Happyslapping...

another way: keep working for newspapers but try to change them from within. seriously!

i can feel a MASSIVE rant coming on about the kind of fuckers who meekly accept the editorial party line of papers such as the mail etc and do nothing to challenge it ... i've done enough ranting for today, so i won't.

(nb: bosses, if you're reading this: i'm not trying to change it from within right this second. i'm subbing the funny column for the back of the magazine. honest.)

Maybe if us squares actually DID happyslapping as well as saying it until it loses its cool, people would stop doing it. But I'm not recommending it.

but it does mean that you profit from them

xpost

i just meant that ranting about the social iniquities created by someone who's employing you is just a teeny bit hypocritical.

(i once briefly worked in mr murdoch's pay and made sure not to criticise him for the length of my tenure)

pash, sorry, maybe i didn't make that clear: what i mean is i know an awful lot of people who would claim to be decent, intelligent, socially minded citizens who've then taken jobs for the mail (and several other papers that espouse unpleasant/bigoted/dinosaur-style views), and have done nothing except shrug and go: "well, you've got to make a living." believe me, the rant i'm suppressing is VAST.

i'm not saying the paper i work for is perfect, but by the standards of most UK publications it might as well be the bloody morning star.

sycophant!

lol most policies probably did come from civil servants one way or another.

of course, people (in absolutely every social class and walk of life) actually THINKING before they have children - am i able, in every way, to bring them up to be decent human beings? am i willing to put in the effort here? do i actually want a CHILD, not just a baby? etc etc - would be a vast, vast step forwards too.

but i'm too tired and my brain is broken and i can't argue any more. really, i'm seeing double here. it's been a long couple of weeks.

i don't think i've ever said the country was going to the dogs. i think i've said western market capitalism is jizz, but that's different :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

How should this be fostered by, say, a government?

what a government needs to do is alter people's notion of "success": ie success isn't having a massive house and car and living in a gated community for fear of your life; instead it's about living in a peaceful, harmonious community built on mutual respect. but i'm fucked if i can see any way of bringing this about other than armed revolution and the execution of about 99% of the population. (nb for the hard of thinking: THAT'S MEANT TO BE IRONIC, OK? it's a poor attempt, but hey.)

a tiny, tired part of me wants to blame this all on thatcher, but i know it's not that simple :)

xpost - A lot of me does blame Thatcher

Social inclusion is definitely the key. Yes, people will act towards their own self-interest ... the trick is to get them to redefine that self-interest. People are social creatures -- and we work much better in tribes than in festering little family units. Leverage that, and you're on to a winner.

Years ago, geography forced those tribes on us. Now, we're connected by the net, by who we drink with, by whom we choose to see. There are people here who know the sex lives of posters they've never met intimately and yet don't even know name of the people living across the hall.

You want to make people make an effort for each other, for society? Redifine their concept of self so that it includes the people around them. I grew up in small towns and villages, and while they have manifold drawbacks, they're really good at community -- fall down drunk aged 15 in a small-town park and someone will know where you live. Do it in a city and someone will nick your shoes then piss on you.

Thatcher, may she die soon, did massive damage to whatever remained of those local societies in the UK -- hell, as soon as people bought their council houses they began walling off from one another and competing.

The shit thing about post-Thatcher Britain is the way it resembles the uglier side of US society: I'm all right Jack, and my chosen tribe is all right -- pull the ladder up.

absolutely. but what's the carrot here? "you'll get carried home when you're pissed" ain't gonna wash with mr and mrs chump in their shit semi with the endowment mortgage and buggered pension.

must ... not ... look at ILE today ... too busy ...

There. Vote Rumpie.

link?

Take any residential street. Imagine a con-man is going door-to-door fleecing homeowners. If they all know their neighbours, he'll get fewer than three doors down before someone's phoned ahead to warn everyone. But if they're all isolated little "I'm in my castle" types, our con-man is going to fleece the lot of them.

Modern society allows people to pretend they're not part of an interdependent tribe. They are. And happyslapping is another manifestation of the breakdown -- of our society working much more poorly broken n little units

seriously: they're going to have to put a fucking electric fence round the thing to stop me.

"but she's a human being," several people have mewled when i've said stuff like this before. to which i would counter: show me the fucking evidence.