andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2012-05-02 12:00 pm
andrewducker) wrote2012-05-02 12:00 pm
Entry tags:
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Interesting Links for 02-05-2012
- MPs announce that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to run News Corp
- The EU's Common Agricultural Policy is slowly being reformed.
- Unrealistic expectations of relationships are a scourge on society.
- How Marvel took The Avengers from a throwaway reference in Iron Man to a record-breaking movie
- Sleep cancels out obesity gene
- Pakistani province's high court orders government to stop censoring websites illegally
- See which parties voted the way that you would want them to.
- Want to know what TV comes out when? Then this is the most awesome site in the universe.
- The dilemmas of TV filming - camera types are changing, and the different styles cause different emotional effects
- Nine more people arrested for naming a rape victim on Twitter.
- Wormworld saga chapter 3 is out. The art is still gorgeous.
- On rape within the BDSM community
- Have 26 per cent fewer houses been built under the Coalition?
- Consumer ebooks sales increased by 366% in 2011. Still only 6% of physical books.
- Microsoft removes racy apps from Windows Phone store. So glad my apps aren't censored.
- SPDY Performance on Mobile Networks. (From the figures, I think SPDY caches will be damned useful)
- Final Fantasy 13-2 characters model Prada. (Okay, gaming is now officially completely mainstream)
- A computer built into a radiation detector. Gloriously retro-looking
- Android Ported to C# - staggeringly faster
- Vote for the person, not the party, in your local council elections (if you're in a country with a sensible voting system)
- Scottish children drinking less fizzy drinks, drinking lots of alcohol, doing no exercise, are very happy.
- Radical Honesty - a step too far?
- Cutting red tape and taxes will not revive Britain - it's spending it in the best places that will help.
- Neal Stephenson answers interview questions (including the one about his epic battle with William Gibson). Old, but good.
- Protection of Freedoms Act landmark achievement in fight for civil liberties.
Radical Honesty
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If the people running scenes were more active in educating the people - particularly newbie dom men - who are invited it would probably cut down on a lot of sexual assault.
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But that's a much more difficult proposition.
Education within the community, particularly for newbies, would cut down on nonconsent issues very quickly. Once you had that issue dealth with you then you could work on the the long term issues of weeding out bad doms and empowering subs
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I'm sick of supposedly serious journalists claiming that marriage is superior to non-married cohabiting. Really fucking sick. I think they have the correlation the wrong way around on the break-up stats; but I also really don't fucking care - if your relationship sucks you should end it, and doing so shouldn't be something that draws social ostracisation.
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Although I want to watch GoT season 2; so maybe I should dig it our of the the internet sewer.
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As it is, I am not putting up with being massively spoiled by people talking about it online between now and next January when the season two box set comes out.
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And frequently _very_ pink.
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Have you come across tvtorrents.com? It's a minor pain to get started but it really is very good.
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What does tvtorrents.com do for you? (I am _so_ not looking at it from work.)
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Being honest though that site you linked to is OK and there's probably little or no benefit in you switching. Also it has wider coverage of things -- not limited to just TV and includes sports on TV.
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Yeah. I wonder what would happen if we had fewer stories about "our eyes met across a crowded room" and more about "and then we put in a lot of effort to understand what made each other happy, and as a reward, it worked really well"... :)
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"[Sir Paul] said celebrity magazines like Hello promoted "unrealistic expectations" about marriage, and people needed to understand the importance of working at relationships to make them work."
""We all know, all of us who have been in relationships - whether married or unmarried - for a long time... that the only way that they are made to work and the only way that they become really qualitatively good is by absolutely grinding away at it." (my bold)
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Oh, that's awesome, I hadn't realised it had been such an ad hoc opportunity, but I'm really impressed that they did manage to assemble a bunch of films that work individually, but aren't wasted if they don't manage to culminate in one super-film.
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Although I seemed to have missed it if the article reported any evidence of that from the study: it claimed there was correlation, but I only saw speculation about causation.
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Oh dear... it seems my favoured political party would be a lunatic in a box making decisions at random by tossing a coin. This agreed with me more than the next nearest political party (Lib Dem at 44%). Conservatives agreed with me more than Labour which was a surprise.
Then again some of the issue summaries were kind of surprising and rather tangential to what the actual votes were: e.g. "All smoking should be banned" was a vote on advertising and smoking in public places. "Legal Abortion should be limited as far as possible" was in fact a vote to reduce the term from 24 weeks to 12. The one about the "right to strike" was a vote about prison officers (actually I think maybe they should but I do think some professions it's just too dangerous for them to strike, the precedents for a police strike are not good).
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Sadly, there are no coin-tossing lunatics running for election, so I will probably vote LD->SNP->Lab tomorrow.
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E.g. Reword the "all smoking should be banned" (which > 50% of people disagree with) to "smoking should not be allowed in some places" or (which > 50% of people agree with) and you've reverse people's political stance.
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The fact that no one party exactly matched what I want (and none even got above 50%) does at least tell me that if they're cheating they aren't doing it too egregiously.
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I got a measley 13 % for Labour, presumably because the current lot are a bunch of authoritarian war-mongering morons, which is quite depressing, especially as I got 28 % for the Tories :(
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What's weird is how low down the SDLP were, given that they're supposedly a left-of-centre party.
