... so little time. Perhaps I should just stop looking at news entirely.
Two judges in Pennsylvania admit to taking bribes to increase the sentences imposed on young offenders. The bribes came from the penal contractors who get paid to keep the kids locked up. To me this suggests that it may be unwise to encourage private industry to make profits from crime. That's a lesson we might try applying to the insurance and security industries.
Amazon bans sales of a ghastly Japanese videogame in which you get to play a sexual predator who kidnaps, tortures and rapes women. Of course Amazon is perfectly right to censor anything it doesn't like, so long as it doesn't try to hide what it's doing. Well done Amazon. The Git Award here goes to British Labour MP Keith Vaz, who pontificated: "It is intolerable that anyone would purchase a game that simulates the criminal offence of rape... I do not see how this can be allowed." (Note the passive voice there: "... can be allowed." Translation: "I don't want to censor anything, perish the thought, but what can I do, I'm driven by an irresistible compulsion...".)
Octuplets' mother's publicists quit after receiving death threats. I don't even know who to be maddest at in this story: the publicist for general spinelessness, the malicious fuckwits who've been sending death threats, the police who show no interest in tracking down said fuckwits and kicking them hard and repeatedly in the stomach, or the mother who hired a freakin' publicist because she had eight babies.
Seriously: where exactly did we go wrong?
6 comments:
As David Letterman once said, "We are very close to the end of civilization."
I'm often tempted to adopt that "no more looking at the news" plan.
The woman, the babies, the other kids, the doctor... it's all crazy. How does a jobless woman afford having the process done in the first place?
Yikes. Sounds like the house hunting might be exerting a negative effect on your usually calm mood.
On the other hand, private penal contractors? Horrifying. I suppose I knew they existed in some form, but not with quite that much...oh I don't know. That's truly depressing.
I can't miss this opportunity to further the agenda of World Communism. Yes, private industry is heavily into US prisons. Refer to this pinko web site: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8289
How much further can we sink?
Eric, I think it was Gandhi who said of Western civilisation: "I think it would be a good idea".
NDR, I'm afraid I've spent as much time looking at that story as I care to, so I'm not going to research an answer to that...
Ruby: you may be right. Work is increasingly loaded at the moment, and having no weekends to speak of as well may be getting under my wossname.
Reilley, I think "sinking" from here can only take the form of stories like these appearing more often. Of course the stories themselves could get a lot worse, but I prefer not to think about that.
You'll be unsurprised to learn I have some ideas about where exactly we went wrong. I'll get to them sometime I have a few hours spare...
Post a Comment