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.

By Trevor Ryan

I feel that in general I’m a very accepting person … well, I take that back. I’m very accepting of groups of people to a much greater degree than I am of individuals, and I’ve long grown out of that phase where I feel the need to put others down strictly to feel better about myself. But the one group of people that throws that whole architecture out of whack is the Amish. Can somebody please tell me what is going on here?

The Amish are the worst. I mean this in the nicest possible way, but they truly are. Why, you ask? For a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the Amish are so amicable that to put them down makes me feel worse about myself, which is clearly not how this sort of thing is meant to go down. In fact, as a whole, the Amish act as if every day is opposite day, not just when you’re feeling sassy and suggest that to someone to drive him or her nuts.

While I’ve never even experienced an entire opposite day, I have driven through Amish country (see, it sounds like “bear country” or “snake country” because there are no actual boundaries, which is unnatural. Well, for people anyway) and I can attest to the fact that it’s coo-coo over there. Suppose you’re Amish and you need to go somewhere. Hop in the car, right? Wrong. No car for you, because as far as the Amish are concerned, cars are evil or something. Well, I think my car is evil, so that’s a start, but generally they are not only not evil, but also quite convenient. In fact, the evil of my own vehicle corresponds directly to the substandard degree to which it works. “Aha!” cries the Amish guy who accidentally went online and read this, “But convenience in and of itself is evil.”

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