Interesting Links for 17-04-2012
Apr. 17th, 2012 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Sceptic debunks "miracle", is arrested for blasphemy
- Majority of England now declared to be in drought - may last until Christmas
- When your non-patented drugs are spontaneously converted into patents ones. I love nanotech.
- The conviction rate for rape is 58%, higher than the average. Reporting it as 6% just puts people off reporting it.
- Greece,Portugal and Spain all fucked. They can't devalue, and they can't be competitive _and_ pay debts off.
- When Eton and Goldman Sachs run charities, the system needs reform
- Volcano eruptions follow Benford's Law
- North Korean Press Bus Takes a Wrong Turn, Gets Some Unauthorised Pictures
- Man whose WMD lies led to 100,000 deaths confesses all
- Abuse At Scale: How GMail deals with outgoing spam.
- Most people not aware how much sugar there is in "healthy" drinks (like fruit juice).
- Can a stroke change someone's sexuality?
- The Official Doctor Who Fan Club - the story of how the BBC handed Who fandom to a 13-year-old
- Ann Widdecombe can fuck off. "Bring back the concept of shame" my arse. (Tories trying to clamp down on drunk people)
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 12:22 pm (UTC)Are we also going to criminalise people skiing and breaking a leg, as a waste of NHS resources?
And to use _shame_, an emotion that generally causes people to behave worse, rather than better, is just the icing on the cake.
If you want to set a bunch of sociologists and psychologists to find out why people enjoy getting that drunk, and then help them with whatever is causing them to feel that's the only way they can be happy, then go for it.
But if people want to shame people into acting the way they want them to, rather than the way they choose, then they can fuck off.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 12:58 pm (UTC)So what is the state of mind that, rather than what I would feel if I did go get blind drunk and throw up in the street, causes me to avoid going that far in the first place?
no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 01:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 01:09 pm (UTC)You need to feel like you don't need to be drunk to have a good time.
You need to feel like you could choose to get up and dance - or not dance, if you prefer - based not on how hammered you are but whether you enjoy it.
You need to feel like if you saw a fit bloke, it didn't make you a slut if you went home with him, just for fun, if you were sober.
You need to feel like it's not going to be a mark of pride for you to tell your mates how many pints you kept down before the last one that broke the camel's back.
You need to feel like you're not a poof if you only fancy two pints, enjoyed slowly over the course of the evening, instead of seven or eight crammed into a two or three hour period.
You probably also need to be immune to the idiocy of your mates' behaviour when they're all hammered and you're not - you need to be able to walk down the street with them at kicking-out time wincing at their rendition of O Flower of Scotland at the top of their lungs and not be thinking "What a shower of wankers... this is the last time I stay sober with this lot."
It would probably also help if you were sure you could afford next month's mortgage/car insurance/council tax, you hadn't just had your working tax credits cut and you knew you'd still be in a job come the summer. But we can't expect miracles.
(This isn't an attack of any kind on you btw, it's more an extended commentary on the current State of the Nation.)
no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 01:35 pm (UTC)Being very very drunk is not generally physically pleasant, being very very hungover is almost universally physically extremely unpleasant. That horrible "oh god, WHAT did I DO" feeling is also not one that I would personally seek out (btdt)... perhaps people are deliberately seeking out these sensations, but I doubt it. It seems to me that they are seeking out "fun" but don't know how to have it without drink. We need to allow ourselves to have fun without drink, perhaps we need to redefine what fun is.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 03:29 pm (UTC)It already is illegal to be drunk in public, or to be drunk and disorderly (Wikipedia, with cites of the statutes).
I think the comparison to the smoking ban need not imply that we should only worry about drinkers who are damaging the health of others or harming the NHS (though
It is _none of her business_ what my state is, unless I am causing destruction of property or harassing people. Should I wish to get horribly drunk then that is _my_ choice.
The law disagrees, and I think rightly. According to the CPS, you need not be a damaging properly or harassing people to be disorderly, you can just be making a public place unpleasant ("rowdy behaviour in a street late at night which might alarm residents or passers-by"). The CPS link came from this thread, where it's discussed a bit.
What Ann Widdecombe proposes seems to be to enforce existing laws, plus a bit of the old Tory "put them in the stocks" business. I doubt the stocks will work, but I'm in favour of enforcing these laws, because doing so would make public spaces better.
There's also the Schroedinger's rapist argument, I suppose: saying I should not be concerned about drunks I encounter as long as they're not violent pre-supposes I know which ones might turn violent so that I can go about my business in public without fear (as long as my spider sense doesn't start tingling). In practice people don't have the spider sense, so you end up with no go areas at certain times.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 07:34 pm (UTC)