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MalcolmBoura

Listed below are comments made by MalcolmBoura between Monday, 6th October 2008 and Wednesday, 22nd April 2009.

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Tuesday's Quote of the Day 9:40pm on 22 Apr 2009 Fortunately it appears that the phone call was a hoax so we won't have to make a complaint. It is well established that censorious attitudes are harmful and that they are especially harmful to young people. It is completely unacceptable that children should be used as a smokescreen for adult hang ups.

Malcolm Boura, British Naturism
Do we still need libraries? 7:18pm on 09 Feb 2009 I would have more faith in libraries if they were not so heavily censored and if that censorship was based on evidence instead of the presumed prejudices of Mrs Grundy.

Most censorship is invisible because a book or magazine missing from the shelves is invisible. If people knew what was being done in their name they would be horrified.

There are thousands of censors in the UK, every library, every council, every police officer, parcel carriers, magazine distributors, ofcom, BBC, ITV, the list goes on and on. There is not a single official body responsible for stopping unnecessary censorship.
The truth about sex education 10:26pm on 23 Oct 2008 The attitudes of a society produce outcomes. Societies which are uptight about nudity, sex and such like have far worse outcomes than those that are more liberal.

Much Government policy, often inadvertently, is making our society more like the USA and less like societies which have good outcomes. Compared to Denmark a teenager in the USA becomes sexually active younger, is less likely to use a condom or contraception and more likely to be promiscuous. The results are predictable. Nearly ten times more likely to become pregnant, nearly ten times more likely to have an abortion and over seventy times more likely to catch gonorrhea. That pattern repeats time and time again. More prudish country, worse outcomes. We even see the same pattern within the UK. Try comparing the figures for Scotland with those for England.

Prudery is a form of child abuse and no amount of prejudice can be allowed to hide that simple fact.
Should council workers have police powers? 7:55pm on 06 Oct 2008 It would take me about 5 minutes to make convincing looking badges, passes and the rest of it. There will be an explosion of con-artists. If I get stopped by somebody demanding to know who I am then I will dial 999. I am not going to risk giving personal information to somebody when I haven't got a clue who or what they are.

These people are often not even council workers. They are employed by contractors and the contractor may be paid depending on how many tickets are issued. Indeed if they don't issue any tickets they may not get paid at all. The employee may also be on targets and commission. Justice is destroyed by the profit motive.

The Local Government Act is in the final stages of becoming law. Councils will be able to make byelaws without any real consultation, with no supervision and with only 3 weeks in which the public can complain, complaints which will probably be ignored. Go on a long holiday and you risk coming back to find that something you care deeply about has been made illegal. It will then be enforced using fixed penalty notices or prosecution. To make it worse, although council workers are required to be trained there is no such requirement for contractors staff.

They claim that the fixed penalties do not give you a criminal record but that is most misleading. They can give you a record which will be with you for the rest of your life and might as well be a criminal record.

There is no realistic right of appeal. The bill to fight a court case can easily be several thousand pounds along with enormous stress and wasted time. Even if you are morally and legally in the right it will probably just be your word against theirs. You then get a criminal conviction which could destroy your career.

A friend of mine recently fought a fixed penalty notice and it cost about £9000. Fortunately he won and he claimed much of it back but he was still well over a thousand pounds out of pocket. The system is carefully designed to make justice an illusion.

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