"On the day the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on 29 January for use for all age groups in the EU, French president Emmanuel Macron claimed that it was "quasi-ineffective" for people over 65."
Who to believe between a group of world experts, and the French President without even an ology in wiping his own bum. An easy choice for a political grouping with a grudge.
The bit when his spin doctors were briefing that Macaroooon is a vaccine expert from all the reading he does on the subject... Anyone else run away screaming, leaving a cartoon person shaped hole in the wall, when they heard that?
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
This will just infuriate furKamskither, but the animus in the EU Establishment against AZ really was driven - in part - by Brexit, and the ironic thing is that Kamksi's wild and one-eyed refusal to see any of this just proves the point
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
At that point I don't think they even realised that most of the UK's initial supplies were from Pfizer and they became fixated on the idea that they had somehow been screwed over by the UK on AstraZeneca.
One of the things that we were reminded of in this, is that world leaders don't really get folders with The Real Answers handed to them in their security briefings etc.
So when they read a stupid column in the paper saying that the UK was hiding all the vaccines in the basement of the Dean Street Pizza Express, that became their belief.....
They get warmed over bullshit that someone saw in the paper/read on Twitter etc. Probably we would be better off if they read PB.
They could make a new Pink Panther film about Inspector Clouseau's mission to track down illicit stocks of the British vaccine.
The Italian government had a bloody good try at that. The pain on faces as the concept of a global supply chain and the fact that various parts of the process, such as quality control, take lots of time.....
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
And as so often the fake news gets all the coverage, where as the correction / accurate reports hardly get mentioned. AZN will be remember by many as that one that one which was dangerous and ineffective.
And now Australia are sitting on millions of doses, as the damn virus finally takes hold there, because a bunch of idiots listened to Macron and that German newspaper, and now there’s more anti-vax nonsense down under, than there is the the States.
The situation in Sydney is catastrophic. It looks increasingly as if what is a very harsh lockdown (reportedly featuring, in the worst affected areas, no moving more than 5km from your home for most purposes, severe restrictions on who is still allowed to go to work, masks even outdoors with steep fines for non-compliance, and police enforcement backed up by the army) still isn't enough to stamp out Delta.
Australia's vaccine drive, which is the only possible means out of the trap given that lockdown doesn't achieve the Zero Covid that politicians expect, yet nobody dare let it go for fear of a massacre, is hopeless. Supplies of mRNA vaccines are extremely limited, and AZ is almost useless because the media and the Australian equivalent of the JCVI have, between them, so thoroughly destroyed its reputation that almost nobody will accept it.
Quite honestly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were still stuck in lockdown at the end of the year.
If R is a as high for Delta as some have claimed, then it is worth remembering that we had a long, slow clawback from the previous variant in the first lockdown. Effective R never got much below 0.8 in the UK.
While these things aren't linear, that looks horribly like lockdowns aren't powerful enough to pull R below 1 for Delta....
Indeed. If you get a handful of isolated cases and can stamp on them really quickly then you've got a chance, but once community transmission passes a certain point - New South Wales reportedly recorded 239 known/confirmed cases yesterday - then the game's up.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
This will just infuriate furKamskither, but the animus in the EU Establishment against AZ really was driven - in part - by Brexit, and the ironic thing is that Kamksi's wild and one-eyed refusal to see any of this just proves the point
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
At that point I don't think they even realised that most of the UK's initial supplies were from Pfizer and they became fixated on the idea that they had somehow been screwed over by the UK on AstraZeneca.
One of the things that we were reminded of in this, is that world leaders don't really get folders with The Real Answers handed to them in their security briefings etc.
So when they read a stupid column in the paper saying that the UK was hiding all the vaccines in the basement of the Dean Street Pizza Express, that became their belief.....
They get warmed over bullshit that someone saw in the paper/read on Twitter etc. Probably we would be better off if they read PB.
They could make a new Pink Panther film about Inspector Clouseau's mission to track down illicit stocks of the British vaccine.
And he will still appear far more competent than Ursula von der Leyen.
Remember, Clouseau was always proved right in the end. So far, von der Leyen has been in the wrong in literally everything she’s attempted. Dido Harding on speed.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
While that’s true, they were also woefully poor at running the trial and submitting the data. That speaks to their inexperience.
They shouldn’t have taken this task on. They should have left it to another firm who was more experienced at trialing vaccines.
Let us not forget that they’ve been rejected twice by the Swiss regulator and the FDA rebuked then on their submission (and also still hasn’t approved their vaccine).
AZ took this on because they (rightly) thought it would be a good vaccine, and because they (wrongly) thought it would be a stepping stone to being a major player in the vaccine space. It wasn’t entirely altruistic.
Are you saying there's a link between vaccines and altruism? I thought we'd established that Wakefield faked the data...
Added to however many the week before (620k). And the week before that.
That's a fair old chunk of people out of the workforce.
Assuming 1 - that they all isolate and 2 - that they all isolate for the full period and 3 - that they can't work from home.
Normal number of people off work sick on an average day in the UK is around 750k.
Very few have to isolate for 10 days once pinged. It typically takes several days for a contact to test positive, before a ping occurs. In my case, therefore, it was 5 days. The range I've seen personally is between 1 and 8 days. So the "weekly" total is, I'm guessing, a reasonable proxy for the number forced to WFH. Some proportion of those will therefore be unable to work.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Kamski is usually sensible, but on this simply wrong. Of course large pharma are profit driven organisations, but the idea they decided to set up a vaccines business for commercial reasons, on the back of an unproven, non profit vaccine - and with any failure destined to be a very public one - is absurd.
This will just infuriate furKamskither, but the animus in the EU Establishment against AZ really was driven - in part - by Brexit, and the ironic thing is that Kamksi's wild and one-eyed refusal to see any of this just proves the point
One has to remember the extent to which the EU and the EU elite had lost their mind, back when all this was happening. One night the EU Commission unilaterally imposed a hard border ACROSS Ireland to prevent legally contracted vaccine exports to the UK - without asking Ireland
At that point I don't think they even realised that most of the UK's initial supplies were from Pfizer and they became fixated on the idea that they had somehow been screwed over by the UK on AstraZeneca.
One of the things that we were reminded of in this, is that world leaders don't really get folders with The Real Answers handed to them in their security briefings etc.
So when they read a stupid column in the paper saying that the UK was hiding all the vaccines in the basement of the Dean Street Pizza Express, that became their belief.....
They get warmed over bullshit that someone saw in the paper/read on Twitter etc. Probably we would be better off if they read PB.
They could make a new Pink Panther film about Inspector Clouseau's mission to track down illicit stocks of the British vaccine.
And he will still appear far more competent than Ursula von der Leyen.
Remember, Clouseau was always proved right in the end. So far, von der Leyen has been in the wrong in literally everything she’s attempted. Dido Harding on speed.
Waaaaaaaaaaay beyond Dido Harding. Even Gavin Williamson has got things right, occasionally. Von der Leyen has an utterly perfect track record of failure.
I keep trying to think how to monetise that.
I remember an Irish friend who was so perfectly rubbish at horses that a bunch of Scandinavian professional spread bettors that we knew actually tried out a system of betting on all the *other* horses in races he bet on... which worked...
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
While that’s true, they were also woefully poor at running the trial and submitting the data. That speaks to their inexperience.
They shouldn’t have taken this task on. They should have left it to another firm who was more experienced at trialing vaccines.
Let us not forget that they’ve been rejected twice by the Swiss regulator and the FDA rebuked then on their submission (and also still hasn’t approved their vaccine).
AZ took this on because they (rightly) thought it would be a good vaccine, and because they (wrongly) thought it would be a stepping stone to being a major player in the vaccine space. It wasn’t entirely altruistic.
Yes and no on the trial. The UK trial was run by the Jenner Institute, the US trial was run by AZ. The US trial was just unlucky to get a couple of trial participants that had underlying neurological conditions (one in the placebo arm and one in the vaccine arm) otherwise it was actually set up pretty well in terms of age and racial demographics, similar to Pfizer. Without that bad luck it gets approved with original COVID data with a 4 week gap and efficacy for symptomatic infection at ~80% in late November or early December by both the MHRA and FDA.
