Sounds like your Question Time lady is trying to lure Brits away to some foreign utopia of safety, predictability and Community Cohesion. I wouldn't discount the possibility that she's funded by the Singapore Tourism Board.
*Most of whom appear to be bloggers
You know perfectly well that if bloggers could cope with anything that was "sometimes ugly, dirty, coarse and dangerous, but vibrant, exciting and alive", then they they'd have better things to do than blog.
In parts of Alto Aragón where I live it actually is like the Wild West.
Herr Doktor, that wouldn't surprise me either. To put this in its proper context, I foolishly spent some time reading the thoughts some of Britain's nastier newspapers and loonier bloggers. For some, it's always two minutes to midnight in the UK.
I find it easy to forget that the internet is a poor reflection of life as it's lived by the majority of the populace - if I believed what I read online, I'd think that AIDS-infected Islamic biker gangs would decapitate me the instant I stepped over my front door.
And that's a fair point, Justin. Every time I hear someone describe Britain as a lawless country, I feel like buying them a plane ticket to Bogota.
If they survived, they'd really have something to complain about.
Could you purchase such a ticket for Mr Cameron?
Is there something about Colombia that Mr Cameron might find interesting, you think?
I'll take that ticket to Bogota? Beats staying here in purgatory...
You can always re-use the phrase "sometimes ugly, dirty, coarse and dangerous" next time you change the subtitle on your blog.
Every time I hear someone describe Britain as a lawless country, I feel like buying them a plane ticket to Bogota.
We can fantasise about time machines, while we're at it. Back to the early 1700's say...
"The Mohocks were a gang that terrorized London in the early eighteenth century, attacking men and women alike. Named for the Mohawk Indians, they assaulted both men and women, disfiguring their male victims and sexually assaulting their female victims. The matter came to a head in 1712 when a bounty of £100 was issued by the royal court for their capture.
"...The Mohocks were the worst and the last of the gangs of street bullies who terrorized London after the Restoration. The first gang to appear were known as the Muns, who were followed by the Tityré Tūs, the Hectors, the Scourers, the Nickers, and the Hawkubites."
A few decades later, "Bands of footpads armed with knives attacked parties of prosperous-looking people in London's Covent Garden, and Horace Walpole was shot by a highwayman in Hyde Park" [quoting Colin Wilson].
I'll spare you any further ranting about the crime rate and the fear of the underclasses and the absence of any bonds of community cohesion during the Victorian era that everyone seems to feel nostalgic for.
I don't know what New Zealand is like, Herr Doktor, but sometimes I feel that Britain is a nation torn between pining for a lost golden age that never existed and pleading for a shining golden future that never, ever comes.
Call me a Marxist loony if you will, but I wonder who it benefits to keep the populace so terrified of crime that they won't vote on any other issue.
Anyone afflicted with amnesia and a very, very strong stomach would also do well to check out the Shankhill Butchers on Wikipedia, just in case we ever wondered whether white Europeans could ever sink to the level of the worst Al Qaeda shitbags.
Oh, and Pisces, if memory serves, you're South African, aren't you? You must know something about crime with a capital 'C'.
Apologies for the lack of gags, funny or otherwise - lager makes me maudlin.
You're lucky I didn't get onto the topic of the rival gangs of Hegelians and Logical Positivists who regularly turned the mean streets of Oxford into a bloodbath during the 1920s. Talk about needing a strong stomach! I read about them in one of Bertrand Russell's essays so it must be true.
That guy Wittgenstein was a hard man alright. Not someone to trust with Occam's Razor.
Can anyone pinpoint the exact moment when Britain tired of stiff-upper-lips and decided to bolt the doors, quivering in dread in front of the TV?
No, but I do remember, if we are talking about stupidity, the people who were pleased to be interviewed on the news, when we started bombing Iraq, in the car park of one hypermarket or another where they'd gone to stock up on food and survival rations. They seemed to be auditioning for the title of The Most Stupid People in Britain.
I agree about Wittgenstein, Herr Anonymous.
What he did to Buridan's Ass with Morgan's Canon really doesn't bear repeating.
Can anyone pinpoint the exact moment when Britain tired of stiff-upper-lips and decided to bolt the doors, quivering in dread in front of the TV?
