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Two Lessons Learnt – politicalbetting.com
Two Lessons Learnt – politicalbetting.com
7 years ago this month the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse was first announced. Cameron was PM, May Home Secretary and the Brexit referendum not even the teensiest cloud on the horizon. How time flies! After three Chairs, the Inquiry – under the chairmanship of its 4th Head, Professor Alexis Jay (who wrote the report on child abuse in Rotherham, published in August 2014) – has been quietly taking evidence and publishing a series of heart-breaking and devastatingly critical reports. Schools, councils (Rochdale, Nottinghamshire), the Catholic and Anglican churches, custodial institutions, children’s homes, sport, health: it feels as if nowhere was safe for children, especially some of the most vulnerable, those who were in the care of the state or institutions which should have been trusted. Now the latest report on Lambeth is out – here. It is a horrible read but this paragraph from the executive summary says it all:-
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They have given us into the hands of the new unhappy lords,
Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs,
Their doors are shut in the evenings; and they know no songs.
The new Upper 10,000 is different to the old. The new have worse manners and less shame.
EDIT
My solution for the problem of accountability for the above scandals would be to have put everyone who knew on the Sex Offenders registers.
I hope they didn't spend too much on her education.
We have a cultural aversion to speaking out, to rocking the boat, being difficult, snitching. We need to be serious about rewarding those who take the risk to do so regardless.
There's a nasty part of the human psyche that enjoys inflicting abuse on those who can't fight back as a power-kick, and these institutions disproportionately attract the sort of types who like to give free reign to it.
They are very good at finding a "reason" to justify it through 'bad behaviour' of their charges - perhaps because they were indisciplined in following the rules, scared, wanted attention, or just soiled themselves - and they then feel on weak ground in fighting back as they lack the confidence to do so, and fear it'd always be put down to being their fault.
So, they don't.
Off the top of my head
Gateway drug
Zero cooperation from parents
All the cool kids will think it's shit
Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents
https://deepmind.com/research/publications/open-ended-learning-leads-to-generally-capable-agents
...We show that through constructing an open-ended learning process, which dynamically changes the training task distributions and training objectives such that the agent never stops learning, we achieve consistent learning of new behaviours. The resulting agent is able to score reward in every one of our humanly solvable evaluation levels, with behaviour generalising to many held-out points in the universe of tasks. Examples of this zero-shot generalisation include good performance on Hide and Seek, Capture the Flag, and Tag. Through analysis and hand-authored probe tasks we characterise the behaviour of our agent, and find interesting emergent heuristic behaviours such as trial-and-error experimentation, simple tool use, option switching, and co-operation. Finally, we demonstrate that the general capabilities of this agent could unlock larger scale transfer of behaviour through cheap fine tuning...
...The more senior you are, the more responsibility you have, the greater the chances of avoiding any actual responsibility or criticism at all...
All well and good, broadly I support, but as a result it became the policy of at least one claimant law firm in the City to routinely raise a whistleblowing element in all the unfair dismissal claims raised on behalf of their clients (unless there was another discrimination element) resulting in huge amount of chaff and very little wheat. The whole thing needs an overhaul.
Half or double the gravity and these agents would be totally lost.
When I was a teenager in Australia (don't know if it was the same here) there were softcore porn magazines that were rated 15+ instead of 18+ - topless pictures and the like but nothing really 'shocking'. Plus then magazines like FHM etc. I have no idea what such stuff is like nowadays but would assume everyone gets everything from the internet, but the internet ramps everything up to 11.
I don't see any way to really encourage or facilitate 'softcore' websites that are accessible to younger people. Especially since younger people aren't thick and know how to access the hardcore sites if they want to.
This makes it sound as if Cardinal Heenan was personally doing the abuse himself. Is that right?
https://twitter.com/FloraEGill/status/1420753165008334864?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^tweet
The internet it seems to me is pushing things to extremes, as it often does.
I'm pretty sure we can't change the law and then retrospectively punish people like Hodge for their disgraceful ignorance, though I think we should make it punishable in the future. Could, though, the victims of Lambeth sue Hodge, the others with responsibility, and Lambeth Council? (ditto for Rotherham &c.)
The horrified bleating of "But that is unfair and arbitrary" that arrises when you suggest that, suggests that (a) the current system of registers is arbitrary and (b) the idea is something that terrifies the shit out of people in the system.
drugspornwhat have you.Do you learn nothing? They are watching it anyway. Which would you prefer - young teens to watch @TSE's preferred stepmoms or something light(er) and fluffy?
And cool kids might think it's shit but how many cool kids are there vs curious youngsters who need a sensible introduction to all that stuff.
Shame she has deleted it, if she has.
