Fascism in Ontario!

[thebitterguy]

Police Chiefs push for beer keg registry.

When will they learn! Beer doesn't kill people! People kill people!

Admittedly, usually after drinking a few beers.

Comments

[sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with keg registry? If you're being responsible, you have nothing to hide.

[thebitterguy]

If they criminalize keg rentals, only criminals will rent kegs.

[sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

I thought they only wanted a name registry, so when a party goes out of control, they have the name of the person responsible for organizing it.

[thebitterguy]

It looks like they're planning on pre-emptively visiting folks.

I'm actually a little torn, because kegs are like the heavy machine gun of the booze world. I'm all for people getting some beer, but that seems a wee bit like overkill.

Not just no, but HELL no.

[absinthe-dot-ca.livejournal.com]

I honestly had to check the date - I was wondering if April 1st had somehow snuck up again.

As for those who argue "if you have nothing to hide, there's nothing wrong with this", I call BULLSHIT. The whole premise of a free society is based, in part, on freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. In short, if the cops don't have a valid reason to suspect wrongdoing, they can stay out of my house. Valid reasons can't be "because I have a beer keg" or something equally as inane, or before you know it the police will be knocking on your door just because they thought that you might have had a bad thought about beer.

This is just so wrong that I can't even begin to say how wrong it is, and the worst part is always the people who willingly give up their own privacy and freedom "in the name of security". In the words of Benjamin Franklin, those who would give up their freedom in the name of security deserve neither.

I know I'm going pretty off-the-deep-end about what appears (on first glance) to be a pretty minor "fluff" piece, but this is just one more example of how too many people want to take your personal freedoms away to make their own jobs easier.

The most ironic part of this tirade, of course, is that I don't even drink beer.

Re: Not just no, but HELL no.

[thebitterguy]

The article seems badly done for two reason: A) the cop seems to be a bit 'gimme! Gimme!', and the rebuttal is the CUSA president. WTF? I know she'd be an expert on over-drinking, but really.

But Kegs are sort of the automatic rifle of the booze world. It's sort of a given that when a keg shows up, someone's gonna go bluto and start screaming and running around in a toga (a toga if we're lucky!). And, yes, guilty on all charges, your honour.

But, as you said, it's a definite assumption of guilt, a bit of a big brotherish presumption. And is this country built on anything more than the assumption that we'll go someplace soewhat remote and drink just enough to be troublesome? I think not.

Re: Not just no, but HELL no.

[absinthe-dot-ca.livejournal.com]

Like automatic weapons, beer kegs do have their purpose - delivering large quantities of lead - err,suds - in a short period of time. There are perfectly valid reasons for this, such as weddings of 300+ people. I should not have to justify the reason I wish to purchase a large quantity of a legal-to-own substance. If they start cracking down on beer kegs, can a crackdown on brew-your-own kits (which make up to 5 gallons of suds at a time) be far behind?

Overall, this is a pretty damn silly news story, but I still stand behind my (rather poorly made) point, which is that the erosion of civil rights and freedoms in the name of "safety and security" is not something we should assume is a "good thing".

Contrary to popular conception and political theory, the government (any government, not just the yahoos sitting in parliament in Ottawa) does not have the health and welfare of its populace as its primary concern. The primary concern of any government is how to get re-elected - unless they are freshly-elected, in which case their primary concern is not to screw things up any worse than the previous team did, or at least not in any publicly-viewable or accountable way. As such, I tend to view any attempt to "protect me" (from myself or from others) with a degree of skepticism.

Re: Not just no, but HELL no.

[thebitterguy]

It's not even teh government who's trying to implement this; it's the cops, those stalwart defenders of cibil liberties.

Re: Not just no, but HELL no.

[thebitterguy]

And, in the further interests of diabolic advocacy (I need an icon for that), it is a controlled substance. The police may view tracking it as no more intrusive than asking for id when buying smaller amounts.

Re: Not just no, but HELL no.

[absinthe-dot-ca.livejournal.com]

Then the police would be wrong. There is a HUGE difference, from a civil liberties point of view, between verifying that an individual is entitled to exercise his rights and tracking what an individual does with his rights. One is a minor infringement of civil liberties which could be argued as necessary to ensure that people who have not earned the right do not attempt to exercise it anyway. The other is a quasi-Orwellian maneuver designed to give the "powers that be" more information than they really need to know to keep me happy, healthy, and sheltered. It's left as an exercise for the diligent reader to determine which is which.