This Week in the New Normal #98 - April 1, 2025

[yankeedoodle]

Note the "suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance" charge. It doesn't get much broader and more slippery and loose and vague than that, does it?  Whatever you're doing, or they think you're going, you're under arrest.

This Week in the New Normal #98
Facial recognition in supermarkets, police raids on church halls and transphobic toddlers.
https://off-guardian.org/2025/04/01/this-week-in-the-new-normal-98/

Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world. https://off-guardian.org/category/this-week-in-the-new-normal/

1. Facial Recognition in Supermarkets
In the UK recently we've been hearing a lot about the plague of shoplifting. In January, the BBC reported that shoplifters were "brazen and out of control".  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp82jvd3g54o

And today we found out why... https://corporate.asda.com/newsroom/2025/31/03/asda-launches-facial-recognition-trial-in-five-stores-to-combat-retail-crime

Today, Monday 31st March, Asda has begun trialling Live Facial Recognition at five stores in Greater Manchester to assess how this technology can be used to improve colleague and customer safety in store.

The trial comes at a time when retailers are facing an epidemic of retail crime. According to the BRC trade body, there are more than 2,000 incidents of violence and abuse against shopworkers every day – a threefold increase since 2020.

It's always so predictable, isn't it?

Sure, it's just a trial in one city. But that's just the beginning.

2. Quaking in their jackboots
The Metropolitan Police raided a Quaker meeting hall in force to arrest six women eating hummus. This is the world we live in now.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj3x5j6g30ro

The meeting was being held by a group called Youth Demand, and was apparently to do with climate change and Palestine and...you know, the kind of thing youth political groups talk about while they eat their hummus.

The arrests were made by more than thirty officers, and the six women were charged with "suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance".

The charge is bullshit, obviously. The raid is bullshit too. Honestly, "Youth Demand", with their climate change action and hummus is, also, hilariously, bullshit. But it doesn't matter if you agree with them, or if they even exist. As always, the precedent and principle are the problem.

3. It's the eating bugs thing again
"Adjust your disgust", says the headline of this piece in Aeon magazine. Adding in the subhead:https://aeon.co/essays/would-you-eat-a-cockroach-what-if-it-was-sterilised-why-not 

The future of food is nutritious and sustainable – if we can overcome our instinctual revulsion to insects and lab-grown meat"

I won't bore you with the details, you already know them.

Meanwhile, in China, the annual meeting of top lawmakers discussed the need to "boost national biotech capacity and introduce a novel food framework".  https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/china-two-sessions-alternative-protein-novel-food-regulation-policy/

One official, in a statement to the National People's Congress, expressed the need to "expand the boundaries of food resources" including "in-depth exploration, nutritional evaluation, and industrial production of alternative proteins".

The pattern is repeating worldwide, quieter than a couple of years ago, but no less recognizable.

Bugs and goo, man. It's gonna be bugs and goo all the way down.

BONUS: Ragebait of the week
A story doing the rounds right now is that a toddler was suspended from their nursery for being "transphobic", and everyone is very cross. If you dig into the specifics of the story you find something very interesting...there aren't any. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14553181/toddler-kicked-nursery-transphobic.html

The toddler and school are unnamed. The supposedly offensive behaviour unspecified. It didn't even happen this year – supposing it happened at all. It's a statistic pulled from a report on all school suspensions in the 23/24 academic year.

And, like all statistics – most particularly government issued statistics – may be entirely made up. But that hasn't stopped anyone being very cross.

It's not all bad...
Some good news from the UK this week, where we might be seeing the highly controversial Assisted Dying bill delayed for a couple of years.  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/26/ten-reasons-why-the-assisted-dying-bill-has-been-delayed/

The pushback comes as the bill is subject to last-minute changes such as swapping out the judicial review for an expert panel and lowering the age limitations.

Personally, I think they need a new spokesperson. Kim Leadbetter comes over as callous and absurd whenever she speaks publicly, not least when she says the problem with assisted suicide and coercion is that families might wrongly coerce their relative into staying alive too long...


Twitter video here: https://x.com/RightToLifeUK/status/1905711519591284929?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1905711519591284929%7Ctwgr%5E7f2b1cd780d1ee545551ad48615aae2ed879e6eb%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-guardian.org%2F2025%2F04%2F01%2Fthis-week-in-the-new-normal-98%2F