Weblog Sin Pies

By Mike Bijon

Reuters: Britain is banning people from engaging in anything that irritates someone else.

“British Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced court powers called Anti-Social Behavior Orders (ASBOs) in 1999 as part of a range of measures designed to ban problem behavior such as excessive noise, drunkenness, bad language and graffiti. … Preacher Philip Howard used to yell ‘be a winner not a sinner’ at passers-by through a megaphone in London’s main shopping street. But not everyone appreciated his high-volume evangelizing. Thanks to a court order, he faces up to five years in jail if he is caught with an amplification device in Oxford Street again. … A woman in Scotland was banned from answering the door in her underwear. One man was ‘ASBO-ed’ for playing the song ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ too loudly, another for feeding pigeons on his property.”

This is the best thing ever. My childhood dream of sending anyone who irritates me away can come true in Britain. Even better, I can stop trying to achieve world domination and watch a lot of TV now, since I don’t even have to rule the world to get rid of people over there. Just ratting them out for anything from public display of religion to having bad taste in music gets the government to ban them from doing whatever I don’t like.

While being “banned” may not sound like a big deal in the United States, it carries a threat of several years’ imprisonment in Britain, and any country that’s crushing free will is sure to will follow being banned through with a good portion of the threat — unlike the prison system in the United States where sentences rarely last as long as bumper stickers.

The government says ASBOs have made real progress in improving the quality of life and making the country safer, and last week Blair announced moves to withhold funding from councils that fail to tackle anti-social behavior.

Even better though, we should all e-mail Prime Minister Blair and encourage him to take the next step and create a colony for all those “crazies.” Just like when they shipped their religious outcasts to the American colonies and their prisoners to the Australian colonies, that could be a good thing for all the stuffy, normal people still allowed to stay in Britain. I can’t think of much land that isn’t spoken for now, but if Britain decides to be like the cool kids from high school they’ll just ditch anyone who doesn’t fit in with the country that most recently pissed them off. Maybe that’s why G-dub is so desperate for NASA to put people on Mars. He could pay back the US budget deficit by selling tickets to Britain to ship everyone they don’t like off to a whole new kind of penal colony.