The issue was in COV002 which was run by the Jenner Institute and they chose, stupidly IMO, not to have many over 65s for ethical reasons so when it came time to approvals regulators were left a bit blind on specific data for over 65s. That's not a critical issue but it can make approval quite a slow process vs a trial that has got data for the group that will primarily benefit from the vaccine such as Pfizer. Another rubbish decision in COV002 was to use another vaccine in the placebo arm which can elicit a generalised immune response that can help against a COVID infection. Resulting in lower efficacy that saline in the placebo arm which the US trial used.
To my mind it was inexperience from both sides that led to the issues in COV002. A more experienced vaccine developer would have put together a much better trial in the UK and a more experienced vaccine pharma would have flagged all of the issues, especially not having enough older people given the target demographic for a COVID vaccine.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
And as so often the fake news gets all the coverage, where as the correction / accurate reports hardly get mentioned. AZN will be remember by many as that one that one which was dangerous and ineffective.
And now Australia are sitting on millions of doses, as the damn virus finally takes hold there, because a bunch of idiots listened to Macron and that German newspaper, and now there’s more anti-vax nonsense down under, than there is the the States.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
And as so often the fake news gets all the coverage, where as the correction / accurate reports hardly get mentioned. AZN will be remember by many as that one that one which was dangerous and ineffective.
And now Australia are sitting on millions of doses, as the damn virus finally takes hold there, because a bunch of idiots listened to Macron and that German newspaper, and now there’s more anti-vax nonsense down under, than there is the the States.
So, no blame accrues to the Swiss regulator, who rejected it twice?
No blame accrues to the FDA who accused AZ of material misrepresentation, and who have still not approved the vaccine?
The South Africans, who publicly stopped using the AZ vaccine, they are irrelevant too?
So there's no chance that, say, commercial pressures have had a tiny influence on foreign regulators who benefit if the for-profit Pfizer makes many billions and the not-for-profit Anglo-Swedish AZ is smeared into uselessness?
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, global experiments with entirely new vaccines, all of which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, global experiments with entirely new vaccines, all of which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
But it was not a controlled experiment. Which is the kind of thing required to prove your hypothesis.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
The human disgust reaction is not necessarily related to harm done.
It's a serious potential route for new emerging diseases. IIRC there was at least one very unusual STD circulating in the Newmarket area some years back.
I'm sorry to the purists, but it is entertaining, and it's great to see on a weekday evening,
I don't think anyone didn't think it would be entertaining. It's cricket after all. The serious questions about it are whether the cost is far too high in sidelining competitions and counties that it's effectively parasitic on, given it has to borrow c. 100 of their players, about ownership and whether it's good for the game to have ECB owned franchises that are completely unaccountable to anyone except TV companies and maybe in the future investors, and wherther you've poured tens of millions into a money pit to basically reinvent T20 (although the ECB claim it'll make a profit, that's excluding the bribes, sorry, solidarity payments to the counties, and heavily reliant on broadcasting income that's effectively at the whim of Sky). The question isn't whether a few more people watch and enjoy it over these few weeks, but whether in three or so years the same problems exist as before, but having burnt a load of cash and the county game to the ground in a way that will jeopardise the future of the game by undermining the foundations the TV friendly stuff is built on.
It's remarkable people would be credulous enough to suggest putting a sport firmly into the hands of money and marketing men in the year we've seen the ESL six show what executives will do if they think they can get away with it, would be a good idea.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, global experiments with entirely new vaccines, all of which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
But it was not a controlled experiment. Which is the kind of thing required to prove your hypothesis.
No it's not. MILLIONS of kids are being abused around the world, often murdered
It may be time to consider radical new steps, coz endless incarceration ain't doing it (severe jail should always remain a default option, of course)
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
So one particular programme didnt work? What does that prove that other ones shouldn't be examined? We just give up? Personally I don't know if it would work I can see the arguments on both sides but if its something that can be tested maybe we should.
Friend of mine was a very good looking child at a Catholic boarding school in southwest England in the 70s
At the age of six-10 pretty boys like him would be invited to sit on the knee of a particular monk, clearly naked under his habit, then the monk would bounce the boy up and down while singing "Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross" again and again until the monk got "suddenly bored" and the boy was allowed to go
All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone.
Sean, you’ve said a lot of repulsive things on PB before, but that just crossed a boundary. You clearly lack the self-awareness to take the necessary next step, so I can only assume the moderators will take the decision for you.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, global experiments with entirely new vaccines, all of which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
But it was not a controlled experiment. Which is the kind of thing required to prove your hypothesis.
No it's not. MILLIONS of kids are being abused around the world, often murdered
It may be time to consider radical new steps, coz endless incarceration ain't doing it (severe jail should always remain a default option, of course)
Yet you still need controlled experiments to prove your hypotheses and change public policy on a rational basis, like vaccine trials (so BTW I do feel you are unfair with your slur about disgust affecting my rationalism). Anything else is 'the latest bright idea', no more, no less, which might work or might be time-wasting shite.
BRASILIA, July 29 (Reuters) - Brazil plans to cancel a contract signed in March for 10 million doses of Russia's Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga said on Thursday as the South American nation struggles with one of the worst outbreaks in the world.
"Please be aware that we are monitoring the comments on this thread, so please refrain from using offensive language. We have zero tolerance for discriminatory comments on our social posts, so please be aware that your words could constitute a hate crime."
Just to say I'm very impressed with @Cyclefree 's header. And @SandraMc 's posting.
It's brought me back to the 1980s for reasons which I don't want to discuss (not my problem, but someone else's, and I don't want to risk even hinting who the person might be). But it was plainly a very difficult time.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
So one particular programme didnt work? What does that prove that other ones shouldn't be examined? We just give up? Personally I don't know if it would work I can see the arguments on both sides but if its something that can be tested maybe we should.
Also none of these programmes involved actually giving the pedophiles a suitable proxy for the intended target, so that they didn't need anything else, which is not what we are discussing
Let's remove "child sex abuse" from the mindgame, as people understandably get upset by the very concept - as do I - I am a parent, it is very upsetting
Let's say you can suddenly give a gamble-a-holic a fake robot casino experience with fake robot croupiers and the exact mental sensation of walking into a casino and losing everything, ie the stuff that gets them weirdly high, and yet in actuality they have lost nothing and they can go about their lives as normal and their genetic itch has been scratched and their families have not been financially ruined
Is that "immoral"? Is it "encouraging gambling by normalising it"? I don't think so
Why can't we extend that to other human sins and crimes? Fake their dubious "pleasures" with AI and robots, so no real harm is done. All this will soon be feasible, so we need to consider the potentials
"Along with Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the conspiracy posse, he is helping create profound distrust in the American electoral system, in the American political system, in the American public-health system, and ultimately in American democracy. The eventual consequences of their actions may well be a genuinely stolen or disputed election in 2024, and political violence on a scale the U.S. hasn’t seen in decades."
Anne Applebaum on Mike Lindell of MyPillow who seems to be Trump's No.1 conspiracy propagator.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
So one particular programme didnt work? What does that prove that other ones shouldn't be examined? We just give up? Personally I don't know if it would work I can see the arguments on both sides but if its something that can be tested maybe we should.
Also none of these programmes involved actually giving the pedophiles a suitable proxy for the intended target, so that they didn't need anything else, which is not what we are discussing
Let's remove "child sex abuse" from the mindgame, as people understandably get upset by the very concept - as do I - I am a parent, it is very upsetting
Let's say you can suddenly give a gamble-a-holic a fake robot casino experience with fake robot croupiers and the exact mental sensation of walking into a casino and losing everything, ie the stuff that gets them weirdly high, and yet in actuality they have lost nothing and they can go about their lives as normal and their genetic itch has been scratched and their families have not been financially ruined
Is that "immoral"? Is it "encouraging gambling by normalising it"? I don't think so
Why can't we extend that to other human sins and crimes? Fake their dubious "pleasures" with AI and robots, so no real harm is done. All this will soon be feasible, so we need to consider the potentials
Hmm. I see what you are arguing, but does the analogy work? It is one thing to play for matchsticks, and another for money. That last is where the thrills are, for some people, or so I gather.
