Be Excellent To Each Other

But I...then you were...and....

You win this round, Moriarty.

I don't know how widespread a problem it is or might be. I just had a couple of bad experiences with the twins when they were small. I think they must have been about 3 years old at the time, so I would have been about 18. I Can't remember where we were off to on one occasion, but it must have been a Virgin train as it was the summer holidays and tge staff had given them little backpacks with activities and snacks in (colouring books, etc) and two lads came over, picked up one of the books that my brother was scribbling in and started being a dick. He drew something crude and was just being loud and leery, saying things to me, made Paul cry which then made everything worse. I do t know if they were drunk or just arseholes, and I don't know if it was because of the kids or me, but it was intimidating, and nobody helped, and I didn't handle it very well as I couldn't really speak up.

I know the second time we were on our way to Bournemouth, and at the time both boys, a couple of years older, were in speech therapy, and there were four lads who on hearing that one of them was struggling to speak absolutely mercilessly and as loud as they could, ripped the piss out of him. They kept on shouting at him to say particular things, so he clammed up, then they were shouting at him to try and get him to say swear words. We got up and tried to move carriages, but they followed us through.

I don't know. They are anecdotal personal examples, and I've had worse alone on public transport when I was younger and alone, including two physical horrible things on tubes, and also one I guess you'd say a 'flasher' or someone who Exposed himself to me and was and touching himself on a tube carriage... I don't know... It's difficult to know what the extent is when you've had a few instances that have scared you. I must have travelled on public transport a lot and had many, many completely uneventful journeys, but I suppose those few experiences stick with you I would have welcomed anything that would have avoided even one of those. There would have been many people, I am sure, who could have dealt with things like that better, but I was always very fearful of repercussions and quite naive I suppose, so it might partly be my inability to confront it that made it worse as I think people then knew they had a target they were affecting, but then I'm just close to victim blaming myself.

Dunno. Too tired to really fathom it xxx

Same reason Harriet is given an allowance for transport.

Some good economic news, UK plc "steady as she goes" with 0.7% growth last quarter:



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34084759

Excellent, excellent. Long may it continue I say.

Goodness, I just read how rambling my reply was last night. I think current tiredness is getting to me now.

I thought it was pretty powerful stuff, and a bit upsetting Meems, didn't really know what to say.

People like that deserve a good hoof to the nether regions, bloody scumbag bullies. Sorry to hear of these experiences.

Cavey

It would probably have been more powerful if I were still able to string a sentence together coherently. I fear this may get worse before it gets better

I went there back in March. I got the feeling it hadn't changed in the quarter-century since my last visit.

I went there too.

It was empty apart from some shit carved into a tree!

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... are_btn_tw

I agree with a lot of this

Ahhh yes, the lying millionaire warmonger who takes guidance from the bearded fairy in the sky, I'm convinced.

Seriously, with every piece like that Blair writes, he makes Corbyn stronger. (Maybe that's the plan, and he's actually on the Tory payroll, as some folks have suspected all along.)

I think you just crossed the conspiracy theory streams. Why would someone on the Tory payroll have a plan to make Corbyn stronger? Or is it a long-con double bluff predicated on the idea that Corbyn really will be disastrous for the party? In which case, aren't you actually agreeing with Blair?

Meh, interesting...





Yes, precisely what I've been saying; Blair politely refers to 'a politics of parallel reality in which reason is an irritation, evidence a distraction and emotional impact is king', whereas I, with considerably less tact but with precisely the same basic message refer to 'swivel-eyed loons'. This latest 'movement', if we can call it that, whereby the whole pesky, inconvenient business of empirical efficacy, truth and demonstrable folly of the absurd 'policies' being pursued - whether that be the SNP's White Paper that disintegrated utterly and laughably before the ink was even permitted to dry (man, if ever a document needed to be printed on perforated, absorbent paper...) or Syriza's empty, vapid "anti austerity" rhetoric (or SNP's for that matter) - is just completely ignored.



Indeed, indeed.



