andrewducker

I find it genuinely quite terrifying that we're now convicting and sentencing people to quite significant jail terms for not actually having done anything. Presumably so long as they continue to have brown skin and funny foreign names, nobody will give a shit though.

Paul Chambers is a white accountant. I find that sobering.

Oh, was that the guy who tweeted a joke about blowing up an airport?

Aye. He wasn’t sent to prison, but he got a pretty hefty fine and a criminal conviction which in turn got him fired and I think struck off by his Institute.

Bloody hell. I thought he got some celebrity assistance and got off with it, that's horrendous that his life has essentially been ruined.

Ah, I am about six months behind.

The conviction was set aside upon second appeal over the summer.

Still, that’s a couple years of his life he won’t get back and I’m not sure what his employment situation is.

Yep, and would he have gotten all the celebrity (and media) support had he not been a white upper-middle class guy. What will happen to the next poor sod that the authorities do this to.

And I see in the news today the Tories want to withdraw from the European human rights convention. That pesky piece of paperwork that makes it illegal for them to wiretap whoever they want, and commit acts of torture.

... not that this stopped Blair of course.

I genuinely don’t know if he would have gotten the support he did if he hadn’t had the background he did have. (1) I think part of the support came from the sheer dumbness of the proscecution, both in terms of the intelligence applied to it and the fact that everyone appeared to be acting on automatic. That and the fact that the authorities surely have something better to be doing with their time than hounding someone through the courts for a joke in bad taste. Certainly part of it was the realisation that if it could happen to a white professional aspirant it could happen to anyone.


(1) (I’m not sure if I would describe Paul Chambers as upper-middle class. IIRC he was a part qualified accountant at the time of the incident. Part quals are the lowest scum on earth. Based on what I know about his occupation he could well have been in social class C1.

He was definitely part-qualified, and was working in industry. Since chartered accountants tend to qualify in practice and move to industry later, he was probably part-qualified ACCA (Certified) or CIMA (management). Which, rightly or wrongly, makes him even less prestigious in society than if he was a part-qualified ACA (Chartered). (See userpic for declaration of bias, although I think many ACCAs and CIMA accountants would probably agree with me.)

Part-quals can't be the lowest scum on earth though. I mean, they've passed two thirds of their exams. That surely puts them higher in the tree than first and second year students who haven't got that far (or 'audit monkeys' as we used to call them)!

Many might. Some would not.

He was CIMA. Which for this ACMA means he outranks either ICAS or ICAEW.

No audit monkeys in industry. We have journal monkeys instead. And the good thing about journal monkeys is that they know their place and are grateful for the opportunity. Unlike part quals who think that when they make FD they are going to be so much better at my job than I am.

Surely "conspiracy" sentencing is always like that? You should convict before they actually do something -- that's why we have intelligence communities. If you wait until they've actually blown something up you've failed. If you wait until they've constructed bombs then it's a huge risk. Unfortunately that article was impossible to tell anything much from.

I can certainly agree that there's a "too soon" or "it's just talk" point where it's just messing about. Everybody with an imagination I think at some point thinks or maybe talks about blowing things up or general destructive behaviour. I can't really tell from that article so I looked elsewhere. Apparently they had made martyrdom videos, gone to classes about bomb making in pakistan and fraudulently collected money to fund this. Seems prosecutable to me.

We'll see I guess what sentence they get. Better to give them a light sentence soon for planning than to wait until they buy stuff, prepare explosives (potentially accidents as they play with refining material) and give them a heavier sentence.

Yeah, but if the authorities were onto them, as they clearly were, and watching everything they did very closely. Why not wait until they'd started buying materiel to construct a bomb? Then they could have found out where they were getting their stuff from, who was assisting them, who else they involved, which fertiliser manufacturers were prepared to sell large quantities of phosphates to Muslim gentlemen who came bearing cash.

I don't disagree that its far better to stop this sort of behaviour before there is any risk, but the concept of people being sent to jail for very long sentences when they've not technically broken the law, sets a worrying precedent.

Although actually I have much less of a problem with this lot being jailed because it does sound like they were genuinely up to no good. It was the last case where they jailed some Muslim, well kids really, for thought crimes, and it turned out their 'training camps' in Dorset they'd gone to were really just them going out and playing games of soldiers with each other. And the extent of their 'bomb making' activity was looking stuff up on the internet, as lots of people might just out of curiosity.

We don't know what the sentences will be yet... yes, there's a possibility they might be disproportionate.

I agree with you completely that there are some "plots" which are just fantasy -- this appears not to be one -- at least in that they'd been to Pakistan to be trained and fraudulently aquired money.

