gilesgoat wrote:Maybe late to the party but I head that Sunak wants UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights .. "to have more control on immigration" ..
I thought it was regarding refugees, not just "immigration".
It's possible that they're responding to the braying crowd fired up by shitty media, it's also possible they're looking to get out of a larger "you need to support refugees" policy in light of the fact that things are about to get a hell of a lot worse.
Climate-driven refugees are already a thing but it's going to get much much worse over the next decade or two. You cited V for Vendetta, but I reckon there are more than a few Tories in charge who'd prefer the Doomsday walled-island approach
gilesgoat wrote:Maybe late to the party but I head that Sunak wants UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights .. "to have more control on immigration" ..
I have always considered the idea of dumping our adherence to the ECHR to be a bluff. Doing so would apparently require our leaving the Council of Europe, which we ourselves (along with Ireland, Italy, Norway and six other countries) created in 1949.
gilesgoat wrote:Wasn't the original story of "V for vendetta" supposed to happen in UK ? ... maybe it wasn't that far from the truth ?
The original comic was indeed written as a critique of Thatcher's Britain.
Emoticon and contraction free since... quite a while ago.
gilesgoat wrote:Wasn't the original story of "V for vendetta" supposed to happen in UK ? ... maybe it wasn't that far from the truth ?
The original comic was indeed written as a critique of Thatcher's Britain.
And, in fairness to the movie, it's still set in Britain.
But, yeah, it's all made a bit more "generic" could-be-anywhere for international audiences. But it still features targets like the Old Bailey and the Palace of Westminster for V's terrorist activities, and is overtly set in the UK (with, you know, V wearing Guy Fawkes' face, that only makes sense in a British context).
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
KlaxonCow wrote:V wearing Guy Fawkes' face, that only makes sense in a British context).
Not these days, not since "anonymous" picked it up. I'd posit that the number of people who see it as the "anonymous" mask far outweighs the number of people who recognise it as Fawkes, even in the UK. And since you ask, Anonymous, 2003, V for Vendetta, 2005, although Anonymous almost certainly stole it from the Moore's 1982 book.
"massive retard™", "full of shit™", "tiny bitch™", "retarted™", "a bit of a one trick pony™", "petty™", "simple minded idealistic twat™", "miserable humourless fucker™"
Well, we have some new government departments with this reshuffle.
Grant Shapps will lead the new "Department of Energy Security and Net Zero".
Which, at least in principle, is a department that should have existed a long time ago, to secure our energy infrastructure and guide the shift away from fossil fuels to renewables.
To understand why, just look at your next energy bill, when it lands on the door mat. And, you know, it absolutely can't be said that this shit was unforeseeable, as I've been foreseeing it for years here on the forums - and years and years before that.
This has to be done - it's perfectly inevitable, as fossil fuels run out, then this shit is going to get more frequent and worse again and again - so we should stop pissing about and get it done, to reap the tremendous economic and environmental benefits. No, sitting on our hands has not - and never will - make the problem go away of its own accord. Humans might have that unhelpful instinct within us, to sit around and hope a problem somehow magically fixes itself, but it absolutely won't happen in this case.
It'll just get worse and worse, until we commit to addressing it. It's really as simple as that. That we have any real choice is just an illusion.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
KlaxonCow wrote:
It'll just get worse and worse, until we commit to addressing it. It's really as simple as that. That we have any real choice is just an illusion.
In a move that confirms they really don't see the bigger picture, Shell and BP have responded to their record profits by... reducing their commitments to drop emissions.
Which is totally logical capitalism. One of the reasons they've been moving to lower emission projects is because they are competing financially very nicely with fossil fuels. But with the profit outlook for fossil fuels up, the green shit goes out the window.
KlaxonCow wrote:Well, we have some new government departments with this reshuffle.
Grant Shapps will lead the new "Department of Energy Security and Net Zero".
Which, at least in principle, is a department that should have existed a long time ago, to secure our energy infrastructure and guide the shift away from fossil fuels to renewables.
To understand why, just look at your next energy bill, when it lands on the door mat. And, you know, it absolutely can't be said that this shit was unforeseeable, as I've been foreseeing it for years here on the forums - and years and years before that.
This has to be done - it's perfectly inevitable, as fossil fuels run out, then this shit is going to get more frequent and worse again and again - so we should stop pissing about and get it done, to reap the tremendous economic and environmental benefits. No, sitting on our hands has not - and never will - make the problem go away of its own accord. Humans might have that unhelpful instinct within us, to sit around and hope a problem somehow magically fixes itself, but it absolutely won't happen in this case.
