Society is in the gutter

Gutter catch 'em all, I say.

http://i.imgur.com/7JeV84g.png

I was killing some time in the staff room, as you do, and started reading a Dean R Koontz thriller called Dragon Tears. This was on page 2.

http://i.imgur.com/mZg02p5.jpg?1

the use of "no doubt" is key.

tbf Koontz might have been on to something with the "bad-tempered, evil minded trolls" bit

in my day a troll was someone who would happily stay under his bridge, now it's all Twitter this, Facebook that

mankind? more like ManUNkind if you ask me

https://metallica.com/blog/news/429181/hardwired-to-self-destruct-available-november-18-2

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopia-that-inspired-the-rats-of-nimh

i condensed it for those who don't want to read the full article:

In 1947, to keep a close eye on his charges, Calhoun constructed a quarter-acre "rat city" behind his house, and filled it with breeding pairs. He expected to be able to house 5,000 rats there but over the two years he observed the city, the population never exceeded 150. At that point, the rats became too stressed to reproduce. They started acting weirdly, rolling dirt into balls rather than digging normal tunnels. They hissed and fought.

[...]

Most frightening are the parallels he draws between rodent and human society. "I shall largely speak of mice," he begins, "but my thoughts are on man." Both species, he explains, are vulnerable to two types of death—that of the spirit and that of the body. Even though he had removed physical threats, doing so had forced the residents of Universe 25 into a spiritually unhealthy situation, full of crowding, overstimulation, and contact with various mouse strangers. To a society experiencing the rapid growth of cities—and reacting, in various ways, quite poorly—this story seemed familiar. Senators brought it up in meetings. It showed up in science fiction and comic books. Even Tom Wolfe, never lost for description, used Calhounian terms to describe New York City, calling all of Gotham a "behavioral sink."

Convinced that he had found a real problem, Calhoun quickly began using his mouse models to try and fix it. If mice and humans weren't afforded enough physical space, he thought, perhaps they could make up for it with conceptual space—creativity, artistry, and the type of community not built around social hierarchies. His later Universes were designed to be spiritually as well as physically utopic, with rodent interactions carefully controlled to maximize happiness (he was particularly fascinated by some early rats who had created an innovative form of tunneling, where they rolled dirt into balls). He extrapolated this, too, to human concerns, becoming an early supporter of environmental design and H.G. Wells's hypothetical "World Brain," an international information network that was a clear precursor to the internet.

[...]

But there was one person who paid attention to his more optimistic experiments, a writer named Robert C. O'Brien. In the late '60s, O'Brien allegedly visited Calhoun's lab, met the man trying to build a true and creative rat paradise, and took note of the Frisbee on the door, the scientists' own attempt "to help when things got too stressful," as Calhoun put it. Soon after, O'Brien wrote Ms. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH—a story about rats who, having escaped from a lab full of blundering humans, attempt to build their own utopia. Next time, maybe we should put the rats in charge.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvIpdKUWgAAlJau.jpg

excellent use of the rhetorical question there, A+

"even 20 years ago an ambulance would have been called"

'would of' surely?

Lowering taxes to makes lower paid jobs more worthwhile would of helped this indolent gent get `back on his feet'

that's amazing. garda you have to get some submissions into these 'have your say' newspaper things, it's a natural forum for reports from the gutter.

struggling to accept that that isn't garda's work tbh

dunno if i could conjure up something this crazy - i can't stop thinking about it.

like it is on so many levels fascinating and horrible.

Ou sont les negligence d'autrefois

Whom shall be the one to call the ambulance? Not I.

these days no ambulance attends the gutter, occasionally a battered uber will pass driven by a rat with a gold tooth

Akeem Diko OTM. Leicester's title win was remarkable.

lol estela

lol x2!

https://twitter.com/MxJackMonroe/status/790591668256997376

Probably more annoying are his kids who are always shouting MUMMY CAN YOU HELP ME at loud volumes and kicking footballs against the face.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cvn0X1uW8AAbAKl.jpg:large

As long as the UK allows a large percentage of its young men to leave school, in a half [or less ] educated state, then the country will not prosper. My Victorian grandfather valued knowledge for its own sake---[he having left a village school aged 10]. Why today have the youth made hero's of the kickers of balls rather than the builders of bridges?
Why is getting drunk regarded as fun and not an illustration of ignorance? Why are nerds, hated at school? Nerds are more likely to be the future than the ignorant and stupid!

we used to not kick a ball in the street.

