#573 : Even worse, this Bloom guy is British [pause for shock reaction] – and campaigned for Obama – he must be part of the global conspiracy for evil socialist commie-sympathizing non-profit health care! (Dan Brown’s next airport-stall-filler will reveal all!)
Clifton, IANAZ* but cats don’t seem to be naturally social with other cats outside their family group – they are highly territorial and will usually fight with other cats that intrude in ‘their’ garden or yard – yet can become friends with other animals, including humans, depending on how those animals respond to them. We had an old cat – maybe 10 – when our daughter, who’d grown up with that one, decided that she’d like a kitten. Kitten duly arrived, and hissed and spat at everyone, including old cat who hissed and spat back, and though (after a few fights) came to tolerate kitten, was never friendly. Tiny kitten also hissed and spat bravely at big flat-coated retriever, who took no notice at all and continued to wave tail amiably; before long they were sharing a basket. Both cats were always selective about which human family members they preferred and which visiting friends they would approach or sit on the lap of.
* zoologist (ailurologist?)
Mez, yes, I was agreeing with you, in my usual convoluted way... :)
DDB #56 : you’re probably right that the cultures don’t read across. For example, in the US judges and prosecutors (and police chiefs) are often elected, which seems weird to most Europeans.
government does seem to be more transparent and accountable than corporations
But over on the Boing Boing commenters party like it’s October 2001 thread there are lots of comments indicating lack of transparency, and inability to hold government and government agencies to account, especially police.
In the UK model, wherever services are privatised, or part-private-part-public, there’s an independent regulator whose job is to deal with people who do bad stuff, and to keep everyone up to standard. For example, the education regulator OFSTED sends round inspectors to all schools, whether public or private. There’s an independent Inspector of Prisons and an independent police regulator whose name I forget. “Independent”, of course, means non-political and not subject to the whims of the governing party or of the media. Whether the regulator does a good job (many say OFSTED doesn’t, especially schools who fail their inspections) is beside this point: the important thing is that the regulator must exist, and must be independent, and be seen to be independent, and must have teeth to bite anyone who gets out of line, including anyone who games the system. In the UK culture that can be more-or-less achieved; perhaps in the US culture it’s more difficult.
Um, I suppose, if we’re going to be really pedantic, “anniversary” literally means a yearly event, so for months or weeks it would have to be something like “mensiversary” or “hebdomaversary”. But those words don’t exist, even in the OED, and Merriam-Webster does allow “anniversary” to mean, broadly, “a date that follows such an event by a specified period of time measured in units other than years”, such as “6-month anniversary”.
But “hijack” does apply to both vehicles and airplanes, the dictionaries say, so you can use it for anything, since ships and skateboards are also vehicles in the broad sense. Journalists’ attempts at smart neologisms such as “carjack” and “skyjack” have never really caught on.
Hamletta #53 : There are certain functions that shouldn't be run for profit, like schools, health care, and prisons.
I’m not sure that I’m with you on that.
In the UK, where I am, there’s a lot of discussion right now about the Swedish experience with for-profit schools, which is said to be good (there’s a recent article here from the Guardian, a left-wing British newspaper). And the Swedes are generally what Europeans call ‘socialist’ which is, of course, far to the left of anything that any US administration would dare even to think of. So if even Sweden can accept for-profit schools, why shouldn’t the rest of us?
Instinctively I agree that some public functions shouldn’t be run for profit, yet I find that I can’t make a clear argument to support my instinct. What’s the principle that says that public services (or some public services) should be provided by government employees? Greed and corruption aren’t exclusive to evil capitalists – they’re found in government-operated services, I would have thought, just as much as in private business. And we don’t seem to have a problem with using tax-payers’ money to pay private companies – often big corporations – to produce drugs for public health care, or to clean hospitals, or to build highways and public buildings and weapons and airplanes for the armed services. So – with proper regulation and oversight – why not let them run schools?
#365 : I guess an effective means of protest is to assemble so many people that every channel has to cover the event (like this, or the Million Man March) – but even then the message would have to be very clear to prevent the opposing media from twisting it out of shape.
I don’t have a Paypal account. When Paypal first started I looked at it and thought, “No way, José!” and have never felt the lack of it. I agree with Avram, I don’t want to expose my bank account, and the problem with letting Paypal charge my credit card is that in the UK (where I am) you can’t cancel such an open-ended authority to charge a credit card, even by cancelling the card account entirely – you can only tell the outfit that’s charging your card to stop, and if it doesn’t, you must prove to the card company that the charges are fraudulent. No. doubt things mostly go well with Paypal nowadays, but I don’t need to take the risk.
Thing is, every big bank robbery gets front-page headlines, but the story two years later about the perpetrators going down for 30 years is only a few inches on page 15. It’s easy to think, hey, those guys got away with $10 million, I can make it to the big time too! Or maybe bank-robbing is like playing the lottery – the odds against success are astronomical, but people do win, so why not give it a try?
#341 : the story about the tasered bicyclist is from 2007. I’m out of date on the current state of US authoritarianism: I haven’t been in the US since 2004 and, as a foreigner, have avoided visiting since then. Can USians, or foreigners who have entered the US this year, comment on whether the Obama administration has tried to dial back the behavior of police, DHS, immigration, etc., and if so, how are the results so far?
