Posts by Rich Lock
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4. Be prepared for SO. MUCH. MORE. bureaucracy than you had ever anticipated. Queues: accept them. Also accept that everything after you get to the front of the queue seems completely illogical. Because it is.
From Bill Bryson's 'Notes from a Big Continent':
There are endless forms to fill in, each with pages of instructions, which often contradict other instructions and almost always lead to the need for more forms. It is like this with every encounter you have with every branch of the American government. After a while you begin to understand why flinty-eyed cowpokes in places like Montana turn their ranches into fortresses and threaten to shoot any government officer fool enough to walk into the cross-hairs.
In my professional life, I have to deal with one particular strand of American bureaucracy via a game of Chinese whispers with a local agent. It certainly isn't good for my blood pressure. Oh, and the 'A4' thing? WTF?
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Yes, I'm Godwined. So shoot me
The problem I have with Godwin is that it's generally misused as 'you mentioned the nazis, therefore you automatically lose'.
There's plenty of times the comparison is entirely valid, like it is here.
Early-mid 20th-century, lots of European countries discussed eugenics, or practised sterilising 'undesirables'. The Nazis, in that hyper-efficient Teutonic manner that they had, just took it a (goose) step or two further. The Nazis didn't just drop out of the sky as some mutant abberation one day. Most of their policies were developed from ideas that were only a little way off from quite acceptable mainstream discussion points pan-Europe at the time.
So I do find it a little alarming that Whanker and Garrotte seem to be determined to force this back onto the mainstream agenda.
It may be my twisted mind, but I imagined someone, possibly Speer, standing up at the Wannsee Conference and suggesting that really, building all these concentration camps wasn't going to be cost-effective
You ain't actually all that far off the truth...
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Unless someone wants to argue Einstein was weak.
I'm pretty sure I could have taken him.
What about Schrödinger, then? It'd be pretty hard to land a punch, I reckon, what with that whole 'there and yet not there' thing he had going on.
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he probably isn't brainless.
Getting thousands of people to voluntarily* hand over enormous sums of money so that you can live a lavish lifestyle beyond most peoples wildest dreams?
If you can pull it off, you're not exactly stupid. Ruthless, unprincipled, greedy and utterly without morals, perhaps. but not stupid.
*well, mostly.
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Oh, and one of my newsfeeds has just presented me with this: "The return of Jon Venables to jail 17 years after he murdered little Jamie Bulger on Merseyside poses any liberal society with a devastating conundrum. In short, the abiding question is: can you cure a 10-year-old who has committed murder?"
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I find the question of the lesbianism interesting. The media's interest in trivial shite is not, it's long established, and easily explained - gossip sells copy.
Well, for me, the sexual orientation thing falls into the category of 'trival shite'. I'm just bemused that as a society we still find the question of who you shack up with an issue. I'm not really interested in which public figures are gay in the same way that I'm not really interested which ones are straight. Although clearly a lot of people are, and that has to be acknowledged.
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I also don't think it would be a bad idea to compare the treatment of the two murderers of James Bulger in the UK with the Bailey situation, at least as far as media attention goes.
The gutter end of the UK press makes the HoS look like a church newsletter, but (so far) an injunction against publishing their location and other details of their new lives has been more or less sucessfully enforced, with the government spending quite a bit of time, effort and money to that end.
Now, admittedly, you need an injunction in place in order to even try to enforce it, and there doesn't appear to be one in the Bailey case.
But I'd say that the two children in that case have a least a slim chance of being able to not have entirely wasted lives. On present evidence, Bailey not so much.
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Young Bailey is sitting at home forbidden from speaking to the media. Then two female reporters door knock him and suddenly they are inside his house.
First contact was made by telephone - the Herald phoned him up. Then they were either freely extended an invite, or pushed for one (my recollection of the article doesn't make it entirely clear which).
So they didn't 'door knock' him, and it woldn't have been a total surprise to him when they showed up.
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The tithe has gone out.
The tithe is high and they're moving on, surely?
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I do find it interesting. But not interesting enough to violate my own ethic on the matter, which is that giving attention to such news encourages it.
The media's obsession with and (over-)reaction to, trivial shite is interesting, for sure. But that needs to be separated, as much as is possible, from the news itself, which just....isn't.
And I use 'interesting' in the sense of 'living in interesting times'.