Posts by Rich Lock
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
The Onion satirised the 'suicidegirls' thing over two years ago.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/42370
Which makes the harold/sun/whatever story look even more pathetic than it already does.
Personally, I stopped taking The Harold seriously as a news publication when it chose to illustrate a story about the melting artic icecaps (the arctic icecaps not being a region known for including any solid ground) with a picture of some snowy cliffs.
To be fair, I suppose it's fine as long as you treat it as if you were getting your news txted to you by an over-excited teenager: "OMG knivez like weapon of choice for teenz. LOLZ"
-
I'm glad someone mentioned Ben Goldacre.
Seems to me that a good proportion of the problems with accurate reporting of tech/science stuff could be boiled down to: most people working in journalism don't actually have a technical background, but have what for want of a better word we could refer to as an 'arts' background (I'm prepared to be corrected on this).
Seems to me that this is why stories like the magic car that can be powered by seawater (but goshdarnit, the inventor just can't attact the development fundng, for some reason) turn up on a depressingly regular basis, instead of being laughed into the round file where they belong.
This isn't to say that the way science is taught is any good. It unfortunately generally tends towards the dry rote learning of facts and figures that discourage independent thought. However, mentions of being able to deconstruct to first principles and randomised double-blind trials can occasionally sneak through and find fertile ground.
-
Joseph, I've read your stuff before and enjoyed it, but you've north and south'd yourself (or metro'd yourself, if you prefer).
I don't buy either of these magazines any more becase I can't trust them to give me something reasonably close to the truth.
You have published a piss-poor argument which starts from a conclusion (blair is painted blacker than he actually is by a bunch of lefties/there is an asian crime wave), and then worked backwards, cherry-picking the facts that fit the conclusion, and ignoring those that don't. Then you've str-e-e-e-e-ch-ed those facts to fit the conclusion, even if the 'logic' steps don't actually follow.
Same as N&S did. If they are so far off the mark on that, who's to say they aren't just as far off on something else that I won't pick up so easily because its further outside my experience.
-
"I don't think the public gives too much thought to public transport (I wish they did)."
For those that don't know, London transport is divided up into six roughly circular concentric zones - zone 1 is Central London, the boundary of zone 6 goes out as far as Essex and Kent in places. Last figure I read put the population of 'Greater London' at between 9 and 11 million. For the purposes of my argument, I'll assume that that is everyone within the boundary of zone 6. 10 million people is 1/6 of the total UK population. Not an insignificant figure.
Lok at a map of the UK. Divide it into four roughly equal portions with a vertical line and horizontal line. The lower-right (south-east) corner is effectively 100% paved over. That is how the UK population is distributed.
Last job I had before I came over here was in West London. There were 20 people in the office. 2 drove to work, 14 took public transport from somewhere inside London (inside zone 6), and 4 lived outside London - one in Cambridge, one in Brighton, one in Luton and one somewhere else up north. These four all used public transport. This mix of journeys was (and is) not at all unusual for SE England and London.
For those living inside London/zone 6, each leg (to and from work) would take 1 to 2 hours on a good day. 1 to 2 hours there, 1 to 2 hours back. On a bad day, you could add anything up to an hour to each leg. My personal experience was that 'bad days' would generally happen 2 days out of 5 - 30-40% of the time.
Draw a circle with central London in the centre and which is big enough to encompass Luton, Brighton and Cambridge and you are talking about potentially 30 million public transport obsessives (and that is what you turn into after a month or two of relying on british public transport). That is now HALF the entire polulation of the country. I'm well aware of the difference between 'potential' and 'actual', but you ignore half the popuation of the country at your peril if you're a poll.
"But as for investment in schools and hospitals...there's been shit loads. I have seen huge differences. I can't say I agree with the way the money has always been spent or all the policies but to say there has been no change is churlish."
Maybe so. I can't comment on the schools because I have no direct or even indirect experience. No children, and no friends with children of school age.
But I have been unfortunate enough to have quite a lot of relevant UK hospital experience.
2-3 visits requiring GA surgery when I was around 18-20. Mid-late '80's-ish. Deep in Thatcher territory. It was a long time ago, but my memory of those is that there wasn't a lot wrong with the hospitals. Reasonably clean, good standard of care. Very, very rough and ready, very basic facilities, lots and lots of room for improvement, but generally good enough. Then an 18-19 year break where I didn't even go to the GP (i'm generally a healthy person). 2003-2004: Hospital visits for me, hospital visits for my immediate family, hospital visits for friends and their families.....
Oh. My. Sweet. Lord. If that is what 7 years of hyperinvestment in the health service buys, then all I can say (to use that tiredest of tired cliches) is that they must have been '3rd World' in 1997. Two words to sum up my experiences would be 'filth', and 'incompetence'.
There's no point increasing your spending on sticking plasters by 1000% when the patient is haemorraging from their femoral. You need a crash team.
"simon g - you are confusing London with Britain. Easy mistake but they are not the same. For example, only in London would George Galloway get elected :-)"
"In one electorate he was a fire breathing left winger. In another the Saddam stooge. London elected him on the basis and clear knowledge of the latter aspects of his career."
Galloway got elected for the same one reason (and one reason only) that Red Ken Livingstone did: to give Blair a bloody nose.
Galloways Labour opponent in Hackney(?) was Oona King. She is a good and well-liked poll and would have comfortably been re-elected if she hadn't unfortunately been standing againt the 'give blair a bloody nose' candidate. Livingstone got elected because he fought on a single platform - 'I will fight to the death to stop Blair privatising the tube system'.
The only reason Labour keep winning is the same reason they kept losing - for the party in power, the opposition is non-existant.
Both election turn-out and Labour party membership are in the cellar. One out of every four people voted Labour at the last election. That's hardly a rousing vote of confidence.