Heh! The guy must be hopping mad, but I guess you (eventually) reap what you sow. Michael Foot may well have been swivel-eyed and unelectable in the extreme, but he was, at least, intellectually honest.

As an aside, amusing to think that Blair can regard himself as anything other than the most loathed man in Britain, and therefore his interventions as anything less than entirely helpful to his opponents...? A rather chronic lack of self-awareness, there.


I think the watershed moment for me was when our own Doc G posted Stu C's latest bustup with pre-GCSE physics in that other thread, apparently some 5-6 years after the original debacle. It occurred to me when I read that, that these types are just never, ever going to give an inch, not ever, and no matter how perfectly persuasive an argument presented to them may be, no matter how objective and compelling the evidence - it will make NO difference. You cannot get a more black-and-white case of being plainly and absolutely wrong than this; it would be impossible to have this degree of certainty in an argument about politics, political concepts and suchlike. Me? Even as someone who's been proven wrong many times, I cannot for the life of me imagine sticking to my guns (and coming back years later to do the same), when having been shown to be unequivocally and absolutely wrong.

I'm not particularly picking on Stu here; there are many, many others like him who've been saying the same old crap, unaltered, since they were 18 or whatever, or for at least as long as I've known them. The point is, there is NO point in trying to argue with people having such a, ahem, mentality/mindset, because it's clearly an impossibility to change their mind even if you could present the most powerful, optimally researched argument with every conceivable citation and corroborative evidence. It seems to me that it is these types people who are the swivel-eyed demographic for the likes of Corbyn, the SNP and Syriza et al and the drivers of this reality-free 'new politics'.

Thank goodness they're outnumbered by sensible, rather more discerning and cerebral small-'c' Tories, or at least in terms of those who can be bothered to turn up at polling booths. Well, in England at least.

You might be right, but hey, don't look at me.
*I* didn't vote for him or his party, unlike some I suspect.



Yup, sure Blair is in the employ of Tory HQ; perhaps they meet in Waitrose to exchange vital snippets and instructions over vol au vents.

Or you know, it could just be that Blair's a bit pissed at the total and absolute unravelling of pretty much his life's work, the New Labour project he and Brown started with the trashing of Clause 4 back in '95.

Don't disagree with all of that, but political consensus can change. Blair was adamant that Scotland would remain Labour, and thought that a move slightly to the left would potentially harm them there; witness instead the absolute landslide victory for the SNP in Scotland.

Oh I agree political consensus can change, most certainly, and there can be little doubt that this has indeed occurred in Scotland which, from my POV, is an entirely good thing because the resurgence of the SNP and the spectre of a minority Labour govt being propped up by it was more than sufficient to ensure great swathes of the English constituencies turned blue (none moreso than the beautiful southwest).

To me, as I've said, it seems utterly irrational. By any sane analysis, the SNP got pretty much every single thing wrong in their bid for independence (and long before then too - remember Salmond's keenness of the Euro and fellow bankers etc.); their White Paper was predicated on an oil price that's three times higher than reality and all this talk about "Scotland's Oil", like it can be the next Saudi Arabia or Norway, was all just so much bullshit as great swathes of people much more knowledgeable than oiks like me were saying all along (most of them were, of course, branded as "Quislings" and "Unionist Trolls", as you do).

You would have thought, then, that given the failure to even get close to a yes vote (I'm sorry, but to lose by over 10 points during years of the worst austerity for three generations and a sitting Tory government is pretty shit), would've spelled disintegration for the SNP, but not a bit of it. Results? Sane analysis and evaluation? Nope, who cares, as Blair notes - it feels good to make the previous 'by default' incumbents in power - Labour - feel the heat.

Can't say I'm particularly impressed by this 'resurgence' by the SNP - it means nowt without having won Indyref, as the people who elected them well know. Especially since it has precipitated an outright majority Tory government.

Rebekah Brooks back as UK chief exec of the newspaper operations division of News Corp; not bad considering she reputedly got a £16 million "payoff" when she left in 2011.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34131605

Proof that criminality is awesome!

Or, by her story, abject incompetence is awesome!

When a single photo makes you really sad.