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Ensures the Secretary of State has a responsibility to provide a good national health service
Bans any new NHS charges without an additional act of Parliament (thus stopping the Labour council in Manchester, where I live, from bringing in charges for using A&E, which they'd been planning to do)
Devolves decision-making to clinicians rather than administrators
Includes a statutory duty to minimise 'postcode lotteries' (trans activists I know are ecstatic about this one).
Puts a cap on the amount of money that a foundation trust can raise from private provision (a cap that wasn't there previously)
And actually *reverses* some of the privatisation Labour brought in, as well as making sure any future use of private providers must be decided not just on the basis of cost (as under Labour's legislation) but must take into account quality of service as well.
I read through the bill several times (unlike pretty much everyone I read making alarmist statements about it ending the NHS -- people with more mild criticisms, like Phil Hammond, who thinks it's a terrible bill but only the latest in a long line of such bad bils, tend to have actually read it, but the ones saying it privatises everything haven't) and found a lot in it that was bad, and that I disagree with, and that I would change if I could, but it absolutely doesn't privatise the NHS.
(My own one got 57% Lib Dem, coin toss, then I think the SNP and Plaid (even though I don't live in Scotland or Wales). Tories came slightly higher than Labour for the same reason as you.)
Northern Irish politics is weird in all sorts of ways -- while I got 57% Lib Dem, for example, I only got 11% Alliance, even though the Alliance party are officially allied with the Lib Dems.
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That's not weird at all. That's the deliberate result of a poll that entirely omits such issues as tax and income distribution and social equality, which one might consider quite important to left-leaning voters. These major reasons that one might vote for a leftish party aren't mentioned at all. Lest it be thought I am biased, these issues might also be considered important to right-wing voters, whom the poll likewise deprives of an accurate reflection of a significant element of their political stance. Result: everyone ends up in the centre, oh what a surprise. And that's even before you get to some of the interesting wording of the questions.
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50% Coin toss (really 33%)
28% LDem
24% UKIP
22% PC
19% Con
19% SNP
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LDem 41%
Green 37%
SNP 35%
Con 33%
Lab 14%
what i want is a party that's unshakeably strong on personal freedom & human rights (after getting into power), economically centre or slightly left of, pro-nuclear, and slightly euroskeptic in the sense of "the EU is good and has its uses, but does it need to do all these things and why should it be an all-or-nothing if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us arrangement?".
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That's what I call a "null policy" -- no party advocates the opposite but they all say the opposition is against it. Nobody is campaigning on being against personal freedom and human rights. Everybody is saying the other party is against it. Interpreted as something like "doesn't believe in ID cards" or "doesn't believe in stop and search powers for the police" it becomes meaningful though.
It's probably also worth thinking that if you put in only 4 "must have" policies which are actually policies where someone could sensibly take the opposite view (rather than things which everyone agrees on vociferously) then you need 2^4= 16 political parties to cover the set. We shouldn't expect to find a political party which agrees with our 4 most strongly held opinions which are not "obvious".
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Also, complete failure to even consider the idea of evidence based drugs policy. Or indeed science-based policy on anything much, not that I'm bitter or anything...
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Here's how I see it. If you ask an old-school socialist "are you in favour of personal freedom?" they might say "Sure, that's why I support a free-at-source health care and education system so that people are completely free to better themselves by having the training and medical help they need to maximise their potentials in life. If you asked the same question to a hardcore Libertarian-large-L they might say "Sure, that's why I'm against all forms of government and taxation so that people are free to spend their money in any way they like."
"Personal freedom" can support more or less any policy: "Ban smoking?" "I support your personal freedom to smoke" "Well, I support your personal freedom to breathe smoke free air."
So "personal freedom" isn't a great rallying cry from a politician for my money.
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I think a lot of the outrage following the Ched Evans conviction is people looking at the facts and thinking to themselves "That's me."
Or at least "That could be me."
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http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/235723.html
I was genuinely shocked. And about a third of the people writing those tweets were women.
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I hope a large number of people who previously thought that behaviour like Ched Evan’s behaviour was okay might start believing it is the serious criminal offence it is.
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That's really interesting. I think Jeff was exactly right when he said that radical honesty was too extremist to be a sensible lifestyle choice, but that it was seductive because it made us think about all the times we'd like to avoid lying but are afraid it will be impractical, when it can (often but not always) turn out to be useful.
However, I think there's a tendency to overcompensate. The first comment described someone who played the guitar, and everyone automatically told him he was great and he thought about becoming professional, and someone told him that he sucked.
Now, I think that person was sensible to give some accurate feedback. But I also think they were embarrassed to criticise against minor social norms, and hence in an almost self-parody exaggerated what they thought.
After all, they probably mean "suck" compared to a professional player, not compared to an average person (who probably can't play the guitar _at all_), so by suddenly shifting the basis of comparison, they're just making the guitar player defensive and less likely to listen.
It would presumably have been equally true but more accurate to say something like:
"You've picked up the basics but you're not of professional standard"
or "You've picked up the basics, but you would need to dedicatedly practice for several hours a day to approach professional standard."
or "You don't have the natural talent to ever be professional"
or "You're not outstanding in natural talent and don't have much dedication. You're not of professional standard, and I don't know whether or not you could be."
It's hard to combine tact and truth, and often impossible, but I don't think giving up is the correct long-term solution (even though it may be the only expedient option in the short term).