It'll just get worse and worse, until we commit to addressing it. It's really as simple as that. That we have any real choice is just an illusion.
There was a separate Energy (and Climate Change) department in 2016. Theresa May split responsibility between Business and Environment.
So all this has done has spent a lot of resources/taxpayers’ money on new letterheads, door signs and personnel moving around. Utterly pointless unless it is all backed up by REAL policies that make a difference - like properly taxing the energy companies, not letting them offset investment/share buybacks/degradation of equipment.
merman wrote:There was a separate Energy (and Climate Change) department in 2016. Theresa May split responsibility between Business and Environment.
Indeed.
Basically, Tory "climate denial" in acting like there's no issue and that energy / climate change is not a central issue, requiring its own department and focus, but that, ah, it's just a side issue of business and the environment, right?
But with the whole world reeling from gas prices, inflation, strikes, and a cost of living crisis, not even Bill O'Reilly could spin this as unimportant.
The thing is, energy is a "background" thing, by its very nature. But it's a crucial and foundational background thing.
It's the "taken for granted" that ticks along in the background, making most everything else possible, on its back. Folks might not appreciate that until, as now, we've got a crisis in its supply and then, as the whole world falls apart, then you suddenly get it: "Oh, so that stuff actually is crucially important, it turns out".
And, as I've stressed before, this is only Putin playing with the gas taps. This isn't remotely the worst that this could get, and look how much damage it can cause.
This is just a disruption in supply. When supplies actually start running out - and, in doing so, our choices of sources will become more and more limited, giving more and more influence and power to tyrants and dictators like Putin or the Saudis - then it won't just be a "crisis", it'll actually start destroying economies, wiping out currencies and so forth.
Energy is a background thing. But it's like the floor under your feet. You might generally notice it's even there, most of the time, but if it were to just vanish - and you're not on the ground floor - then, boy, you're in a whole heap of major trouble.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
"Because UK is part of a democratic civilised world .. "
The outspoken new Conservative Party deputy chairman says he would support the return of the death penalty because “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”.
On the other side "to be fair" it seems now EU is "considering" and Italy does NOT oppose the thing ( actually it seems "pro" ) about building walls/borders "to stop migrants" across EU using EU money ( still in the news today )
.. makes me thing at those sci-fi movies/stories .. "reality always surpasses even imagination" ... ...
The outspoken new Conservative Party deputy chairman says he would support the return of the death penalty because “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”.
Some of them even committed a crime before they were executed!
The outspoken new Conservative Party deputy chairman says he would support the return of the death penalty because “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”.
Some of them even committed a crime before they were executed!
" But the LORD said to him, "Not so ; if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over." Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. "
Bhudda said, "One should not kill a living being, nor cause it to be killed, not should one incite another to kill. Do not injure any being, either strong or weak in the world."
I mean, yes, people get murdered. But there's no vast epidemic of serial killers that's erupted recently to justify a re-examination of this policy.
Indeed, statistically, there weren't less murders before the abolition of the death penalty, and the murder rate has not gone up in response to its abolition (nor, in any country that abolished the death penalty and then later re-introduced it, there is also no corresponding dip in the murder rate either).
There is simply no statistically significant correlation whatsoever to be found - in any country, at any time in human history - between the murder rate and the death penalty. It's just not there to be found.
The death penalty isn't a deterrent. You might personally feel like it ought to be, but reality disagrees with you in the actual numbers.
It simply doesn't work.
And, if you stop to think about it, then of course it doesn't. Those who are serial killers have a mental disorder. Those who commit a crime of passion - murdering their wife and her lover in a jealous rage - are not thinking straight. Those who bump off a family member to gain an inheritance are blinded by greed or desperation.
Those who commit murder don't believe that they're going to get caught. If they did, then they wouldn't do it in the first place. So, in that regard, the penalty is irrelevant, as they're convinced they're never going to serve it anyway.
That is, if the person expends even a nanosecond of forethought before committing the act. Which, in the case of a crime of passion, they absolutely aren't doing.
This is like going up to a smoker and telling them to just choose not to smoke. A drug addict to just choose not to take drugs.
The mistake is assuming that it's a conscious decision and, therefore, they can just consciously choose otherwise - and suffer no ill effects for doing so. And that, of course, is not how addiction works at all.