No 'political agenda' here and this isn't aimed at anyone, so what we do about this? MIGRANT INVASION scream the headlines, but they're human beings the same as the rest of us. Surely we have enough resources, enough space, enough room for everyone? If we can have billionaires with yachts that cost hundreds of millions of pounds, can't we not have children drowning as their parents try to escape the horrors in their own country?

It's easy to forget how fucking blessed we are living in the UK.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/s ... f-refugees

*graphic picture contained within the spoiler*
[

Oh come on, at least put it in a NSFW spoiler tag or something. That is horrendous.

Disagree. Sadly, its life.

He also looks just like my son. And of all the things that we have to worry about him that we sometimes think make our issues special, they ain't, because upsetting photo boy, and loads like him, are worse off.

Edit: However to clarify why, is because for me there is no pointscoring in this, and probably doesn't belong in the Political thread because no party in the UK is even touching on dealing with this in any way shape or form. The differences we have in the UK between Rich and Poor are trivial scratches compared to the circumstances that make this happen. It isn't left vs right, socialism vs capitalism, its humanity or not. And regardless what anyone says about Evil Tories, that isn't making this happen, and Corbyn or anyone else have no suggestion, or frankly even more than a passing glance on making it stop. This is Ethiopia 1985, writ large. And it needs to be resolved. Quickly.

My cock is floppy and ugly but you wouldn't want a picture of that slapped on here without a tag. But that's life, I have repugnant flap of meat drooping out of my pelvis.

Citation needed

That's a weak argument; all sorts of things are 'life' but having them front and centre as someone scrolls through a thread wouldn't be on. I personally don't mind but I support anyone who doesn't necessarily want to see dead children on Beex. A spoiler tag with a comment is trivial to do here and if you want to post an image of an actual dead person I'd be very surprised if it was considered too much to ask.

No-one wanted to see Michael Buerk reporting on emaciated virtual corpses walking round africa when they were eating their tea. But they saw them.

The world changed as a result. The problem didn't get solved overnight, but attitudes (looking beyond our own doorstep, and our comparatively trivial issues) changed and things improved over time.

There's a fairly big difference between primetime news reporting and a tiny games-focussed Web forum. Anyone looking to raise widescale awareness of any issue would be an idiot to use Beex as a springboard. And none of that speaks to my implicit question which is: where do you draw the line? Metric fucktons of terrible atrocities happen all over the world all the time so is it cool to post pictures of anything now as long as it actually happened? Obviously not, but that's the gist of your response here and I'm just saying that can't be the single justification.

...or Cameron's Daily-Mail-courting anti-immigration policies. Policies that have no grounding in economics, but are carefully designed to appeal to people scared of migrants. Which have been proven, year after year, to be entirely unworkable as immigration has risen time and time again. But the emotional impact -- the popularity of these policies with middle England -- that is undeniable. How is that any different to the policies you are castigating Corbyn for?

(1) Is Abdullah Kurdi now facing extradition from Turkey? (2) If these photographs hadn't surfaced, would the answer to (1) be any different? (3) isn't that shameful? (4) Some 2600 migrants fleeing to Europe by boat are estimated to have drowned. This is not an isolated story.

See also: all the time and money spent going on about and after 'benefit fraudsters' despite the tiny % of the welfare bill they make up, while tax avoidance on a massive scale by rich people and companies is, historically, strangely unaddressed in the tory crusade.

It's fucked up that the two pictures of the dead child seem to have completely changed the tabloid narrative from 'dole-seeking cockroaches' to 'humanitarian crisis'.

We're the thousands of other dead people not photogenic enough for the Sun or the Mail?

Parliament petition link, BTW.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/105991

Exactly that.

It's the usual hateful tabloid bullshit; as soon as public opinion moves they flip their position so they can always be on the 'right' side of whatever's going on. It's surely only a matter of time before the fucking Sun unveils some vomit inducing 'campaign' (with suitably vague aims) so that if anything at all does change they can do the usual load of hypocritical back slapping while claiming that it was The Sun wot won it. Ugh. The fact that they're so nakedly manipulative yet slack jawed twats keep buying into it really boils my piss.