Likewise, there is a very nasty element of power and abuse involved in much sexual perversion. Does a doll sate that or frustrate that? I don't know, and I don't particularly want to know. Anyway, I have a nice bath to have, and a nice book on naval history to read, so good night all, play nicely.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
That's a pretty reasonable proposal
I do take on board the notion - expressed cogently by @carnyx and others - that almost any experimentation in this field is extremely dangerous and possibly evil. But I also feel that "doing nothing" is evil. How many child abuse rings and child abuse epidemics must be uncovered, time and again, before we accept that we've got this really really wrong. It's a basic, ugly human flaw, visible in every human society (even Denmark) and here is modern technology *possibly* giving us a solution.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
That's a pretty reasonable proposal
I do take on board the notion - expressed cogently by @carnyx and others - that almost any experimentation in this field is extremely dangerous and possibly evil. But I also feel that "doing nothing" is evil. How many child abuse rings and child abuse epidemics must be uncovered, time and again, before we accept that we've got this really really wrong. It's a basic, ugly human flaw, visible in every human society (even Denmark) and here is modern technology *possibly* giving us a solution.
POSSIBLY
It would be wrong to ignore it
If successful a knock on effect could also be, make the bots only available via a prescription from a psychiatrist for the non convicted that way you also end up with a list of potential offenders.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
The term Britannia referred to the entire peninsular among the ancient Greeks, with Hibernia and Albion being two of the islands within it. Britannia then referred to southern Albion after the Romans colonized the place. The whole term refers to Celtic people who lived there, so if anyone should be upset it's the English.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
If the English had had a famine imposed on them by Germany a century and a half ago they wouldn’t be at all “sensitive” or “chippy” about it. They’d let bygones be bygones.
Sure they would.
The Irish deserve great credit for their restraint and for their powers of forgiveness.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
The term Britannia referred to the entire peninsular among the ancient Greeks, with Hibernia and Albion being two of the islands within it. Britannia then referred to southern Albion after the Romans colonized the place. The whole term refers to Celtic people who lived there, so if anyone should be upset it's the English.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
If the English had had a famine imposed on them by Germany a century and a half ago they wouldn’t be at all “sensitive” or “chippy” about it. They’d let bygones be bygones.
Sure they would.
The Irish deserve great credit for their restraint and for their powers of forgiveness.
Hmm. THis reminds me that certain dominant elements in the UK renamed the German Ocean as the North Sea.
"Please be aware that we are monitoring the comments on this thread, so please refrain from using offensive language. We have zero tolerance for discriminatory comments on our social posts, so please be aware that your words could constitute a hate crime."
Hmmm.
So South Lancs police posted that they had raided a traveller site and recovered a number of stolen caravans. Then tweeted about this, specifically. Then worried that someone might comment.... poorly
Important piece by @BevanShields ‘Dame Sarah Gilbert called Australia’s botched roll-out of the vaccine the “greatest public health disaster” the country has ever witnessed.’
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Tut, surely 'half European'.
But no Sotch?
AFAIK it's HQ'd in England with English law operating (you can tell I've recently had to do a probate executry which hinges on precisely that kind of distinction when dealing with the decedent's assets).
Important piece by @BevanShields ‘Dame Sarah Gilbert called Australia’s botched roll-out of the vaccine the “greatest public health disaster” the country has ever witnessed.’
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Sir Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chief investigator of its clinical trials, said......across Europe this has been an absolute nightmare with changing of age recommendations over the course of the past six months that’s really left some people without vaccine when they could have been vaccinated...and that’s a huge risk to our populations around the world if we get that wrong.”
[Dame Sarah] Gilbert also used the interview to restate her personal view that children should not be vaccinated in wealthy countries ahead of at-risk adults in developing nations.
“For me, when we still do not have enough vaccines to supply the whole world, the priority is getting to those health care workers - particularly in other parts of the world that don’t have access to vaccines yet that are constantly at risk,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean to say that we shouldn’t ever vaccinate children. But I think the top priority is to get vaccines out to other parts of the world where only 1 per cent of the population so far is vaccinated.”
Important piece by @BevanShields ‘Dame Sarah Gilbert called Australia’s botched roll-out of the vaccine the “greatest public health disaster” the country has ever witnessed.’
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
The term Britannia referred to the entire peninsular among the ancient Greeks, with Hibernia and Albion being two of the islands within it. Britannia then referred to southern Albion after the Romans colonized the place. The whole term refers to Celtic people who lived there, so if anyone should be upset it's the English.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
If the English had had a famine imposed on them by Germany a century and a half ago they wouldn’t be at all “sensitive” or “chippy” about it. They’d let bygones be bygones.
Sure they would.
The Irish deserve great credit for their restraint and for their powers of forgiveness.
Extraordinarily incompetent and ineffectual though the response led by Trevelyan was (and, notably, in marked contrast to the much better handled situation in Scotland, which was also affected) I think it is a bit harsh to imply the English invented the potato blight.
Important piece by @BevanShields ‘Dame Sarah Gilbert called Australia’s botched roll-out of the vaccine the “greatest public health disaster” the country has ever witnessed.’
The tightest most successful lockdowns have simply shifted the risk of their populations being exposed to the virus into the future, when the virus is far more transmissible. So they need vaccination more than most other states do, and yet their vaccination programme is very slow. Hopefully Australia will still get through relatively unscathed, but there will almost certainly be countries that end up worse off as a result of lockdowns and poor vaccinations than if they had been hit hard in early 2020. It's a bit like crossing a busy road and dodging a small car and then running straight into a bus.
Sir Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chief investigator of its clinical trials, said......across Europe this has been an absolute nightmare with changing of age recommendations over the course of the past six months that’s really left some people without vaccine when they could have been vaccinated...and that’s a huge risk to our populations around the world if we get that wrong.”
[Dame Sarah] Gilbert also used the interview to restate her personal view that children should not be vaccinated in wealthy countries ahead of at-risk adults in developing nations.
“For me, when we still do not have enough vaccines to supply the whole world, the priority is getting to those health care workers - particularly in other parts of the world that don’t have access to vaccines yet that are constantly at risk,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean to say that we shouldn’t ever vaccinate children. But I think the top priority is to get vaccines out to other parts of the world where only 1 per cent of the population so far is vaccinated.”
We live in cloud cuckoo land if we think it's over when we are all vaccinated while the virus lurks in largely unjabbed countries, creating havoc and new variants. It is a global pandemic.
Important piece by @BevanShields ‘Dame Sarah Gilbert called Australia’s botched roll-out of the vaccine the “greatest public health disaster” the country has ever witnessed.’
Linked to article above - the tweet misquoted/omitted context of what Gilbert said.
“If it’s now possible to accelerate vaccination in Australia and save lives by getting people vaccinated quickly, then it won’t be the greatest public health disaster that the country’s ever seen.
Although I suppose you could infer that if its not possible to accelerate vaccination it would be....
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Tut, surely 'half European'.
When did England cease being European?
Brexit? Or did that not happen?
The EU isn't Europe. Ask any Norwegian, or Swiss.
Or Serbian, Macedonian, Russian, Ukrainian*, Belorussian, Moldavian, Albanian, Bosnian, Kosovan or Albanian.
*I would advise you to make sure you ask the Russian and Ukrainian at separate times and in different places.
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
The term Britannia referred to the entire peninsular among the ancient Greeks, with Hibernia and Albion being two of the islands within it. Britannia then referred to southern Albion after the Romans colonized the place. The whole term refers to Celtic people who lived there, so if anyone should be upset it's the English.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
If the English had had a famine imposed on them by Germany a century and a half ago they wouldn’t be at all “sensitive” or “chippy” about it. They’d let bygones be bygones.
Sure they would.
The Irish deserve great credit for their restraint and for their powers of forgiveness.
Extraordinarily incompetent and ineffectual though the response led by Trevelyan was (and, notably, in marked contrast to the much better handled situation in Scotland, which was also affected) I think it is a bit harsh to imply the English invented the potato blight.
Not to say invented, but there was some very iffy gain of function stuff going on.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
I enter this thread with trepidation, as I was once banned for having a firey discussion with another PB poster (who no longer posts) on the issue.
