Posts by Danielle
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Also, did anyone notice the sheer insanity of the cycling commentary for Hayden Roulston's silver-medal race? I can never tell who our talking guys are - they all blend into a big MATEMATEMATE in my mind - but this one was particularly crazed, and his English commentary partner kept saying wry bitchy things which went right over his head.
Paraphrased sample:
Our dude, breathlessly: 'Hayden Roulston... a courageous, mighty but humble demigod from a small town in New Zealand... THIS IS HIS NIGHT!' [as Bradley Wiggins quite easily overtook him and won]
English dude: 'And let's not forget the winner, Wiggins. But I suppose that silver medal is sorely needed by the New Zealand team in this Olympics.' [Oh snap, etc]It reminded me of nothing so much as the dog show judging commentary in Best in Show. Unfortunately, our guy was the moron judge...
(Also, Valerie Vili is a total badass! And the Evers-Swindell race had me jumping up and down. I scared the crap out of my dogs.)
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Heh. I think Grant's thematically appropriate Jay-Z quote would be:
He who does not feel me is not real to me, therefore he doesn't exist
So poof! Vamoose, son of a bitch -
You may find his "social concerns" bloody wonderful; I find them condescending, simplistic and vaguely inhuman.
I don't get it.(As usual. :)) Are you saying that the working classes in the 19th century actually had it peachy keen without welfare... or just that you don't like the way Dickens wrote about them?
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I try to have more than one animal, all at different ages, so they can be 'staggered' and we don't ever have an empty house. Last year we lost litte grey Shirley to cancer (sigh) and now Laverne has to carry the cat torch alone. She has to hang out with the two dogs for company now, which I'm sure isn't ideal for her!
Condolences, anyway. He was very beautiful.
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poking the PAS Charles Dickens Appreciation Society
Ironically - I brought him up in the first place, right? - I don't even *like* Dickens. Give me a nice concise Jane Austen any day. (And Jane's novels are filled with horribly disadvantaged female characters who are perfect arguments for why we should have the DPB!)
But I fully see Oscar Wilde's point when he said that "one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing".
Oh, I haven't heard that before! Funny.
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The reality would have made people too sick to read them.
The first part of The Ghost Map (a history of London's mid-19th century cholera outbreak and the people who worked out how to stop it) is particularly enlightening on the lives of the working classes in that city in the 1840s. Warning: not for the weak of stomach. Of course, if your current job is to go into sewers and pick out saleable rags from piles of shit (while constantly risking death by gas explosion), you might find it all a bit ho-hum.
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there's some tipping point where you throw human beings in the too hard basket
Acknowledging that there will always be people in need of assistance is not 'throwing them into the too hard basket'. And there are, no matter how much we hound or scold them, always going to be at least a few people who will need permanent or semi-permanent help from us. Not everyone can successfully function in the world we've created. How well we help those people is a measure of our compassion and our success as a society. (She says, grandiosely. Heh.)
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Good Goddess, Danielle. Dickens was a great novelist (though one who, in my view, was highly uneven and somewhat over-rated), but you might as well hold up Gone With The Wind as a historically and sociologically reliable document of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, as opposed to a vastly entertaining piece of melodramatic fiction.
Way to miss my point, Craig, which was that Grant is clearly so ignorant of basic historical facts that I was attempting to mention something in popular culture (TV adaptations of Dickens, etc) that he might conceivably have heard of or understood. You know, giving him a little help with the 'why'. I have an MA in history with a big old 'first class honours' attached to it: I don't need anyone to tell me what reliable sources consist of. (I have few enough useful talents without people undermining this one, dammit. :))
In. Any. Case. Governments created centralised social welfare as a reaction to well-recognised social problems. It's not like everyone suddenly got soft and started 'living off the nanny state'. Depending on your interpretation of these events, either governments became afraid of working-class violence and gave the people a sop to stop them revolting, or they were beneficent leaders who redistributed wealth out of the kindness of their hearts. Whichever way you look at it, the problems *clearly existed*.
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If one was prepared to consider the consequences of ending welfare
Since centrally organised welfare is largely an innovation of the 20th century in the west, it's quite clear what the consequences of 'ending welfare' are. Just look at the 19th century in the UK, note the poorhouses, the beggars, the debt-ridden working classes existing in horrible conditions and in many cases starving to death, and rinse/repeat (with added technological innovations or whatever).
I mean, FFS, dude. You must know *something* about this stuff, right? Even cribbed from TV adaptations of Dickens or something? Oliver? Remember 'please sir, can I have some more?' All the little kiddies being sent out to pickpocket, drinking gin? Anything? Anyone? Bueller?
Sigh.
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He reminds me a little of Jason Schwartzman in the Wes Anderson films Rushmore...
It should be noted the Max Fischer, while charismatic, is also deeply deluded and... kind of officious and nutty. This does not bode well.
God I love that movie. :)