No particular objections to the image being put behind a spoiler but I'd take issue with it being described as 'NSFW', this is a picture that's being carried far and wide on news services across the world, and I put it in a thread dedicated to political debate, it's not like I sneaked it into the MAME thread or something.

It'll be interesting to see if sewer rags like the Mail and the Sun change their position somewhat now, where more considered and, dare I say it, humanist and compassionate papers such as The Guardian, have been describing this as a humanitarian crisis all along, and publishing articles/opinion pieces/etc in support of that position.

(Although interestingly the Mail have pixelated the picture to protect their readers' gentle natures, not that paparazzi pics of random celeb's arses are given such treatment, along with a comment on whether or not the 'derriere' is 'pert' - and judgement passed accordingly.)

It was me wot moaned to the mods about it by the way.

Not NSFW per se, just massively upsetting.

Three clicks and done. Signed.

Actually for some (Russell included) it could be. Someone at our workplace (Russell and I work together) had their contract ended because of an image in the media that showed someone's death, being viewed on a work computer.

Whether it was what they wanted the person in question to leave for, who can say, but it was the technicality that was used to relieve them of their position, so in those terms not 'safe' for some at work. I completely understand what you are saing: these images are widespread and everywhere today, and something I am finding quite difficult to deal with emotionally, but in some cases actually having them cached in your browser viewing history might be a bit sensitive if it can be used against you.

I did actually umm and ahhh about describing the image as NSFW. I decided not to in the original post but then followed it up with with my own mod post describing it as such just in case anyone hadn't seen it, then they knew straight away that it wasn't suitable. Anyway, carry on.

NSFW isn't a literal thing as far as I'm concerned, anyway.

So - who'd house one of the immigrant families, if it came to that?

It should be noted that an image behind a spoiler tag is cached in your browser viewing history, which is why actual NSFW images and videos aren't allowed on Beex at all.

If in doubt don't browse BEEX on work computers at all, a lot of what's written here would fall afoul of many workplace internet policies. It's not just pictures and videos that can get you in the shit.

Me. Ok, probably not a family, but I've got a spare bedroom and buying food for four people instead of three is neither here nor there.

I've certainly got the space.

Are there not housing developments in Ireland standing empty? I reckon a bit of that sweet EU bailout money could help a few thousand to the emerald Isle.

I think the immediate problem is evacuation though. There's too many desperate people dying on rafts and dinghies

Ah, is that right? I think it is mostly academic as for many they have to be looking for something to get you over, and I think in the case mentioned it was as said person had been watching it with some others, one of whom assumedly alerted the powers to go and find the proof. I don't read the forums at work anyway (unless on my phone, which is on 3G) because I don't trust any of you I have actual work to do.

Couldn't have put it better myself.


If I had the room I'd take people in. Unfortunately there's barely room for those of us already living at my house, so I have to make do with signing petitions and donating via Amazon wishlists and stuff.

I'd temporarily take in a family.

There are over half a million homes empty in England anyway, so maybe we should put them to use?

That we have only taken in about 300 refugees is pretty awful. Even feckin' Ireland have taken more.

But like I always say, journalists are twats, what do you expect? Moral consistency? Integrity? Heh, good luck with that.

On the unspoilered image, I'm with Russ. I know it's weak of me etc. but I find it near impossible to deal with images such as have been described (I haven't looked at them).

I also agree with APOD that they've been posted in the wrong thread - this is a meta UK political issue and it's hardly as though any of the UK political parties has an answer to this, or indeed can have an answer.

My own view? As hard as it is to say - especially since I myself come from immigrant refugee stock (and so is hypocritical as I am acutely aware), I just don't think taking in more of these people is the answer, because if we do, ten times more again will come as a result. I'm sorry, but that's just the harsh reality of it for me.

We need to be concentrating our efforts into humanitarian measures within the actual affected countries (probably that we ourselves messed up, in many cases).

All that being said, we'd still be prepared to take in a family in need on a temporary basis I'm sure.