But here goes: there are many different sorts of child sex abusers, and it does blend into other forms of abuse, including non sexual physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, but also shades into other forms of male* sexual behaviour that vary from the illegal to the legal but misogynistic, such as use of sex workers pornography or even manipulative "pick up techniques".
These things are not just driven by sexual desire, but a drive to control, exploit, humiliate and hurt, and to do so to those perceived weak such as children, or naive young adults. That is why these sorts of incidents happen in many different situations and cultures. The problem boils down in large part to toxic masculinity.
There is a call to lock 'em up and throw away the key, or even more draconian solutions, but actually the evidence for the efficacy of this is limited. One problem of ostracizing Paedophiles and similar is that it pushes them into like company (for want of any other) and also where they have nothing to lose. That is a very toxic set up for re-offending in an even more appalling way.
There is a completely different approach, that has proven successful in Canada, and has been trialled in other countries. This article claims a reduction of offending of 83% in Canada, without a bizarre enthusiasm for abusing child androids. It is for many an uncomfortable idea, but it does seem to work by re-normalising toxic masculinity, and creating normal social skills and values:
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Tut, surely 'half European'.
When did England cease being European?
Brexit? Or did that not happen?
The EU isn't Europe. Ask any Norwegian, or Swiss.
Or Russian. One of the most European of countries. Quintessential Europe, even if at the edge of Europe.
What is Europe without St Petersburg, the Ballets Russes, Kievan Rus, Akhmatova, caviar, the Vikings on rhe Volga, Tchaikovsky, Chagall, the whole beard-chopping thing, Peter the Great in Deptford, and the defeat of Hitler in Berlin?
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
The term Britannia referred to the entire peninsular among the ancient Greeks, with Hibernia and Albion being two of the islands within it. Britannia then referred to southern Albion after the Romans colonized the place. The whole term refers to Celtic people who lived there, so if anyone should be upset it's the English.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
If the English had had a famine imposed on them by Germany a century and a half ago they wouldn’t be at all “sensitive” or “chippy” about it. They’d let bygones be bygones.
Sure they would.
The Irish deserve great credit for their restraint and for their powers of forgiveness.
Extraordinarily incompetent and ineffectual though the response led by Trevelyan was (and, notably, in marked contrast to the much better handled situation in Scotland, which was also affected) I think it is a bit harsh to imply the English invented the potato blight.
I don't think that was ever suggested. However, the resulting shortage of food - which did cause the famine - was at least partly caused by public policy AIUI. For instance, in the failure to restrict exports of food from Ireland .
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
And your subjective squeamishness is a valid objection to exploring possible ways of reducing terrible real world harm to real children?
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
The term Britannia referred to the entire peninsular among the ancient Greeks, with Hibernia and Albion being two of the islands within it. Britannia then referred to southern Albion after the Romans colonized the place. The whole term refers to Celtic people who lived there, so if anyone should be upset it's the English.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
If the English had had a famine imposed on them by Germany a century and a half ago they wouldn’t be at all “sensitive” or “chippy” about it. They’d let bygones be bygones.
Sure they would.
The Irish deserve great credit for their restraint and for their powers of forgiveness.
The government spraying the Irish potato crop with blight wasn't the best idea.
Sir Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chief investigator of its clinical trials, said......across Europe this has been an absolute nightmare with changing of age recommendations over the course of the past six months that’s really left some people without vaccine when they could have been vaccinated...and that’s a huge risk to our populations around the world if we get that wrong.”
[Dame Sarah] Gilbert also used the interview to restate her personal view that children should not be vaccinated in wealthy countries ahead of at-risk adults in developing nations.
“For me, when we still do not have enough vaccines to supply the whole world, the priority is getting to those health care workers - particularly in other parts of the world that don’t have access to vaccines yet that are constantly at risk,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean to say that we shouldn’t ever vaccinate children. But I think the top priority is to get vaccines out to other parts of the world where only 1 per cent of the population so far is vaccinated.”
I had a very interesting discussion on this with my tutor group before the end of term - 50%+ were second generation immigrants with antecedents in many parts of Asia and Africa.
They all wanted the jab. But then we discussed what was needed in so many other countries where lots of them still have family.
And all of them said, without hesitation, that while they still wanted the vaccine it would be wrong for them to get it while these more vulnerable people who needed it urgently were going without.
(That doesn’t mean, incidentally, that they would refuse the vaccine if it was extended to schoolchildren. Just they thought it would be the wrong decision.)
Incidentally on that subject massive shout out to @Malmesbury and @MaxPB for all their information which was truly invaluable in informing those discussions.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
I enter this thread with trepidation, as I was once banned for having a firey discussion with another PB poster (who no longer posts) on the issue.
But here goes: there are many different sorts of child sex abusers, and it does blend into other forms of abuse, including non sexual physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, but also shades into other forms of male* sexual behaviour that vary from the illegal to the legal but misogynistic, such as use of sex workers pornography or even manipulative "pick up techniques".
These things are not just driven by sexual desire, but a drive to control, exploit, humiliate and hurt, and to do so to those perceived weak such as children, or naive young adults. That is why these sorts of incidents happen in many different situations and cultures. The problem boils down in large part to toxic masculinity.
There is a call to lock 'em up and throw away the key, or even more draconian solutions, but actually the evidence for the efficacy of this is limited. One problem of ostracizing Paedophiles and similar is that it pushes them into like company (for want of any other) and also where they have nothing to lose. That is a very toxic set up for re-offending in an even more appalling way.
There is a completely different approach, that has proven successful in Canada, and has been trialled in other countries. This article claims a reduction of offending of 83% in Canada, without a bizarre enthusiasm for abusing child androids. It is for many an uncomfortable idea, but it does seem to work by re-normalising toxic masculinity, and creating normal social skills and values:
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
I enter this thread with trepidation, as I was once banned for having a firey discussion with another PB poster (who no longer posts) on the issue.
But here goes: there are many different sorts of child sex abusers, and it does blend into other forms of abuse, including non sexual physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, but also shades into other forms of male* sexual behaviour that vary from the illegal to the legal but misogynistic, such as use of sex workers pornography or even manipulative "pick up techniques".
These things are not just driven by sexual desire, but a drive to control, exploit, humiliate and hurt, and to do so to those perceived weak such as children, or naive young adults. That is why these sorts of incidents happen in many different situations and cultures. The problem boils down in large part to toxic masculinity.
There is a call to lock 'em up and throw away the key, or even more draconian solutions, but actually the evidence for the efficacy of this is limited. One problem of ostracizing Paedophiles and similar is that it pushes them into like company (for want of any other) and also where they have nothing to lose. That is a very toxic set up for re-offending in an even more appalling way.
There is a completely different approach, that has proven successful in Canada, and has been trialled in other countries. This article claims a reduction of offending of 83% in Canada, without a bizarre enthusiasm for abusing child androids. It is for many an uncomfortable idea, but it does seem to work by re-normalising toxic masculinity, and creating normal social skills and values:
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
What on earth are you referring to????
My remark about the monk in southwest England?
FFS, that was sarcasm. I thought the giveaway might have been
"All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone."
That was me being sarcastic. That monk was clearly sexually exploiting a child. I sometimes forget that a lot of people on PB are a bit, ah, literal, perhaps I should use more SARCASTIC EMOJIS?
FWIW the school I am referring to had a terrific abuse scandal years later and several monks and others went to prison. Good
Downside, I presume?
I won't name names but you're not a trillion miles away
You obviously mean Worth.
You might as well have named it. The only new information is that you have a friend who was a victim there. The long-term abuse of a large number of pupils at Worth and the jailings are all in the public domain. I could name a Clarendon school where a lot of the abuse has never been publicly revealed, although a small part of it has been hinted at in fictionalised form that practically nobody without experience or close knowledge of the school will be able to decode.
