Posts by tussock
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Hard News: Crossing the line into idle bigotry, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Sort of.
Scots is a fundamentalist fashion culture. What the Bard wore is fundamentally correct. The Bard laid down a lot of sayings about how pants should not be warn so Scots has a very fashion-conscious function built in. And a lot of what the Bard wore was fresh.
Fortunately for everybody, the Bard wore lots of things – things that can be interpreted as clashing with each other – and more importantly wore these things a long time ago. In the intervening period designs have evolved to facilitate Scottish pants that work – do all the things that pants do (warm, clothe, comfort, protect, enhance the lives of the citizenry). This is how most Scots sit.
Unfortunately there is a lot of oil off Scotland. To the rulers of large parts of the British Isles this means they are way better off repressing the urges of their citizens to seek better pants (ask for a bigger share of the revenues). They’ve done the good old opiate of the people thing and fostered ultra-conservative Scottish dress that takes most the fashion work of the intervening 400 years and calls no true Scotsman on it. This works for the rulers real well and even though the fashion it produces doesn’t really work … so what, it doesn’t matter because there is enough oil money to sponsor pipe bands anyway.
Then doubly unfortunately the British export their newly found oddly conservative Scots dress by setting up schools to teach the literal pure dress of the Bard and by tearing down the fashion that distracts from the Bards kilts. This takes hold in places where there is no gushing fountain of creativity and when it doesn’t work there – bollocks are on show. The Scots who follow the no-pants branch are relatively few and most other Scots don’t like them (because bollocks on show = bad).
However Scots is a fundamentalist fashion-culture and what the Bard wore is fundamentally correct to every Scotsman – otherwise you are no true Scotsman. The pipe bands by dressing as the Bard almost bared (and controlling Ayrshire) lay claim to being purely Scottish and this is a claim the wider Scots world has difficulty disputing (unless they are Irish – whole other story). And if Scots have difficulty disputing the pipe band claims it becomes very difficult for you, me or opinion writers at the Times to dispute it.
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Legally the police have no choice. One person makes a complaint or it gets in the press and they have to act. It's specific police training that they not have a heart or a conscience about the people they're hassling, they are again required by law to go after everyone, not pick and choose. The only maxim is they not waste their time on people they can't possibly convict of anything, like rich folk.
As everyone knows, they attract some bad-natured people to the force as a result. Those with a kind heart have a hard time enforcing all of our shitty laws. As such you get police earning internal brownie points by keeping stories negative for the police out of the press, by any means they can imagine, legal or otherwise. It happens. Reports get fixed up. People get talked to, repeatedly. Police turn up at your work, over and over again. Serious charges get laid if you dare complain.
Having said that, police are totally handy for people with real problems. Fall off a cliff or get stabbed and the police (and medical folk) will totally fix that up for you. If we didn't have laws forbidding broadly harmless activities they'd have more time to spend on the real problems and less ability to convict anyone harmless (and thus less desire to hassle them, and enabling them to recruit more kind-hearted people).
TL;DR: the problem here is we have stupid and widely unpopular laws that punish harmless people, including people trying to do real good. This is the inevitable outcome of that.
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Something else y'all might notice about Stewart is he's a tool of the Democrats just as much as Fox is for the Republicans. Like Mr Littlewood says there, he spent eight years talking shit about Bush, now he's talking shit about the people who criticise Obama for doing almost exactly the same things on every single issue.
Now, you can totally do that for valid reasons, in that Obama is ... almost sane. At least less clearly bat-shit crazy than Romney.
Like, Obama believes the US is a perfectly fair country where anyone can literally become president if they just want it, where Romney thinks the US is a country were the noble rich are being dragged down by burden of free-riding socialists which makes the ever-growing number of billionaires very sad (i.e. poor people should become venture capitalists).
Obama believes in creating world peace with huge fleets extra-judicial-murder robots to take out anyone who talks about not supporting their client states. Romney wants to create world peace and prosperity by starting a war with a very large and well armed state who could trivially cut off the world's oil supply.
The latter is clearly even less sane than the former. Dangerously so, even. So it's valid to support Obama, from that perspective. But that is totally what Stewart does.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
I'm also 37 or so and since I've understood anything about computers it's been obvious that "Hacker" is a term for people who understand how computers work, rather than just click the mouse like everyone else.
As "Auto Mechanic" is a term for people who understand how cars work, rather than just push the pedals and turn the wheel like everyone else.
But then, I know that programming is different to coding, which is different to scripting, which is much different to being a script-kiddie. So make of that what you will.
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Sort of explains how Bennet got that "confidential" client data out to the press so easily, doesn't it. Attach File -> Search on network -> Send. No wonder she doesn't think she broke anyone's privacy, it was all right there on her office (and home) computer!
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@Johnathan King, nice to know we can post porn here now.
Can I just point out, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims in this world, no exaggeration. The "outrage" at this film they've shown on the news here appears to be maybe twenty guys burning a flag here and there (and an unrelated bomb). A couple of Imams said something stupid.