Indeed, most smokers do not want to smoke. Ask them. Check the surveys. On a conscious level, smokers absolutely know that they should quit. Many smokers are just constantly trying to quit, again and again. When the smoking bans were introduced, a significant majority of smokers backed the new law, even though it was prejudiced against them specifically.
For the death penalty to work as a deterrent, it requires murder to be a completely conscious pre-meditated decision. This assumption is often completely false, which is why - regardless of the penalty - murder still continues at more or less the same rate, with or without the death penalty.
In fact, if murder were a conscious pre-meditated decision, then who the hell is choosing life imprisonment as "the easy option"?
Ever noticed that when folks go on a "shotgun rampage" and start murdering people randomly, they almost always turn the gun on themselves as their final act. They want that "out" to not have to face any consequences. Life imprisonment is the hard option. The death penalty is the "easy out" that, very frequently, is exactly what murderers who're about to be caught seek for themselves - turning to suicide, to not face the consequences, when they feel they're about to be caught.
Indeed, I should add that to the list. Serial killers have a mental disorder. Crimes of passion happen in a fit of rage, where they aren't thinking straight. Bumping people off for the inheritance is motivated by greed or desperation, and they're running on emotion, not intellect. And we can add that those who commit mass-murders are generally suicidal - they intend to kill themselves, but have decided to get some "revenge" on the world and take as many people with them as they can, before they leave this life.
Do you see what I'm saying? These people are not thinking straight. They have serious mental disorders going on. They are NOT rational actors.
And though this saying is one I'd usually use regarding religion, it holds here: "You cannot rationally convince someone out of a position that they did not rationally get into".
You cannot reason someone out of religious belief - with evidence and facts and reasoning - when they did not reason themselves into that belief in the first place. No amount of "this is how evolution works" can undo "I believe in God because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy".
You cannot reason someone out of an addiction - make a smoker quit by plastering "smoking kills" all over the packets - when they did not reason themselves into that addiction in the first place. You can appeal to their conscious mind all you like, but this will have zero effect on their subconscious chemical addiction. Which is why, you know, despite constant tax increases, "plain packaging", warning labels that consume 75% of the packaging... we still have people buying fags and smoking them.
And the interesting thing is that, if you talk to those people, the vast majority of them want, on an intellectual conscious level, to quit smoking. On a conscious level, when surveyed, most smokers fully agreed that the smoking ban was a good idea. They know it's a problem, they don't want to do it. You're not dealing with a conscious intellectual decision here, so you cannot reason people out of it.
(Or, well, there's one exception to that - kids smoking their first fag. They're not addicted at that point, so you could reason them out of it before they start. But, ah, kids are curious, rebellious and don't listen, which is why nearly all smokers are made at that age. A big problem is that children, as well as not listening to the grown ups, are internally convinced that they are immortal. The warnings about health consequences are, in their minds, some distant thing that's not relevant to them. And kids don't understand addiction - they also think everything is controlled consciously and rationally - so they're sure that they can just quit whenever they like.)
The death penalty doesn't work. Demonstrably so.
With or without it, the statistics just don't appreciably change, one way or the other. It doesn't matter what the penalty is, because it's simply not figuring into the mental calculations of these people... that, as I've pointed out, are generally suffering from serious mental disorders of one kind or another.
You are, in effect, expecting mad men to be rational actors. And then are surprised that, hmm, this really doesn't make a single sodding difference to murder rates.
If you really care about the murder rate, then it has - barring the odd fluctuation - been in steady decline for centuries. Correlated to a rise in the standard of living.
That's what actually works, by the actual numbers. As we all live better lives, then the murder rate goes down. Unlike feudal Japan or Medieval Europe, folks generally don't feel the need to walk around with swords strapped to their belts, as everyone is safer in a more prosperous and peaceful nation.
By the numbers, crime rates go up in economic depressions and down in boom times.
I remember, when the financial crisis happened, Labour sent an internal memo - that got leaked and reported by the press in "shock and horror" mode - to government departments to watch for the rise in crime rates, now that the country was going into an economic depression. The press freaked out: "oh my god, how can they say this!!". But, sorry, they're dead right. The statistics absolutely back it up. Sending out that memo is the kind of governmental competence that we could do with having once more - they know the numbers, they know the evidence and they're rightly preparing themselves for what is to come. Good. We need more of that, in fact.