But the only way I know you meant Worth is because you said the school was Catholic, located in southwest England, and took boys aged 6-10. If you'd specified only one of those criteria, it could have been any of numerous places. (Douai came to mind, because it was Catholic and I have a friend who was sexually abused by priests and older boys there.) Specify no criteria at all and the number rockets up. Sexual abuse is the norm in English boarding schools. I don't mean every boarder is sexually abused or an abuser. That would not be true. I mean that every boarding school has a culture of sexual abuse. Anyone who has attended one and denies that fact is either a liar, or else they have blacked it out. Those who have never been anywhere near this kind of institution may not have considered the import of the fact that many masters and housemasters were themselves pupils at similar schools. "Didn't do me any harm," etc. Yeah, right.
A note to younger women: don't believe any man who says he went to boarding school and it didn't do him serious emotional harm. It did.
Film recommendations: "The Making of Them" (1994) (brilliant title - spot the double meaning), "Boarding Schools - the Secret Shame - Exposure" (2018).
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
The term Britannia referred to the entire peninsular among the ancient Greeks, with Hibernia and Albion being two of the islands within it. Britannia then referred to southern Albion after the Romans colonized the place. The whole term refers to Celtic people who lived there, so if anyone should be upset it's the English.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
If the English had had a famine imposed on them by Germany a century and a half ago they wouldn’t be at all “sensitive” or “chippy” about it. They’d let bygones be bygones.
Sure they would.
The Irish deserve great credit for their restraint and for their powers of forgiveness.
Extraordinarily incompetent and ineffectual though the response led by Trevelyan was (and, notably, in marked contrast to the much better handled situation in Scotland, which was also affected) I think it is a bit harsh to imply the English invented the potato blight.
I don't think that was ever suggested. However, the resulting shortage of food - which did cause the famine - was at least partly caused by public policy AIUI. For instance, in the failure to restrict exports of food from Ireland .
The word ‘imposed’ suggested the English invented it.
Which is not the case, as you note.
Yes, the government response was a catastrophe, but it didn’t cause it and it was not therefore ‘imposed.’
Of course, if you want to have a longer philosophical discussion about how absentee landlords and the neglect of Irish estates led to the situation in many indirect ways, that’s different, but it was not deliberate policy to starve the Irish.
However, Stuart is beyond reason on the subject of the English, I fear.
(Just a reminder, in case he goes off the deep end, that I am not English.)
We are not big cider drinkers in our household, but we usually have a few bottles kicking about, especially in the summer. My wife’s favourite brand is Strongbow (she is an incorrigible Anglophile). We ran out last week, so I nipped in to the state retail monopoly Systembolaget to stock up. Usually the products have a wee flag and the country of origin, but I was surprised to see a new label under the Strongbow: ’internationellt märke’ - ‘international brand’, and no flag. That’s a bit odd I thought, considering that the bottle itself claims to be “British” (sic).
According to the small print, the product is manufactured at Ciderie Stassen, Aubel, Wallonia. So, the main label is telling a big porkie.
Ah well, at least this particular customer is delighted to be buying an EU product.
Presumably you wrote '"British" (sic)' because you regard Britain as a supranational political union, so why refer to an 'EU product'?
Stuart’s bias = good BritNat bias = bad
Is there a single "BritNat" who is so around the bend that he or she would write '"EU" (sic)'?
I think Stuart is putting (sic) to indicate that that is exactly what the bottle says, not him. (The anomaly presumably being that it should be UK if an actual source, or 'English' to indicate the style.)
Why should it say English instead of British? British is a perfectly legitimate word to use to refer to something coming from Britain.
But for import purposes it is the UK that is the geographical entity, or possibly GB if you aren't allowed to include NI. 'Britain' itself is inaccurate and sloppy.
British isn't sloppy.
Foster's says Australian in its marketing, why can't something from Britain say British? Where is the mistake that justifies the (sic)?
How is English ok but British not? They're both the same grammatical style.
That's the point. SD was thrown by the use of the word British when you would expect something legally specific such as UK or GB and when those had been used before. So he as making it clear it wasn't a paraphrase.
British is ambiguous because of the NI issue - both political and now also in the impex issue. So it's very odd to see anything so sloppy in the impex cointext.
Aren't Britain and GB synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = UK of GB and NI. Hopelessly confounded in any context where that difference is important. As it is now when dealing with impex.
Let me rephrase my comment then:
Aren't Britain and the UK synonymous? If so, what's the issue?
No, because Britain is often used = GB. As you yourself demonstrated. Hence the ambiguity.
If you want to be pedantic British would describe anything from UK+Ireland, since the are the British Isles. Still, I really don't see how it's a huge issue. A product from anywhere in the UK could be described as British.
They are not the British Isle any more. The Isles of Britain and Ireland, or Ireland and Britain, to taste.
I'm pretty sure that name is used to describe the islands, at least in the UK.
It is ridiculous not to use the term British Isles. The term, or variants of it, is thousands of years old. No one gets uppity over the "Irish sea".
It was Britannia plus Hibernia 2000 years ago, so not "British Isles" at all. Only the British bit was Britannia, and 'British' is found today as Welsh and Cornish.
On the Irish Sea, that is a water body. It's common practice to use sound.channel/sea plus the name of the smaller entity demarcated - thus English Channel, Irish Sea, Sound of Jura.
But 'British Isles' is about the islands themselves and plainly an anachronism. You could just as well talk of going to the Society Isles.
The term Britannia referred to the entire peninsular among the ancient Greeks, with Hibernia and Albion being two of the islands within it. Britannia then referred to southern Albion after the Romans colonized the place. The whole term refers to Celtic people who lived there, so if anyone should be upset it's the English.
Everything you say about seas and oceans also applies to land masses. Canadians don't get upset over being in the Americas. Indonesians don't get upset being in the Malay archipelago. It's just Irish chippiness, which is probably to be expected from people that still feel sensitive about a famine that happened a century and a half ago.
If the English had had a famine imposed on them by Germany a century and a half ago they wouldn’t be at all “sensitive” or “chippy” about it. They’d let bygones be bygones.
Sure they would.
The Irish deserve great credit for their restraint and for their powers of forgiveness.
Extraordinarily incompetent and ineffectual though the response led by Trevelyan was (and, notably, in marked contrast to the much better handled situation in Scotland, which was also affected) I think it is a bit harsh to imply the English invented the potato blight.
I don't think that was ever suggested. However, the resulting shortage of food - which did cause the famine - was at least partly caused by public policy AIUI. For instance, in the failure to restrict exports of food from Ireland .
A quick look through Oliver Twist suggests that the establishment was not overly caring about anyone.
But what really is amazing is how overpopulated rural Ireland was:
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
What on earth are you referring to????
My remark about the monk in southwest England?
FFS, that was sarcasm. I thought the giveaway might have been
"All seems perfectly fine to me. Harmless fun for everyone."
That was me being sarcastic. That monk was clearly sexually exploiting a child. I sometimes forget that a lot of people on PB are a bit, ah, literal, perhaps I should use more SARCASTIC EMOJIS?
FWIW the school I am referring to had a terrific abuse scandal years later and several monks and others went to prison. Good
Downside, I presume?
I won't name names but you're not a trillion miles away
You obviously mean Worth.
You might as well have named it. The only new information is that you have a friend who was a victim there. The long-term abuse of a large number of pupils at Worth and the jailings are all in the public domain. I could name a Clarendon school where a lot of the abuse has never been publicly revealed, although a small part of it has been hinted at in fictionalised form.
But the only way I know you meant Worth is because you said the school was Catholic, located in southwest England, and took boys aged 6-10. If you'd specified only one of those criteria, it could have been any of numerous places. (Douai came to mind, because it was Catholic and I have a friend who was sexually abused by priests and older boys there.) Specify no criteria at all and the number rockets up. Sexual abuse is the norm in English boarding schools. I don't mean every boarder is sexually abused or an abuser. That would not be true. I mean that every boarding school has a culture of sexual abuse. Anyone who has attended one and denies that fact is either a liar, or else they have blacked it out. Those who have never been anywhere near this kind of institution may not have considered the import of the fact that many masters and housemasters were themselves pupils at similar schools. "Didn't do me any harm," etc. Yeah, right.
A note to younger women: don't believe any man who says he went to boarding school and it didn't do him serious emotional harm. It did.
Film recommendations: "The Making of Them" (1994) (brilliant title - spot the double meaning), "Boarding Schools - the Secret Shame - Exposure" (2018).