Why not wait until they'd started buying materiel to construct a bomb?

I can see your point. OTOH, isn't it actually kinder (to them) to intervene sooner before they commit more crimes? They'll get a shorter sentence. Also, that material is dangerous, potentially flamable etc... I can quite see someone thinking "OK, let's try that thing I read on the internet now I have the ingredients even though it wasn't the plan"
(It's the sort of thing I can imagine as frighteningly possible having disuaded a friend from whipping up a batch of Piranha solution on a whim because he noticed we had ingredients lying around.)

Yes I suppose there could be a lot of visible deterrent value couldn't there. Making it clear to people that if they start thinking about building bombs, then the authorities will be down on them like a ton of bricks.

Although that tactic never seemed to work so well with the Irish. I suppose ultimately what worked there was sitting down with them, listening to their grievances, and negotiating a settlement.

I wonder if many of our problems with Muslim extremism might go away if we just got the hell out of Afghanistan.

You know, there was a program on about it a few nights ago, and the major British army bases established 8 years ago, in those 8 years we have successfully pushed the Taliban back 2 miles. More than 2 miles from the bases? Every village was firmly under Taliban control. Two bloody miles in 8 years. It's unbelievable.

There's a lot to what you say. I think you have to listen to grievances, negotiate and so on exactly as you said. As I said though, I think this had gone a lot further already than just "start[ing] thinking about building bombs".

You also have to sit down with people who aren't making bombs, listen to their grievances, and negotiate a settlement, or else those people may come to the reasonable conclusion that making bombs is what gets your grievance on the agenda.

At the trial of the Haymarket anarchists, the prosecutor told the jury in so many words that there wasn't any evidence connecting these men to the crime, but they talk about that sort of thing, so they should be executed.
Five death sentences.

I very much approve of that "Stop apologising for what you read" article.

Some of the comments rather miss the point though:

"I don't really care what it is as long as you are engaged and enjoying it. Granted, I'll probably roll my eyes behind your back if you tell me you're a Twilight fan..."

"I love genre fiction, but I prefer good to bad. For instance, I think George R R Martin is much better than Terry Goodkind."


Neither of the above comments really annoyed me. This one did:

"While I would much prefer that kids read "quality" books, anything that engages their mind and improves their reading skills is preferable to sitting, mindlessly, in front of a computer game."

To which my response (admittedly I'm too polite to actually post it on that site) is:

"You utterly retarded fuckweasel. Have you ever actually played a computer game more sophisticated that Angry Birds? And you're a children's librarian? I'm sorry, but there should be laws against allowing people quite so stupid and harmful as you anywhere near children. I'd rather leave children with a catholic priest than with you. If you think that computer games are "mindless", how about we set up a competition where a team of professional gamers with degrees competes against a team of mental retards at Team Fortress 2 and see who wins?"

Ahem.

Sorry. She touched a nerve there.

Oh yes. People who assume that computer games are mindless annoy me too.

Ironically I actually know a real children's librarian. She's the best Rock Band guitarist I've ever seen and a very good FPS player. Going over to her place for an all-weekend LAN party in May. She's also played all the way through Baldur's Gate about ten times.

Another discussion of the 'comments affecting peoples' opinions' study worth reading is here. Also The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science. Really interesting stuff.

Thanks!

(I have to say that the Science article goes a long way to avoid using the term "cognitive dissonance"!)

Bigger word count, innit? :P

Those are amazing, especially the water-drop globe and the rainbow waterfall.

LOL. I can just imagine it.

I've definitely had the experience of mentally unwinding a nested subclause, and pausing for a second, and then adding the necessary preposition, and appreciate people who can follow along :)

I always explain those sentences as "Did you know, any positive integer or positive imaginary integer number of copies of the word 'fish' form a grammatical sentence?"

> Who polices the police police? The police police police are the ones who police the police police...

Somehow, even in rhetorical abstract questions, internal affairs (or military police, etc, etc) get a bad reputation :)

You should have put a larger spaces between pig and and and and and whistle when you painted that sign...

(also buffalo)

As a non-native speaker who has had the distinct pleasure of learning the language from scratch, I feel compelled to say I really, really love English. I also feel compelled to say this might be symptomatic of a peculiar sort of linguistic masochism on my part.

Like most languages enamored with prepositions, English is entirely dedicated to the art of concealing where things actually are. A casual tourist will quickly discover that doing things around the house does not involve rakes, restaurant cars supposedly situated on trains don't require grappling hooks to access, fighting over something doesn't mean you have to be able to fly, and so on. Often it takes ages for a reasonable person to figure out that the words "to" and "from" only have the most tenuous and metaphorical relationship with the physical world.