This same week, there are hundreds of millions of Christians in the world, no exaggeration. There was no doubt the odd crowd of them picketing something to complain about teh gays ruining marriage again (maybe someone even found a doctor to shoot). A couple of radio-evangelists no doubt said something stupid.
One of these things is talked of as an intolerant culture that justifies military intervention toward the violent overthrow of other people's governments, justifying our own continuing military involvement in cyclical vengeance killings (yay us). The other is "freedom of speech" and "freedom of religion".
But see, their protests are also freedom of speech. Them killing people in response to their people being killed is the same reason we use to kill their people right now. Johnkey's all about the bloody vengeance just this week, which will inspire it's own cycle of retaliation until it eventually reaches our own soils.
But most people, and there are billions of us, are basically pretty nice folk. Even the hundreds of millions who happen to be deluded enough to be Muslims or Christians.
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Who's attributing the violence (and the classic propaganda "low angle" crowd scenes) to this film? There's constant protests against US foreign policy around the world, including inside the US. There's fundy Imam's calling fatwas on some bullshit as often as US fuckwits are calling for war on yet another Muslim land over some other bullshit (only the wars kill rather a lot more people). Is anyone surprised the Libyan people aren't perfectly compliant to the violent restructuring of their state via overwhelming air power, including the bombing of cities and hospitals? That you can organise an attack on a US base in Afghanistan on a flimsy pretence?
As to what the deeper motivations are, it's Palestine, duh. The massive ongoing non-negotiable US financial and military backing for a violently repressive racist state that refuses to recognise the rights of groups of natural citizens simply because they are Muslims. It's a sore spot, particularly for Muslims. That thing where they get to sit at the big kid's table because they have nukes is hardly a secret either.
Which comes back around to Māori and if property is something only white-people's law gives you, or something. Funny how the government can sell something that no one can own, unless they mean "no one brown can own". -
I think it does become that safety net and I think over time what it instead has become is a bit of a trap for quite a few people when we've seen 161,000 people have been on for at least five of the last 10 (and) 139,000 for at least 10 years.
Notes to the math-impaired among us. That says over the last ten years, 161k people have been on a benefit for 5 years or more. Naturally around half of those people will be on a benefit now, so that's ~80k of the current crop.
The bit where you've implied "(and)" isn't an "and". It says, quite separately, that 139k people have spent 10+ years on a benefit during their entire lives. Most of that will naturally be older people and those with long-term disabilities both physical and mental, perhaps 40k right now.
So there's ~320k on a benefit now, about one quarter of them have spent half the last ten years on a benefit, and maybe one eighth of them (overlapping) have spent a total of ten years or more on a benefit over their lives thus far (including people who cannot work because they have a broken neck, a child-like mind, a host of degenerative diseases, and so on).
The minister uses the bigger overall numbers after discussing single mums to give people a false impression quite deliberately, that being the whole point of the policy, but it's not all that confusing to unbundle.
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Hard News: Changing news, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Natural enough. Social media gives light to alternative perspectives from those of the mainstream consensus. A presentation of genuinely varying opinion makes people see that some of it must be wrong.
What is wrong is still normally the random musings of the common folk, but not always, and the times they are right tends toward pointing out the foibles of the mainstream.
It's like "everything you learnt in school is wrong", which lists many untruths taught to school children, but doesn't invalidate algebra, literacy, or the scientific method, and is quite flawed in many ways itself.
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So, things to say.
The police are required by law to uphold stupid and harmful laws. When there's a potentially long sentence and a high chance of conviction they have to go after it, so they'll always go hard after harshly prohibited materials.
Cannabis (particularly when eaten) is terribly weaksauce in terms of harm potential. Children shouldn't smoke pot, certainly not heavily and consistently, and doubly certain not if doing so makes them a bit psycho.
But there are kids smoking pot right now. Heavily. Even when it makes them a bit psycho. Have done for a very long time, will do in the foreseeable future. Knew a couple myself in my younger days, despite prohibition. Various studies in the states show the rates of inappropriately heavy use of drugs simply do not change with prohibition. It's about 1% of the population doing something stupid with drugs now, and always has been.
All that changes is you get a higher prison population. Keep one drug dealer in prison for life and you just create a market for a new one on the outside, because capitalism (like the internet) sees censorship as an obstacle and routes around it.
If dealers last 2 years between getting busted, and you put them away for 15 years instead of 1, you have 11 times as many dealers and 165 times as many people in prison on the same charge, but no effect on supply. That's not sane.
Price indicators over the years shows prohibition is not even a significant hardship on the supply side. It's not just that it does harm, it also doesn't do any good. Catch 10% of meth shipments and shipments increase by 11% to compensate. Immediately. Put more pot growers away, more pot is grown. That gap between work and welfare? Yep.
You know what works? Tax. Actually shifts prices. Pays for treatment of said harms. Like magic. Limit sales to chemists, if you care about who profits and how good they might be at spotting abusers.