Why is that specifically a note to younger women, you pompous little prick? If you went to boarding school, speak for yourself, and if you didn't wtf do you know about it.
Sort of on topic, The Woodsman, staring Kevin Bacon, is a very brave film.
It tries to show the point of view of a paedophile who knows that what he does is wrong (he too was abused as a child) and is trying to get better.
I've encountered a few self confessed pedophiles - by which I mean men (and they are often but certainly not always men) who admit to desires for pre-pubescent children (the true definition of pedophilia)
Now, this was clearly a self-selecting group - people willing to talk about it. So they were unusually thoughtful and self aware. But what struck me was their anguish, how they were aware that what they did causes harm, how they struggled with it morally, but they were overcome with perverse desire, and did it anyway.
And thus a child - many children, perhaps - was wounded deeply, perhaps damaged forever
If we ever attempt to satisfy the perverse desires of these people, with sex-bots, then this is surely the group to target first. They do not wish to hurt or murder, but they are deviant, and they will hurt in the end (or murder). Why not let them expiate their desires on an entirely simulated non-human? Is that really validating their warped fantasies, or just channelling them safely?
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Tut, surely 'half European'.
When did England cease being European?
Brexit? Or did that not happen?
The EU isn't Europe. Ask any Norwegian, or Swiss.
Or Russian. One of the most European of countries. Quintessential Europe, even if at the edge of Europe.
What is Europe without St Petersburg, the Ballets Russes, Kievan Rus, Akhmatova, caviar, the Vikings on rhe Volga, Tchaikovsky, Chagall, the whole beard-chopping thing, Peter the Great in Deptford, and the defeat of Hitler in Berlin?
Naught more European than crime fighting dildoes, as I'm sure you'd be the first to agree.
James Ward @JamesWard73 I think we have our first clear signal of a “Step 4” effect in today’s reported case data. While growth is flat in older age groups (>40s), and maybe even still falling in under-15s (a schools effect?), it’s picking back up in the young adult (15-40) group. 1/5
Important piece by @BevanShields ‘Dame Sarah Gilbert called Australia’s botched roll-out of the vaccine the “greatest public health disaster” the country has ever witnessed.’
Linked to article above - the tweet misquoted/omitted context of what Gilbert said.
“If it’s now possible to accelerate vaccination in Australia and save lives by getting people vaccinated quickly, then it won’t be the greatest public health disaster that the country’s ever seen.
Although I suppose you could infer that if its not possible to accelerate vaccination it would be....
If they can't stop Delta spreading without lockdowns, there is no time to really get more people vaccinated. Doublings and all that. Yikes.
All we can hope for at that point is the "Delta Spike" - quick up, quick down.......
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
I enter this thread with trepidation, as I was once banned for having a firey discussion with another PB poster (who no longer posts) on the issue.
But here goes: there are many different sorts of child sex abusers, and it does blend into other forms of abuse, including non sexual physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, but also shades into other forms of male* sexual behaviour that vary from the illegal to the legal but misogynistic, such as use of sex workers pornography or even manipulative "pick up techniques".
These things are not just driven by sexual desire, but a drive to control, exploit, humiliate and hurt, and to do so to those perceived weak such as children, or naive young adults. That is why these sorts of incidents happen in many different situations and cultures. The problem boils down in large part to toxic masculinity.
There is a call to lock 'em up and throw away the key, or even more draconian solutions, but actually the evidence for the efficacy of this is limited. One problem of ostracizing Paedophiles and similar is that it pushes them into like company (for want of any other) and also where they have nothing to lose. That is a very toxic set up for re-offending in an even more appalling way.
There is a completely different approach, that has proven successful in Canada, and has been trialled in other countries. This article claims a reduction of offending of 83% in Canada, without a bizarre enthusiasm for abusing child androids. It is for many an uncomfortable idea, but it does seem to work by re-normalising toxic masculinity, and creating normal social skills and values:
*while there are incidents of female abusers, this is overwhelmingly a male issue.
In fewer than four sentences, describe what you mean by "toxic masculinity"
Because, to me, it sounds like you are toxifying an entire gender, just because
The article he posts makes no reference to that either, which makes me think he just viewed this as an opportunity to push a pre-existing view he already held.
Difficult to blame them, after all the sh!t thrown their way for trying to do the right thing.
Don't give me that AZ are so altruistic crap, they saw a business opportunity, screwed it up, and maybe now think that they are just crap at the vaccine business and/or there isn't enough profit in it for them.
Sorry but that’s bollocks. They offered to vaccinate the world on a non-profit basis, in the face of a global pandemic, only to see their reputation trashed for political and protectionist reasons.
Don't worry, if it was a European company rather than a British one it would be completely altruistic with no concern for profit and Brexit Britain's GSK and AZ would be evil profit seeking types who deserve to go bankrupt.
AstraZeneca is a European company. It is half Swedish, half English.
Tut, surely 'half European'.
When did England cease being European?
Brexit? Or did that not happen?
The EU isn't Europe. Ask any Norwegian, or Swiss.
Or Russian. One of the most European of countries. Quintessential Europe, even if at the edge of Europe.
What is Europe without St Petersburg, the Ballets Russes, Kievan Rus, Akhmatova, caviar, the Vikings on rhe Volga, Tchaikovsky, Chagall, the whole beard-chopping thing, Peter the Great in Deptford, and the defeat of Hitler in Berlin?
Naught more European than crime fighting dildoes, as I'm sure you'd be the first to agree.
I am almost loathe to ask but curiousity prevails....did it cure the constipation?
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
I enter this thread with trepidation, as I was once banned for having a firey discussion with another PB poster (who no longer posts) on the issue.
But here goes: there are many different sorts of child sex abusers, and it does blend into other forms of abuse, including non sexual physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, but also shades into other forms of male* sexual behaviour that vary from the illegal to the legal but misogynistic, such as use of sex workers pornography or even manipulative "pick up techniques".
These things are not just driven by sexual desire, but a drive to control, exploit, humiliate and hurt, and to do so to those perceived weak such as children, or naive young adults. That is why these sorts of incidents happen in many different situations and cultures. The problem boils down in large part to toxic masculinity.
There is a call to lock 'em up and throw away the key, or even more draconian solutions, but actually the evidence for the efficacy of this is limited. One problem of ostracizing Paedophiles and similar is that it pushes them into like company (for want of any other) and also where they have nothing to lose. That is a very toxic set up for re-offending in an even more appalling way.
There is a completely different approach, that has proven successful in Canada, and has been trialled in other countries. This article claims a reduction of offending of 83% in Canada, without a bizarre enthusiasm for abusing child androids. It is for many an uncomfortable idea, but it does seem to work by re-normalising toxic masculinity, and creating normal social skills and values:
*while there are incidents of female abusers, this is overwhelmingly a male issue.
In fewer than four sentences, describe what you mean by "toxic masculinity"
Because, to me, it sounds like you are toxifying an entire gender, just because
I would rather not discuss this subject with you.
I do not think an entire gender is toxic, nor another entirely blemish free. I would say that toxic masculinity is a pathological set of antisocial behaviours, directed at women in the main, but sometimes vulnerable men.
Thank you Cyclefree for this passionately written header. I would like to see our whole society and government transformed to put the interests of children and young people first. Sexual abuse is the most flagrant and disgusting - and for most of us unfathomable - way in which children are hurt in our society. But poverty, neglect and an education system that fails to meet children's needs are equally damning failures.
I could not agree more and just cannot start to understand why anyone would abuse a child in any form whatsoever
There is no penalty in my view strong enough to deal with anyone who abuses a child
That’s basically my view, although I wouldn’t quite go all out hang-em-and-flog-em.
Serious crimes deserve serious penalties, though.
There is also a place for strong social taboos. Comments like Leon’s, upthread, need to be called out.
Call me a puritan all you like, Leon, but I think you’re on a slippery slope to rationalising disgusting abuse.
Both child abuse, and the inclination are disgusting. That should be a firm red line in our society and our public debate.