But the real affront is what's called preposition stranding, which is to language roughly what Cthulhu is to geometry. What English-speakers do is that they take these tiny little words you can never get straight, sever them from their beloved nouns with a hacksaw, and then they sort of casually throw them around the sentence in order to cleverly mislead their enemies.

For whatever bizarre reason things burn in various spatial directions, unlike any self-respecting thing on fire logically should. When an arsonist sets out to burn down something, he needs to take note of the fact that it may, in fact, ruin his plans and burn up instead.

Conclusions are drawn, but they're conspiciously not drawn out of anything, so this must be the sort of drawing you do with pencils. This seems perfectly logical until you realise that a drawn-out meeting is not actually drawn out of anything either, it's just too darned long. This may stress people "out", according to certain people. It may also distress people, but not in a relation to any container or direction. It may aggravate people, and it may aggravate the situation. Aggravated people are, according to the linguistic whim of the day, annoyed people. But if something aggravates a situation, it makes the situation worse, not more annoyed.

LOL. That's an amazing description. Yes, it's just like that, except you can't see it when you're used to the language. Yesterday I was trying to give some examples of how idiosyncratic, and I literally couldn't think of any, because I'm so used to all the words, I can't see which ones are ridiculous when you've not absorbed them from birth.

I think what surprises me most about this is the suggestion that perhaps other languages don't have random illogicalities as a result of lots of different parts of them having been derived from entirely different ways of thinking about the world.

In several of your examples it's easy to see where the contradictory things came from. Burning down and burning up, for example: a building burns down in the sense that afterwards it doesn't reach as high into the air, and it also burns up in the sense that most of it rises into the sky in the form of smoke. Neither is inaccurate on its own terms; either one makes sense depending on which aspect of the process is most interesting to you; their apparent contradiction is amusing, but easy to understand in terms of language evolution.

Are all other languages really more consistent? Or is it just that people tend to notice the oddities in languages they didn't grow up with, and not the ones they've been accustomed to all their lives?

I am, of course, being completely facetious here. I certainly don't mean to seriously imply you couldn't make fun of other languages in much the same way. (Indeed, absent any obviously useful universal standard of quirkiness, one could very easily turn the tables and give a similar treatment to my own native Finnish, which has no future tense, and stubbornly refuses to invent a word for the verb "have".)

How do Finns refer to the future, or ownership?

Or do they just not like to talk about it?

Fascinating. I guess most languages have holes in them - not surprising that people just work around them and then don't even notice them after a while (or if they started off with them).

Wait, what? To have and to be are the most irregular verbs in most European languages, which usually means that they're the most useful. How does Finnish avoid having a to have verb?

Judicious use of "to be" coupled with the adessive or inessive case. Strictly literally, I don't get to "have" a thing, but there might be one on or at me. Confusingly enough, were I an inanimate object, there might well be a thing in me. (Which is surely just as silly as anything English might ever throw at people... but, as cartesiandemon and simont rightly observe, you tend to have to specifically point these things out to native speakers in order to get them to appreciate the humour value.)

positive imaginary integer number of copies of the word 'fish'

Bwahaha!

I think it's a good message, but now I'm trying to analyse the problem more deeply.

One aspect is social pressure. I might be quite embarrassed to admit liking well-written childrens books. But in fact, most people I know are quite positive about that. But it would be very hard for me to admit I liked Twilight[1].

Another aspect is _why_ someone likes it. Some books I like because they give a good insight into something. Others I like because they push the emotional buttons I need to have pushed. And I think both of those are totally legitimate, but it's understandable that people don't want to reclassify books from the first category into the second one. If A thinks "oh, book X is SO CLEVER", and B thinks "book X is really good at making people feel clever", then it's totally valid to enjoy it or not enjoy it, but there's an undercurrent that A assumes B doesn't like it because B is too stupid to get it and B assumes A likes it because A is too stupid to see through it.

[1] I didn't, but I know what the strengths and weaknesses are, and although I think it's a genuine problem that it romanticises stalking as a relationship model, I don't think that's why people dislike it as much as they do, I think a lot of the criticism comes from (a) disliking anything "bad" that's popular and (b) wish-fulfilment about killing people being more socially acceptable than wish-fulfilment about being stalked by your perfect boyfriend.

Apologising for what you like to read:

I recall that there's a Paul Graham essay from a while back which goes further, by saying that the "guilty pleasure" sorts of reads might perfectly well be better than the sort of worthy thing that you feel virtuous as you read, because the former must have some genuine merit in order to satisfy the "pleasure" part of "guilty pleasure", whereas the latter may in fact have no merit at all and it's all just hype. Or something along those lines.