-
I wouldn't normally reply to stuff like this - it's too time consuming, but you've really got me rarked up (which I expect was the point).
You referred to one British TV import. Allow me to refer to another:
'What a load of old SHIT!' - Katherine Tate.
I'm a pom and I'm 35. I've been living in NZ since 2004.
This means that I grew up under Thatcher, and have spent roughly 50/50 of the politically aware part of my life firstly under the Tories and then under NuLab. This doesn't qualify me as some sort of expert, but does give me the first-hand experience you seem to be completely lacking.
"Blair's core supporters did not elect him to run a country. They elected him to give the miners their jobs back, blow a raspberry at Ronald Reagan, tear down the tower-block flats and secede the Malvinas to Argentina. He was elected to nullify the 1980s, to make it as though Thatcherism had never been."
Wrong. In so, so many ways.
1) Blairs core supporters are NOT the electorate at large. Sociaist Worker may have elected him to do that, but they are a minority of blowhards who would have trouble filling the back room of a pub if they were giving away free beer. And everyone - everyone - in the UK knows it. People DID NOT vote for any of those things. People are what wins or loses an election, not political wonks or swivel-eyed fundamentalists.
2) The electorate at large voted in a Labour government (or rather, kicked out a Tory Govt) in 1997 because they were sick, sick, sick of sleaze and corruption. Sick, sick, sick of fat tory faces stuck in the trough when they were having trouble paying the bills. Remember Martin Bell? You don't seem to have touched on that anywhere in your troll.
A monkey in a suit could have won the 1997 election from the tories.
3) The electorate were also slowly waking up to the fact that the Thatcher/Tory reforms - i.e. sorting out the unions and getting rid of 'dead weight' - had cut everything so close to the bone that the marrow was leaking out.
Leaving Iraq and N. Ireland aside, there are essentially three thing that the British electorate cares about:
1) The NHS/Health System
2) Public transport - the railways and the tube
3) SchoolsPeople expected and WANTED Blair to grab those three things by the scruff of the neck and smack them into shape. If he'd stood up on 2nd May 1997 and said 'Right. The NHS is stuffed, the railways are stuffed, and the schools are stuffed. We need more money to sort it out. I'm raising taxes to pay for it all', there wouldn't have been a peep. Not a peep.
Peoples attitudes/thoughts since 1997 have been something like this:
1997 - Yes! He's in/they're out!
1998 - I'm sure he'll get started soon.
1999 - Any time you're ready, Tony...
2000 - Erm, Tony? The railways? The tube? Schools? The NHS?
2001 - He's privatising what? Didn't we kick the last lot out for doing that?
2002 - We're invading who? Are you sure this is a good idea, Tony?
2003 - Now we're invading Iraq? Erm, hold on, you haven't quite convinced me of this...
2004 - How about less evangelising and self-righteousness and more sorting out the stuff we elected you for, cockmunch.
2005 - Oh, for fucks sake.
2006 - Piss off Tony.As a mate of mine summed it up in 2001 - 'We elected you to CHANGE THINGS, you morons, not KEEP THEM EXACTLY THE SAME!'
Think I'm wrong? My dad has voted Tory as long as I've been alive. Up to 1997. It took me a while to realise he voted Tory because he had to live through the last lot - unions run wild, three day week, power cuts, mountains of rubbish piling up in the parks where me and my sis were supposed to be playing because the binmen were on strike.
Last time we got talking about politics, he nearly blew a fuse talking about the 'wasted opportunity' of 1997 - pretty much exactly as I have outlined above.
And I haven't even touched on Iraq, or the missed opportunity to reign in Murdoch, or the curtailing of civil liberties, or PPP, or any one of a dozen other key points of the last ten years.
-
Right...
Long time reader, first time poster and all that.
This article has finally spurred me into joining the debate.
I'd recommend that anyone who is interested in a more detailed analysis of this start by reading Susan Faludi - 'backlash', and 'stiffed'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Faludi
Most of her research and writing was done before the latest 'raunch explosion', but her main arguments are still pretty relevant.
Crudely speaking, she argues that when you push an established power base, that power base is going to push back.
One of the main examples she uses in her earlier book is the increase in the number of press stories that focussed on a decrease in female fertility at a certain age - a cut-off point mid/late 20's for sucesful pregnancy. These started appearing in large numbers around the time that larger numbers of women were on the first rungs of the career ladder in the '80's - The subtext of all of these was: 'are your eggs on the turn? You'd better go and have kids while you still can. Forget about that career'.
She argues that most of these stories don't actually bear close scrutiny. However, they do help to create a climate of fear for women who 'want it all', and potentially make it easier to remove them from the competition.
Apply that argument to 'raunch culture'. Creating a culture where a woman only has value if she is a sex object makes it harder for women to get ahead in male-dominated industries that require brain power, and therefore change the status quo.
It isn't that there's a smoke-filled back room somewhere where levers are pulled, and these things magically happen. She argues that they are a natural, unspoken, unplanned reaction of the dominant (male-driven) culture to challenge.
So, why? Well, the SST article nearly had it, but didn't spell it out. They managed to put 2 and 2 on the table without actually getting round to adding them up. As they pointed out, girls do better at school. Girls leave school with more qualifications. Girls are therefore better qualified for the top jobs. Also, more women than men are teachers - the school system naturally becomes increasingly feminised and it become easier for girls to do well and harder for boys to do well.
More clever girls and less clever boys jumping for the bottom rungs of the ladder = a challenge to the old boys club.
I'm trying to summarise some fairly complex arguments in a couple of hundred words, so apologies if this come across as a bit crude. Go and read the books if you want to know more.
Having said all of that, sexual politics is far more complicated than I can easily comprehend.