revision
I’ve been having fun (ha) with revision this week, and have been realising how annoyingly difficult it can be. I started off with a plan of five fifty-minute sessions per day, but unfortunately this collapsed very quickly. To start with, I made the plan around the beginning of the last week of term, but by the end of said week I had had a load of homework and coursework that I wasn’t expecting piled on. This fried my plans because I had to set aside time for that. Additionally, I’ve realised that fifty minutes is too long and so have lowered it to forty with a twenty minute break. In the end I’ve only got through a small amount of what I intended, but at least I can learn from this planning mistakes and perhaps do better in the future. For starters, providing I can get my revision stuff between the houses, I will do a forty minute session after school every day – or so I hope. At the moment it’s mainly generating revision cards of notes to read through nearer to the exams, so it isn’t too hard – just extremely boring.
Revision in general isn’t something that I like because in addition to finding it unentertaining (strange thing is that I’m often interested in the material and will quite happily read it, but that is supposed to not be a very full-proof way of doing things) and also don’t really have the patience. My skills in it are exceptionally low because I’ve never really had to revise before and this means that now I’m having to learn how to do it (if there is such a skill) and this is somewhat difficult. I’m having to ask for a lot of help (in the form of verbal/e-mail advice) to work out the best way of doing it. Worst of all, I get a lot of contradicting messages about which methods to use :S
The rest of this holiday is going to be very hectic because I have this weekend, or some of it, away with our cousins in Surrey, then the 10th and 11th are at my Father’s house where the former is my Sister’s birthday, and finally I then have four days in a hotel in the Lake District, which will probably be spent revising if not reading through a pile of school-related books I need to get through. On this note, I’ve realised lately that I’m getting to a busy point in general. The other night on IRC I was working out how to use my new staffer abilities on OFTC (something which I will blog about individually), but I was also trying to juggle a meeting for ComProj (my last post) and several PM conversations on IRC and IM. Is this a bad situation?