I'm all about not piling on or dragging up really old stuff without a good reason, but it was half an hour ago.
A similar point better expressed would at least avoid the outrage.
The problem is now is that any kid can get unlimited free hardcore porn at the tap of a button to say they are 18+. Whilst I can see some logic in providing a relatively safe exposure to porn through a softer version I just can't see it working. Teenage boys, being as they are, are not going to use any kind of gentler site when they can push the boundaries with all the other content that is available to them.
I think this is one area where it is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. The only approach really is through education in schools that this content is not normal.
Prohibition never works. Pushing people into the arms of "stepmoms" is not a good thing to me.
But the principle is a good one.
Incoming media panic that cases up again today vs yesterday (when still down vs same day last week).
Not even remotely acceptable.
A bit like my header about sexual violence against women where one esteemed poster started boasting about the many tarts his friend had a night.
Only on PB eh!
"Oh it's all out there" people say but to have a dedicated site which is safe and stepmom free would be a great idea.
They’re still increasing (just), but Tuesday’s (816) was only 1% up on the previous week (805). It was 10% yesterday.
Beds occupied now at 5,056 - *down* from 5,182 yesterday.
https://twitter.com/fact_covid/status/1420760740877668372?s=20
Theory England prediciton: 26629
England Actual: 27524
However, at the same time, due to the now total mismatch been the survey group of ZOE i.e. dominated by people who are vaccinated / partially vaccinated, because Piers Corbyn isn't going to sign up to an app that collects your self reported health data, ZOE algorithm has had to have a massive tweak, so it could be for the first time that now ZOE data isn't anywhere near as useful as before widespread vaccination.
Anecdotally there seem to be lots of cases and people in isolation in our Bucks village, including those double jabbed. Not heard of anyone having it badly though.
We are as the months go on obviously going to start to see it be a much bigger percentage of the total, as the number of unvaccinated people who haven't had COVID will become a small percentage of the population.
https://thefword.org.uk/2008/01/against_censors/
This time by Great Jumping Jolyon about political figures? Or is there something to this one?
https://twitter.com/skepticalzebra/status/1420762462077427714?s=20
Grime artist Stormzy has pledged to support a further 30 black students studying at Cambridge University.
Each will receive a £20,000 annual scholarship under a new partnership between banking group HSBC UK and the musician's charity, #Merky Foundation.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-58011700
Likewise, 1.6 million adults aged 16 to 74 years had experienced sexual assault by rape or penetration (including attempts) since the age of 16 years. (2)
Few of us on here are shrinking violets: we will know and talk to many people. Most, perhaps all, of us will know someone who has experienced rape or sexual assault in the past, and probably someone who has suffered domestic abuse in the last year. Yet some seem to deny this: their social circle magically does not include such victims.
(1): https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/domesticabuseinenglandandwalesoverview/november2020
(2): https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/natureofsexualassaultbyrapeorpenetrationenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020
Shine a light on issues surely not hide them in darkness?
A reminder: Australia has vast supplies of a good vaccine which had its reputation trashed by shoddy government communication, bad faith reporting and irresponsible behaviour by so-called 'experts.' One of the greatest public-policy failures of our time.
https://twitter.com/kishor_nr/status/1420555803933569027?s=20
What is the answer, I'm less certain of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluffer_(London_Underground)
Thanks for the header. As a society, we seriously fucked up.
Glad I’ve never been responsible for child protection. I’d like to think I’d be fearless in standing up against this kind of shit, but in reality I can almost understand why pretty much everyone, one step removed from the abuse, kept their heads down - back in the 70’s/80’s/90’s. Most people had imperfect information (often just unprovable suspicions) and a high chance of losing everything if they made a scene.
I think things have changed, now, though. At least I hope so. The existence of networks of victims groups via Facebook etc make this kind of abuse so much harder to hide/run away from. It also enables witchhunts, of course. But that’s a discussion for a different day.
Teenagers are going to explore their sexuality. They always have done, they always do. Its a rite of passage almost.
Doing so should be safe, not censored and pushed to extremes where people can then take advantage of them.
I was simply hinting you might want to pick a different word which is less unfortuinately ambiguouss in that context (sorry, having to do so much editing of TSS these days).
As long as this is reflected in hospitalisations, that should be fine. After all, a steady throughput at about half the recent peak would mean we're moving towards towards herd immunity at a more sustainable hospital occupancy (in theory, should level off at about half the current level) and with minimal overshoot past the herd immunity threshold.
In addition, covid hospital occupancy in England has reduced for the first time since late June. Good to see.
Only if cases and hospitalisations rebound upwards after a brief dip will the above change. Hopefully not. I'd happily take a gentle decline in cases and hospital occupancy at half current levels and gently falling.