Dunno about puritan, but can I call you a bigot? It seems to be absolutely certain that sexual impulses are irrevocably baked in to people way before they have any choice in the matter. Nobody chooses to be straight or gay and I'm guessing nobody chooses to be a paedophile. You can be disgusted by the inclination as much as you like, but someone with the inclination who entirely resists giving in to it is morally a better person than you appear to be.
The issue I have is when people try to rationalise fantasising about hurting other people. Especially, but not limited to, kids. Surely a fucking bell goes off in their head at some point and they think “what was I thinking, that’s wrong”
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
As Pagan says, what if it could be proved that child sex robots reduced harm to real children in the real world?
What would your attitude be then?
I find that very distasteful, Leon.
Oh good god. Why?
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
I'm just thinking about the practicalities, ethics and not least the political optics of a controlled experiment to prove that. Which is what your wording requires, in essence.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
We have just done a live experiment on BILLIONS of people with unprecedented inhumane lockdowns, entirely experiments vaccines, which could kill millions either way
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
The way to do the experiment would you would give half of a sample of convicted child abusers one of the dolls on release and half not. Then measure reoffending rates. No new perverts produced and you get an answer
I was at a stats conference a few years ago and one of the presentations was on the analysis of a programme that tried to “treat” sex offenders. The stattos reckoned that this sort of thing actually made things worse and the govt dept pulled the plug on it straightaway.
I enter this thread with trepidation, as I was once banned for having a firey discussion with another PB poster (who no longer posts) on the issue.
But here goes: there are many different sorts of child sex abusers, and it does blend into other forms of abuse, including non sexual physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, but also shades into other forms of male* sexual behaviour that vary from the illegal to the legal but misogynistic, such as use of sex workers pornography or even manipulative "pick up techniques".
These things are not just driven by sexual desire, but a drive to control, exploit, humiliate and hurt, and to do so to those perceived weak such as children, or naive young adults. That is why these sorts of incidents happen in many different situations and cultures. The problem boils down in large part to toxic masculinity.
There is a call to lock 'em up and throw away the key, or even more draconian solutions, but actually the evidence for the efficacy of this is limited. One problem of ostracizing Paedophiles and similar is that it pushes them into like company (for want of any other) and also where they have nothing to lose. That is a very toxic set up for re-offending in an even more appalling way.
There is a completely different approach, that has proven successful in Canada, and has been trialled in other countries. This article claims a reduction of offending of 83% in Canada, without a bizarre enthusiasm for abusing child androids. It is for many an uncomfortable idea, but it does seem to work by re-normalising toxic masculinity, and creating normal social skills and values:
*while there are incidents of female abusers, this is overwhelmingly a male issue.
In fewer than four sentences, describe what you mean by "toxic masculinity"
Because, to me, it sounds like you are toxifying an entire gender, just because
The article he posts makes no reference to that either, which makes me think he just viewed this as an opportunity to push a pre-existing view he already held.
Comments
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/58018041
I think we’ve unrepressed our society too much when it’s ok for people to rationalise fantasising about harming others. And vocalising/publishing it.
The extreme libertarians on this site are seriously out of whack with the rest of society on this.
The harder they push (child sex dolls?!!) the greater the inevitable repressive pushback.
There’s such a thing as public morality. And so there should be.
Remember, Clouseau was always proved right in the end. So far, von der Leyen has been in the wrong in literally everything she’s attempted. Dido Harding on speed.
I keep trying to think how to monetise that.
I remember an Irish friend who was so perfectly rubbish at horses that a bunch of Scandinavian professional spread bettors that we knew actually tried out a system of betting on all the *other* horses in races he bet on... which worked...
What would your attitude be then?
The issue was in COV002 which was run by the Jenner Institute and they chose, stupidly IMO, not to have many over 65s for ethical reasons so when it came time to approvals regulators were left a bit blind on specific data for over 65s. That's not a critical issue but it can make approval quite a slow process vs a trial that has got data for the group that will primarily benefit from the vaccine such as Pfizer. Another rubbish decision in COV002 was to use another vaccine in the placebo arm which can elicit a generalised immune response that can help against a COVID infection. Resulting in lower efficacy that saline in the placebo arm which the US trial used.
To my mind it was inexperience from both sides that led to the issues in COV002. A more experienced vaccine developer would have put together a much better trial in the UK and a more experienced vaccine pharma would have flagged all of the issues, especially not having enough older people given the target demographic for a COVID vaccine.
I'm sorry to the purists, but it is entertaining, and it's great to see on a weekday evening,
I genuinely don't understand this mentality
Or were you trolling? Hard to tell!
No blame accrues to the FDA who accused AZ of material misrepresentation, and who have still not approved the vaccine?
The South Africans, who publicly stopped using the AZ vaccine, they are irrelevant too?
https://unherd.com/2021/06/why-is-bestiality-so-disgusting/
The human disgust reaction is not necessarily related to harm done.
Firstly, you have to decide which population you are dealing with - existing perverts or potential ones.
If it's existing ones, giving them sex toys, and very dodgy ones, on the rates/taxes is not a great look. Can yo uimagine Ms Patel fronting that? Hell, so far as we can tell she thinks the RNLI are a bunch of furriner-loving pinkoes.
If it's potential ones, then you need a much larger trial - and have the ethical problem of ending up with, erm, fully activated perverts (which is in itself a cruelty to them).
Secondly, either way you will have some children who have been harmed that would not otherwise have been harmed, if only because they were allocated to the wrong arm of the trial. Instant pitchforks and firebrands.
I can't see the experiment being done. And if that is not possible, then it is not discussable.
So, yes, I think this is do-able, it is certainly "discussable"
I detect your inner repuls-o-meter is overcoming your rationalism. Which is understandable, but silly
This coming week is the crucial week for seeing whether this is a swift flare out or a long burn.
Edit: it was equine, but in humans.
It's remarkable people would be credulous enough to suggest putting a sport firmly into the hands of money and marketing men in the year we've seen the ESL six show what executives will do if they think they can get away with it, would be a good idea.
It may be time to consider radical new steps, coz endless incarceration ain't doing it (severe jail should always remain a default option, of course)
Evan Donovan @EvanDonovan
NEW: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mocks new
@CDC mask guidance at @ALEC_states event
"We say no to lockdowns, no to school closures, no to restrictions, and no mandates.
[We] should not be consigned to live...in a Faucian dystopia."
https://twitter.com/EvanDonovan/status/1420769146246152192
Countries across the globe say they've been let down by broken promises and stalled deliveries of Russia's Sputnik V Covid vaccine...
One of the countries hit hardest by late deliveries is Iran. Tehran ordered 60 million doses, only a fraction of which have arrived.
In February, it was announced that Iran would receive five million doses in a "first phase" of the agreement with Russia.
But by the end of June, the total number of Sputnik doses delivered to Iran was just 920,000. The figure now stands at around two million.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-58003893
Edit: and child-harming shite.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-cancel-contract-russian-covid-19-vaccine-minister-says-2021-07-29/
https://twitter.com/LancsRoadPolice/status/1420749420174340099
"Please be aware that we are monitoring the comments on this thread, so please refrain from using offensive language. We have zero tolerance for discriminatory comments on our social posts, so please be aware that your words could constitute a hate crime."
It's brought me back to the 1980s for reasons which I don't want to discuss (not my problem, but someone else's, and I don't want to risk even hinting who the person might be). But it was plainly a very difficult time.
Let's remove "child sex abuse" from the mindgame, as people understandably get upset by the very concept - as do I - I am a parent, it is very upsetting
Let's say you can suddenly give a gamble-a-holic a fake robot casino experience with fake robot croupiers and the exact mental sensation of walking into a casino and losing everything, ie the stuff that gets them weirdly high, and yet in actuality they have lost nothing and they can go about their lives as normal and their genetic itch has been scratched and their families have not been financially ruined
Is that "immoral"? Is it "encouraging gambling by normalising it"? I don't think so
Why can't we extend that to other human sins and crimes? Fake their dubious "pleasures" with AI and robots, so no real harm is done. All this will soon be feasible, so we need to consider the potentials
Anne Applebaum on Mike Lindell of MyPillow who seems to be Trump's No.1 conspiracy propagator.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/mike-lindells-plot-destroy-america/619593/?utm_term=2021-07-29T14:08:58&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=edit-promo
Likewise, there is a very nasty element of power and abuse involved in much sexual perversion. Does a doll sate that or frustrate that? I don't know, and I don't particularly want to know. Anyway, I have a nice bath to have, and a nice book on naval history to read, so good night all, play nicely.