And, if you think about it, then it's all perfectly logical. While there are some crimes - such as the "crimes of passion" mentioned earlier - that defy this, the majority of crime is economic in nature.
Prostitution and drug dealing are businesses. To make money. Theft and burglary - and related crimes like "fencing stolen goods "- is obviously economically motivated. Even white collar crimes, fiddling the stock market, is economically motivated - but this time for greed, not desperation.
Alcoholism, drug abuse, paying for sex and the other end of these criminal businesses is typically motivated as an escape from their hellish lives. They're drowning their sorrows, avoiding their problems by getting high, etc..
If you want to bring down crime rates, there's a known solution: Eliminate poverty.
Absolutely everywhere, in every culture, throughout all of human history, the pattern holds: As the standard of living rises, crime falls.
The most successful crime prevention measure in all of human history was the Industrial Revolution. Crime rates have been steadily falling ever since, correlated to the rise in living standards - and it maps perfectly in every single country on planet Earth, who entered that Revolution at different points in time.
If you want to virtue signal ineffectively, then talk about "getting tough on crime" - and then have no appreciable effect on crime rates for doing so. But if you really want to fix the world, then strive to eliminate poverty and raise living standards - that actually works better than anything else ever has, and you can totally see the direct correlation in the numbers themselves.
The Ancient Romans used the death penalty liberally. Taking the most famous example, Jesus was killed for "blasphemy" and, either side of him, were petty thieves. These are hardly the most heinous crimes that have ever been committed, but still the Romans happily used their deterrent / torture / revenge / public humiliation execution on, frankly, anyone that so much as looked at them funny.
So, Ancient Rome was this blissful crime-free Utopia, then? Absolutely not. It was an immoral cesspit of depravity.
Indeed, it's one of the arguments why the whole God thing is full of shit. Because if God was so angry as to rain down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah for their perversions and immoralities, then why the hell did he leave Rome standing?
(Yeah, "fire and brimstone". Basically, Sodom and Gomorrah were the victims of a volcanic eruption. Like the victims in Pompeii. Even the bit about "a pillar of salt" actually makes sense with that, because we've all seen the eerie "statues" of the victims of Pompeii, encased in volcanic dust that then solidified like concrete. I mean, it's not actually salt - it's not really sodium chloride - but primitive people wouldn't have known that and it does look "pillar of salt"-like to the untrained eye. Two cities perished to a volcanic eruption - as Pompeii did - but these folks interpreted it as "God's vengeance". Just like how some mad religious people were trying to blame the New Orleans floods on "tolerating gays". Umm, no, it was a flood - perfectly naturalistic origin - and the levies broke, as the flood defences were allowed to wither, due to standard political corruption and general not-giving-a-shit about poor people.)
Charles Dickens tried to make this whole thing clear in Oliver Twist. Oliver is blameless. He's an orphan. And, yes, he's annoyingly sweet - to "I want to punch him in the face" levels of irritation, but that's vital to the story, to make abundantly clear that Twist is 100% blameless for the situation he finds himself in. Then the story takes us through the sequence of events of how the very system itself forces him into criminality - Fagin and the Artful Dodger provide him the "family" and support that society completely fails to provide - and then, with Oliver being a tiny little lad, he's recruited into breaking into the homes of the rich to steal.
A simple message: If you don't want to be the victim of crime, then we, as a society, should take away the need and temptation of criminality. If no-one is ever allowed to be so desperate, then crime rates will fall to near non-existence.
It's not just that "do unto others, as you would be done by" is a nice thought. It's a pragmatic one. If, in their position, you were treated well and fairly, then you wouldn't have the motivation to turn on society's rules.
If you obey all the rules and are left to fucking rot then, frankly, the thought of "fuck those rules" is a perfectly rational response. Why should I follow a law - a societal set of rules - that has allowed me to fall through the cracks and harmed me? I'm not just desperate enough to disregard your rules, I'm even motivated to get some revenge on a society that so casually let this happen.
Better mental health treatment. Then these people - who almost always have mental disorders, as I've covered - never get so bad as to commit murder.
Remove the threat of poverty. From anyone everywhere. And that's where you'll actually find your crime-free Utopia. We have, in fact, been slowly getting there, as crime - and particularly violent crime - have been in steady decline for centuries, as "absolute poverty" has gradually improved the world over (though we still have our "relative poverty" to tackle).
