Journal Entries
Well, it had to happen sooner or later...
Posted Apr 29, 2007
You hear a lot about the 'respect' issue in young people and how they seem to have little of it for others. I was at home on Friday night enjoying a bourbon and watching CSI when I heard a large bang from outside. I opened the front door and found that two youths walking past had upended our wheeliebin (which had nothing in it) on my car. I started asking them what they hell they were doing, when I got a flurry of obscenities and one of them threw a full can of lager at me (which hit me) before they legged it.
I wasn't hurt, but I could seem them several hundred yards away down the road. Part of me wanted to go back in and call the police, the other half wanted me to chase after them with a four-by-two and beat the crap out of them. I did the former. The police couldn't actually do anything apart from commiserate and try to find them.
I am buying a large baseball bat that I will keep inside my front door. I have a nasty feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Discuss this Journal entry [26]
Latest reply: Apr 29, 2007
Complete and utter bloody morons
Posted Apr 18, 2007
It sickened me to hear an American pro-gun commentator on Radio 4 maintaining that the reason they allow everyone to have guns in the first place is because of the tyranny they suffered under the British. Well, sunshine, it's TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY YEARS after the War of Independence, and the world has changed a lot since then.
One important common lesson we learned from the US is that we now also tend to believe in the sanctity of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as well. One lesson they could learn from us, however, is that we are also able to PRIORITISE.
Discuss this Journal entry [26]
Latest reply: Apr 18, 2007
There was a very good program about anti-Americanism on R4 last night ....
Posted Apr 17, 2007
...where I heard a French anti-globalisation protestor calling for not 'free trade but fair trade'. Can anybody please explain to me how free trade is not fair trade? That if you empower the producer to sell his or her goods openly on an international market, free of any trade protection or government subsidies or import tariffs, that this is not 'fair' in some way?
These people spend most of their time talking though their arse.
Discuss this Journal entry [33]
Latest reply: Apr 17, 2007
"The glass is falling hour by hour..."
Posted Apr 6, 2007
This is why I get so angry when climate change contrarians try to publicise their crap, even on h2g2: http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2051770,00.html
It's plain to anyone that the world is in serious trouble yet certain governments still want to try and water down the conclusions of the IPCC. This is a body of hundreds of scientists who have thrashed out a consensus. And the nature of a consensus is that it is equally likely to understate the impact of possible future scenarios as well as overstate it.
Yet four governments with the US in the vanguard want the conclusions watered down. George W Bush is probably the worst single thing that has happened to this planet in the past ten years. He supports narrow, highly conservative and sectional interests over the good of humanity and the entire world, and when the effects of his thinking are pointed out to him he seeks to neutralise or discredit those who do so.
Louis MacNiece summed up this attitude in his poem Bagpipe Music:
'The glass is falling hour by hour
The glass will fall for ever
But if you break the bloody glass
You won't hold up the weather.'
Discuss this Journal entry [29]
Latest reply: Apr 6, 2007
Reports of PR's Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Posted Mar 18, 2007
I had, as is increasingly the case recently, a nasty little spat in PR with somebody who had posted an entry. The entry itself claimed to be about hard scientific fact but was really nothing more than a collection of opinions. There was a lot of scientific reasoning in there, to be certain, but it wasn't particularly well thought-through. It was even subtitled 'The Cynic's View': unfortunately for him what he got in PR was a diehard sceptic's view of a cynic's view.
The sad thing about this argument, and about the entry in general, was that it was posted by an intelligent person who had done a lot for h2g2 and PR in general and probably will continue to do so. He had no doubt become disaffected with what he saw PR becoming, and in so doing was championed by a fully-paid-up (but articulate) member of the Awkward Squad who, from my perspective anyway, has never had much truck with the original ethos of h2g2 and has always tried to refashion it into a vehicle for his own rather pretentious form of writing.
Well, I looked in PR and it is alive and kicking. There are plenty of first rate entries there to comment on and if there are some second-rate ones then they could generally be given a leg-up by constructive and measured criticism. You can read about the Duke of Marlborough, Parrots, the Strawberry Tree, Great Zimbabwe, Mary Queen of Scots...all of them well-written and interesting and above all informative.
So, I'll tell you what: all you cynics go out and champion the highly-subjective, the pretentious, the opinionated and the overwrought. I'll carry on supporting the utterly boring, objective, fact-based, well-written, measured and ultimately informative and worthwhile entries. We'll see which end up being more valued by readers other than the author.
Discuss this Journal entry [8]
Latest reply: Mar 18, 2007
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