Serge, it was a Dutch biologist, not Japanese (not too surprisingly – there are plenty of ducks in NL, with all those canals to swim on). His research consisted of description of one, singular, duck which chanced to kill itself by flying into a window under his office, and of the ensuing... occurrence. The extent of homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks is, as scientists put it, not yet fully understood.
At the Ig Nobel prize awards they usually have some (real) Nobel prize winners on stage – Paul Krugman was there this year, and had a pink bra-mask put on him.
Not only accent, but also choice of words and prounciation, are class markers in all the languages that I’ve encountered. Of course, they’re often regional markers too. I once shared an office with a Belgian who claimed, credibly, to speak five different flavours of Flemish: the place where he grew up, his current home, his wife’s family’s home, the town where he went to university, and “Received Flemish” (whatever the correct term for that is) as spoken on national radio and TV. And that’s in a tiny country without major geographical features to encourage different dialects, such as you find in Switzerland. The class and regional variety in the Netherlands is about as rich, even before you get to the distinct languages and dialects that abi discussed here a couple of months ago.
Then of course there’s the ever-fascinating variety of accents and mannerisms of speakers of English across the world, as first or second language – for example, the audible differences between English-speaking South Africans, whose first language may be English, Afrikaans, Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa, etc.
Talking of masks, we must surely bow to the genius of Dr Elena Bodnar who has invented a brassiere that converts into two face masks. Last week she was deservedly awarded an Ig Nobel Prize.
abi #244 : And underneath it all is the constant awareness, the perpetual anxious care, of a people whose physical environment is almost entirely constructed. ... All the peace and prosperity this nation has built for itself rests on a foundation of constant maintenance of the infrastructure.
Somewhat off-topic: that may explain the excellence (relative to some other countries) of NL’s infrastructure. When you’ve got to vigilantly maintain your infrastucture, maybe you get in the habit of constantly improving it. So the Dutch keep building not only dykes and polders but also railway lines, tunnels, underground car parks (e.g. Museumplein in Amsterdam)... whereas the British tend to leave their infrastructure poorly maintained and unimproved for too long until things get so bad that they’re forced to do something. The British sewerage system is a case in point – out of sight, out of mind – many towns and cities, including London, are existing on systems built in the 19th century with only bolt-on improvements since then.
Though I do wonder whether the Dutch have done something about the waves in the motorway between The Hague and Utrecht. After one rather quick drive (we were late), both children were seasick.
In one of Nevil Shute’s novels¹ he describes a system of multiple voting in which everyone gets a basic vote and can earn extra votes by accomplishment and contribution to their country, up to a maximum of seven where the seventh vote is awarded to only a few people, as a high honor for special merit. In such a system, maybe one or more extra votes could be forfeited by being convicted of a crime.
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¹ In the Wet. My link is to Wikipedia; I don’t have the book any more, so I’m not certain if the Wikipedia article is accurate, but it fits my memory of the book.
heresiarch, in reading back up this thread¹ to find out what the long argument is about – which turns out to be the French banning kids from wearing headscarves in state schools² – I come across your #42 referring to ridiculous fools who want nothing more than to impose their own strictly defined freedoms on everyone else. Quite so.
Moving right along to your #207: The problem with treating immigrants like they don’t really belong... Whoa. The French are treating immigrants like they do really belong, and therefore should, like everyone who belongs, keep religious symbols out of state school. What I think I see you arguing is that instead, the French should make a special exception for one group of kids. Would that help them to belong?
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¹ yeah, yeah, I should start from the top, but I always open books first in the middle, so why not threads?
² hey, this is about schools. Schools make all sorts of rules about dress to try to keep the level of competition down. School kids are... school kids, after all. And those rules are usually very local-culture-referenced. (Often they don’t have the desired effect, but that’s beside the point.)
#2: right on, except, to be pedantic, the word automatic in the Crown gets automatic rights on the “loot”. In England, the Crown gets rights to the loot only if a coroner’s court decides that the find is treasure (no longer “treasure trove”), as it has in this case. Then the treasure is the property of the Crown, but as you say, the finder and landowner (and tenant, if any) get paid.
I’m not sure that it’s valid to say that everyone who’s in prison has chosen to live outside (civilised?) society and therefore shouldn’t have a say in how society develops. Some people choose to live more or less outside society, in one way or another (e.g. hermits), without actually breaking the law: should they be excluded too? There are certainly people in prison who have rejected society entirely, but many who haven’t – some can even be said to be decent people who made a momentary mistake which we who have been spared the mistake might feel that we should not totally condemn.
Just to clarify what I think may be a misunderstanding in the OP and #58: the European Court of Human Rights isn’t directly connected to the EU. The court implements the European Convention on Human Rights which was adopted in 1950 by the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental organisation with, currently, 47 member states (EU: 27) all of whom AFAIK are signatories to the convention. Every country in Europe except Belarus and the Vatican is now a member of the CoE and the Vatican, the US, Canada, Mexico and Japan have observer status.
But I think compliance with the convention may be a condition of EU membership, so perhaps EU pressure can be applied that way.
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