My Victorian grandfather

LOL

Why today have the youth made hero's of the kickers of balls

so this fuckin' loser can neither kick a ball nor properly grasp the fundamentals of the english language eh

ripe fodder for the soylent green factories of post-brexit britain imo

Nerds are more likely to be the future than the ignorant and stupid!

ya, about that...

Why is getting drunk regarded as fun and not an illustration of ignorance?

yes, no intelligent person has ever been a big boozer.

This guy hates Churchill I suppose?

A busy bloke is this David Vinter
https://profile.theguardian.com/user/id/2472083?page=1

tbf to the lad he claims to be over 80 and has 955 pages of comments in three years

My father, missing WW1, by a week, went self employed at 19, and worked 7 days per week for 50 years, and only ever one holiday.

So we know all about his dad and grandad, I bet he was a complete waster himself though.

he spends all his time on CIF so that'a a given

tbf to the lad he claims to be over 80 and has 955 pages of comments in three years

feeling like i need to up my ilx posting game tbh, no way i'm gonna be beaten by an octogenarian. i fought in the irc wars of the mid-90s ffs

This is the rest of my day sorted thank you.

I think his grandmother was a Star Wars droid.

You should have seen my old grandmother b1880 clear the kitchen table cover it with newspaper, skin and gut 4 rabbits, then boil them on the open stove. Somehow she and my farm labourer grandfather raised 5 children, water from a pump, bog down the yard, paraffin lamps . No free doctor, no family allowance, no radio before 1939. But he lived long enough to have his own B/W television.
Yet , three children to grammar school, son a captain in WW2, and later a county cricketer and house builder.
How many are considering such preperation?

Do thefood parcel recipients keep expensive dogs, enjoy weekly bottles of plonk, still smoke, have weekly hairdos,?
If so they are not poor, how come my farm labourer grandfather b, 1876 raised 5 grandchildren, bog down the yard, pump for water, paraffin lamps, three to grammar school, he himself was taught to read by the Methodists from age 12! And lived to be 86, always rode a bicycle. never drank, rarely smoked, and christmas was rabbit pie.

Nature made us all very unequal and Labour has far better leaders than the urban Milliband, six months real grafting would do him good!

And inequality of wealth is magnified by overpopulation, until governments start to seriously tackle this problem peacefully, we may find nature has its own way of doing it! As in 1349!

these exclamation marks are doing hard work.

Harold Macmillan did build houses, far more than Labour ever did,
over 300000 two years running! Most of you are just kids, I went to school in WW2,big classes, but we did learn to be literate, and very numerate . No calculators, we did, and can still do maths in our head, long division and fractions by the chalk and talk method at primary school. And at 6 walked daily one and a half miles on my own, no one had a car, most 'dads' in the forces!

weekly hairdos

My father, missing WW1, by a week, went self employed at 19, and worked 7 days per week for 50 years, and only ever one haircut

back in them days we wished for baldness so we could keep food on the table. the hirsute were viewed as dangerously decadent and forced to drink their biannual pint of bitter at the working men's club in the toilets where we didn't have to look at them

whole families bald, there was. ten to a bedroom all looking like freshly polished eggs

great grandfather dead at four, worked in mine, no safety, cornish pasty for lunch, piss in a field, home five miles up again next morning. gave birth to grandad at three. men pregnant in those days! we shot a child out of our mouths and some of us still can. yes that is actually true. i was there!

back in the day you'd retell Monty Python sketches and there'd be no pregnant men in them

btw for a crash-course in pension-aged messageboard posters I recommend joining a football forum

no cars back then, and the average height was three foot six, so we used to ride dogs everywhere until they fell over dead from overwork. piles of dead dogs there were, lining the cobbled streets, and the little orphan urchins used to suck out their eyes for the protein, 'jelly e'en' we used to call them, i can still taste them now. you wouldn't get those in your newfangled spars, i'll tell you, and more's the pity