easyweb.co.uk - Ann Picking

Anne Moffat: Reductio ad Hitlerum

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:07:30 +0000

Our MP, Anne ~~Picking~~Moffat has historically been a thought-free, nodding dog for whatever hare-brained, knee jerk, reactionary guff the current government has dreamt up.

However, lately she's excelled herself in lack of thought, research, tact and insight when she conflated problems with the recent Scottish Ballot Paper with the principle of PR, and in doing so, compared the new First Minister to Hitler:

Did not proportional representation give Germany Adolf Hitler? To a lesser degree, we have been given the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond). Can that be a good example?
Source

To pick off the obvious problems:

There's the obvious kneejerk against Labour's current bête noir — sour grapes for losing power in Scotland, mixed with the fear resulting from her own constituency being part of that shift.
Then there's the simple fact that proportionality delivers an overall result that is closer to the will of the people. That it tends to upset entrenched parties that benefit from the current system obviously leads to even the more reasonable of her Hon Friends decrying it.
Next, we can note that previous AMS elections had very few spoiled papers. And even this time round, the new STV system had a remarkably low spoilage rate. So bitchy comments about this particular election's validity are either supremely premature and ill-informed, or are directed at another target.
Finally, Ms Moffat has shown herself prone to making logical fallacies. In this case, the Reductio ad Hitlerum, generically expressed as Adolf Hitler (or the Nazi party) supported X; therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad, etc. As X can include building motorways, painting watercolors, owning dogs and vegetarianism, this is clearly a fallacy. In the online world, this is known as the Corollary to Godwin's Law: the citing of Hitler in an argument ends the argument, with the citer being deemed to have automatically lost.

The Home Office's Best Week Ever

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 12:13:19 +0000

With apologies to la Hewitt for the title.

To start slightly off centre, this week saw two major scope increases for the National ID scheme (conveniently after the legislation has passed):

The NIR is to function as a complete population register with cross-functional data sharing that far exceed the stated strictly limited circumstances mandate. As previously predicted by the Fiend, myself and others, this is child's play once you have foreign keys to all the government's databases stored on the Register
Contrary to previous promises, the Card is to store your medical info. So as well as the inevitable Civil Liberties problem here, every provider of medical services is going to need the Card Reading Kit (previously estimated by the Home Office as £4k - £6k plus connectivity for each reader workstation). Whose budget is paying for this? Can't imagine the Dept for Health is jumping at the idea.

So I'm beginning to think that maybe the best way to keep tabs on the population isn't to give each of us an ID Card, but instead to lock the lot of us up in a secure location, and then HMG will know exactly where we all are. Oh, wait...

Continues below the fold »

Dear Anne: About These ID Cards

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:11:39 +0000

Today I participated in Democracy, and wrote to (well, faxed) my MP on the subject of ID Cards. Read on for what I wrote, and wait and see if Anne Picking also participates. Although given her history of never rebelling against the Labour whip, and spending under £150 per annum on stationery, perhaps I shouldn't be too hopeful of a sensible response. We'll see, eh?