The death penalty. It doesn't work, demonstrably so. It's just scared people getting hysterical.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
Much to the annoyance of Farage and John Redwood, they're having cross-party "emergency talks" in private about how the fuck to fix this increasingly broken situation.
Brexiters claim ‘sellout’ after Tories discuss rapprochement with EU
Nigel Farage, John Redwood and Lord Frost rail against news of senior Tories joining cross-party summit to tackle failings of Brexit
Prominent Brexit supporters have hit out at senior Conservative figures after the Observer revealed they had taken part in a private cross-party summit entitled: “How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?”
[...]
The criticisms came after the Observer reported details of the discussions, which involved frontbench MPs from both main parties, as well as diplomats, foreign policy experts and prominent business figures.
[...]
A source with knowledge of the summit told the Observer: “The main thrust of it was that Britain is losing out, that Brexit is not delivering, our economy is in a weak position.”
It's worth remembering that the referendum was actually sold to the British people as only being "advisory".
Yet the second Leave won, it became "the Will of the People" - even though the Leave win was by the slenderest of margins - and then it weirdly started to include exit from the single market, exit from the customs union, exit from other Europe institutions... but, sorry, none of that was in the referendum question, and there's a vast difference between "should the UK leave the EU?" and "should the UK become an isolated pariah by pulling out of absolutely everything for no particular reason?".
And while Brexiteers would - with some truth to what they're saying - stress that the current disaster is not all Brexit - as it's also very large parts the pandemic and Putin's warfare - the point is that any exit from the EU would always happen in the background of world events. You can say "this isn't all Brexit, there are also world events" - but there are always "world events" all the time. It's not reasonable to presume you can do anything without "world events" being there to complicate matters.
Part of the calculation in voting for Brexit or not is that you should have the wisdom to know "world events" will occur, and what footing that would put the UK on, when those do happen. I mean, to any referendum voter that was not just being pushed emotionally by Farage's racist propaganda, that was the central question that you were supposed to be thinking over before you voted. Not just getting excited by "take back control" bullshittery, but thinking to yourself: "where would this ultimately leave our country in the future?".
And, you know, any reasonable person debating that question in their mind would almost certainly have voted Remain, because this was clearly a decision that would put us at serious disadvantage. To move from a significant player in the biggest trading bloc in an increasingly globalised world, to a small island, with a begging bowl, looking for small opportunities here and there. Because, to be fair, Brexit could offer some flexibility to do things that being a member of the EU wouldn't allow - not being constrained to follow a "one size fits all" EU-wide policy - but these "Brexit opportunities" are, quite simply, few and very much "small fry" in comparison to being part of the single market and largest trading bloc on the planet.
Brexit hasn't actually met that we've "taken back control" of our waters for fishing, in fact. But even if it 100% meant that, fishing is not even a blip on the radar of the wider UK economy. Not that this "Brexit opportunity" ever even fucking materialised at all, but even if it had, then it was a very poor exchange economically - fucking over most of the UK's economy for the sake of a particular neurotic issue in a very small part of the economy (not that I don't sympathise with the fishermen, but I'm just trying to put this gripe in its proper wider context. It is - pardon the pun - very much "small fry" in the grand scheme of everything. EU rules didn't ever stop fishing from happening, but there were "rough around the edges" issues with it, which Brexit could have possibly solved. But, so far, it absolutely hasn't).
This was easily the biggest unforced error the UK's made in centuries. And asking a Brexit voter why, I don't know that any of them could really give a rational explanation, as it was all just slightly-racist emotional wishful-thinking bollocks, sprinkled with an awful lot of lies that are now clearly never going to happen.
And perhaps the grandest irony of Brexit - which is just irony all the way, as I've mentioned before - is that economics will likely eventually force us back into the customs union, the single market or the EU itself and then, as a re-applying member, we'll lose our original "privileges". And we'll have left the EU become more "federalist" in the meantime, so what we rejoin will be even less what we wanted. And, with reapplication, the pound will be gone, as "new members" must use the Euro.
The grand irony is that we'll eventually come crawling back and the Brexiteers will have managed to have killed off exactly the things they claimed to be preserving... including the UK itself, as Scotland, come the next Independence referendum, is gone. And with it goes the Union Flag that English nationalists were waving so proudly.
I don't think Leave voters - also known as "useful idiots" - have any idea what the words "unintended consequences" mean, as they've never encountered the concept before.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