I do take on board the notion - expressed cogently by @carnyx and others - that almost any experimentation in this field is extremely dangerous and possibly evil. But I also feel that "doing nothing" is evil. How many child abuse rings and child abuse epidemics must be uncovered, time and again, before we accept that we've got this really really wrong. It's a basic, ugly human flaw, visible in every human society (even Denmark) and here is modern technology *possibly* giving us a solution.
POSSIBLY
It would be wrong to ignore it
Sure they would.
The Irish deserve great credit for their restraint and for their powers of forgiveness.
Children over 12 who are at higher risk of getting ill if they catch Covid will be offered the jab, the vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi has confirmed.
But the vast majority of children in the UK, who are low risk, will not be offered the vaccine for now.
However, some healthy children over 12 who live with other vulnerable people can have the vaccine, as well as those on the cusp of turning 18.
It means, overall, around 370,000 children will be eligible.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57885845
Has it come into effect yet ?
Because the number of under 18s who have been vaccinated this week is minimal.
So South Lancs police posted that they had raided a traveller site and recovered a number of stolen caravans. Then tweeted about this, specifically. Then worried that someone might comment.... poorly
https://twitter.com/jkalbrechtsen/status/1420839716488835075?s=20
[Dame Sarah] Gilbert also used the interview to restate her personal view that children should not be vaccinated in wealthy countries ahead of at-risk adults in developing nations.
“For me, when we still do not have enough vaccines to supply the whole world, the priority is getting to those health care workers - particularly in other parts of the world that don’t have access to vaccines yet that are constantly at risk,” she said.
“That doesn’t mean to say that we shouldn’t ever vaccinate children. But I think the top priority is to get vaccines out to other parts of the world where only 1 per cent of the population so far is vaccinated.”
https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/astrazeneca-creator-says-australia-s-mixed-messages-on-vaccine-may-cost-lives-20210730-p58e8v.html
“If it’s now possible to accelerate vaccination in Australia and save lives by getting people vaccinated quickly, then it won’t be the greatest public health disaster that the country’s ever seen.
Although I suppose you could infer that if its not possible to accelerate vaccination it would be....
*I would advise you to make sure you ask the Russian and Ukrainian at separate times and in different places.
Which is only 14k up on the week.
I would have thought that allowing the 17.75 group be vaccinated would have made it available to another 150k plus.
But here goes: there are many different sorts of child sex abusers, and it does blend into other forms of abuse, including non sexual physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, but also shades into other forms of male* sexual behaviour that vary from the illegal to the legal but misogynistic, such as use of sex workers pornography or even manipulative "pick up techniques".
These things are not just driven by sexual desire, but a drive to control, exploit, humiliate and hurt, and to do so to those perceived weak such as children, or naive young adults. That is why these sorts of incidents happen in many different situations and cultures. The problem boils down in large part to toxic masculinity.
There is a call to lock 'em up and throw away the key, or even more draconian solutions, but actually the evidence for the efficacy of this is limited. One problem of ostracizing Paedophiles and similar is that it pushes them into like company (for want of any other) and also where they have nothing to lose. That is a very toxic set up for re-offending in an even more appalling way.
There is a completely different approach, that has proven successful in Canada, and has been trialled in other countries. This article claims a reduction of offending of 83% in Canada, without a bizarre enthusiasm for abusing child androids. It is for many an uncomfortable idea, but it does seem to work by re-normalising toxic masculinity, and creating normal social skills and values:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-03/cosa-volunteers:-the-people-who-hang-out-with-paedophiles/7648518
*while there are incidents of female abusers, this is overwhelmingly a male issue.
What is Europe without St Petersburg, the Ballets Russes, Kievan Rus, Akhmatova, caviar, the Vikings on rhe Volga, Tchaikovsky, Chagall, the whole beard-chopping thing, Peter the Great in Deptford, and the defeat of Hitler in Berlin?
It tries to show the point of view of a paedophile who knows that what he does is wrong (he too was abused as a child) and is trying to get better.
Oh wait.
They all wanted the jab. But then we discussed what was needed in so many other countries where lots of them still have family.
And all of them said, without hesitation, that while they still wanted the vaccine it would be wrong for them to get it while these more vulnerable people who needed it urgently were going without.
(That doesn’t mean, incidentally, that they would refuse the vaccine if it was extended to schoolchildren. Just they thought it would be the wrong decision.)
Incidentally on that subject massive shout out to @Malmesbury and @MaxPB for all their information which was truly invaluable in informing those discussions.
Because, to me, it sounds like you are toxifying an entire gender, just because
You might as well have named it. The only new information is that you have a friend who was a victim there. The long-term abuse of a large number of pupils at Worth and the jailings are all in the public domain. I could name a Clarendon school where a lot of the abuse has never been publicly revealed, although a small part of it has been hinted at in fictionalised form that practically nobody without experience or close knowledge of the school will be able to decode.
But the only way I know you meant Worth is because you said the school was Catholic, located in southwest England, and took boys aged 6-10. If you'd specified only one of those criteria, it could have been any of numerous places. (Douai came to mind, because it was Catholic and I have a friend who was sexually abused by priests and older boys there.) Specify no criteria at all and the number rockets up. Sexual abuse is the norm in English boarding schools. I don't mean every boarder is sexually abused or an abuser. That would not be true. I mean that every boarding school has a culture of sexual abuse. Anyone who has attended one and denies that fact is either a liar, or else they have blacked it out. Those who have never been anywhere near this kind of institution may not have considered the import of the fact that many masters and housemasters were themselves pupils at similar schools. "Didn't do me any harm," etc. Yeah, right.
A note to younger women: don't believe any man who says he went to boarding school and it didn't do him serious emotional harm. It did.
Film recommendations:
"The Making of Them" (1994) (brilliant title - spot the double meaning),
"Boarding Schools - the Secret Shame - Exposure" (2018).
Which is not the case, as you note.
Yes, the government response was a catastrophe, but it didn’t cause it and it was not therefore ‘imposed.’
Of course, if you want to have a longer philosophical discussion about how absentee landlords and the neglect of Irish estates led to the situation in many indirect ways, that’s different, but it was not deliberate policy to starve the Irish.
However, Stuart is beyond reason on the subject of the English, I fear.
(Just a reminder, in case he goes off the deep end, that I am not English.)
But what really is amazing is how overpopulated rural Ireland was:
County Mayo
1841 388k
2016 130k
County Tipperary
1841 435k
2016 160k
County Clare
1841 286k
2016 118k
County Cavan
1841 243k
2016 76k
County Roscommon
1841 254k
2016 64k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_population_analysis
With plenty of other examples.
Is there anywhere else in Western Europe which has suffered such population falls ?
Now, this was clearly a self-selecting group - people willing to talk about it. So they were unusually thoughtful and self aware. But what struck me was their anguish, how they were aware that what they did causes harm, how they struggled with it morally, but they were overcome with perverse desire, and did it anyway.
And thus a child - many children, perhaps - was wounded deeply, perhaps damaged forever
If we ever attempt to satisfy the perverse desires of these people, with sex-bots, then this is surely the group to target first. They do not wish to hurt or murder, but they are deviant, and they will hurt in the end (or murder). Why not let them expiate their desires on an entirely simulated non-human? Is that really validating their warped fantasies, or just channelling them safely?
James Ward
@JamesWard73
I think we have our first clear signal of a “Step 4” effect in today’s reported case data. While growth is flat in older age groups (>40s), and maybe even still falling in under-15s (a schools effect?), it’s picking back up in the young adult (15-40) group. 1/5
https://twitter.com/JamesWard73/status/1420823811415490567
All we can hope for at that point is the "Delta Spike" - quick up, quick down.......
I do not think an entire gender is toxic, nor another entirely blemish free. I would say that toxic masculinity is a pathological set of antisocial behaviours, directed at women in the main, but sometimes vulnerable men.