If you ask me, what Britain needs is a class war. There's nothing like an angry mob in the street -- with a few looted stores and middle-class housing in flames -- to shift the distractible minds of the tabloid readers away from nebulous fears about brown people, and reawaken a proper, decent fear of soot-covered coarsely-spoken workers.
I would volunteer to fight in the class war myself... except that I have other priorities, and family obligations.
Can anyone pinpoint the exact moment
It doesn't seem that long ago that you had a government who promoted diversity as part of Brand Britain... punks with mohawks seemed to feature in every tourism promotion. I vaguely remember the slogan Cool Britannia.
At some point the advice from the focus groups shifted, and you went from there to a government who'll slap an ASBO on anyone who is not wealthy or titled enough to be amusingly eccentric rather than antisocial. Don't start me on the subject of their lists of core British values.
Coincidentally, the Prime Ministers in both had the same surname. Wonder if they were related.
Core British values? I think we should focus instead upon instilling hardcore British values.
That would probably mean creating a nation where every cunt gets a crack at the whip, and any fucker has the chance to pursue their fucking dreams, provided they don't do so at the expense of any other cunt.
I'd like to see that on a manifesto at the next election.
Seems like you Brits are much like Americans on at least one front: Whenever the proles get a bit skittish (regardless of the root causes), just appeal to their need for safety and security (vs. freedom and liberty ala "leave us the f*ck alone) and truck out that tired law and order canard of more cops on the street and the false notion that the more cops we have, the safer we'll be ('cause we know that cops never pose any danger to us--just those bad men known as criminals).
speaking as a pant wetting jessie, my life is made considerably worse by how often I find myself, for example, sitting on the bus my teeth itching with anxiety while a gang of feral teenagers grunt, strut and swap knifing anecdotes. I've no idea whether this country is going to the dogs, because I wasn't around in the old days so can't make the comparison. But I wish somebody would come up with a way of taming these young hoodlums (who have at various times in the past have held knifes to my throat, beaten me etc.) obviously as a pant wetting jessie I can't do it myself.
In fairness Roy, there are plenty of neds around, but so it has always been.
I live in the city but I'm a country boy originally, and I can't help but notice how it's people from the sticks who are most terrified.
If I could click my fingers and turn Scotland's underclass into model citizens, I would. Since that's not going to happen any time soon, I guess I'll just have to put a brave face on it, eh?
I agree. I work with 'yoof' and apart from the hellish smell of lynx most of them are ok.
Well I go along with Roy... yer average group of feral teenagers does act like a pack of poorly-socialised apes. That's because... damn, forgot the punchline.
Meanwhile, back on the original topic, I was just thinking how nice it would be if the process of choosing each year's Moral Panic could be made more transparent. I don't watch TV or read enough of the papers, so it puts the kibosh on my party small-talk until I work out that I'm supposed to be concerned about the methamphetamine epidemic, or super-predators [remember them?], or bird flu, or whathaveyou.
A widely-publicised Lotto draw at the beginning of the year would help.
I think the time is right for another flesh-eating virus.
You never see any good flesh-eating viruses these days, it's all nasty Muslims and disorderly children. Anyone would think we've turned into a nation of cranky pensioners or something.
Buck up your ideas, media types, and let's have a real scare. It's been years since we've had a good story about how limp-wristed tree-hugging liberals want to re-introduce packs of wolves into the countryside.
Give me a drug-epidemic moral panic, any day... Next time I'm in court, I want my lawyer to be able to explain that "My client's unspeakable behaviour is quite of character, and can be blamed on his consumption of [name of latest addictive drug goes here]." Which is not to say anything against the excuse-making possibilities of porn addiction and heavy-metal music.
But blaming one's crimes on a flesh-eating virus? Not so easy.
It's been years since we've had a good story about how limp-wristed tree-hugging liberals want to re-introduce packs of wolves into the countryside.
Not round here it isn't. Except it's bears. They reintroduced them into the French Pyrenees. Unfortunately they're not very good at respecting the border with Spain. Neither are the Aragonese farmers, who spent many happy years using the Pyrennean passes for smuggling purposes, but any bear unwise enough to wander the same way will find themselves swiftly shot.
Drugs, porn and heavy metal? I call that Tuesday.
No wonder you like it round here, the page probably shimmers with psychadelic titties after a few seconds' staring.
Most things shimmer with psychedelic titties after a few seconds' staring. If this is a side-effect of the medication, I'm not going to meddle with the dosage.
Commenting by HaloScan
