Tagged: Politics

Anaesthetic! What operation!!

A Way to Scare Old People and Save Money

Anaesthetic! What operation!!
Anaesthetic! What operation!!

Got a letter from the Government the other day. A form letter as it goes. The kind of form letter that absolutely terrified my 80 year-old mother.

She’s an ex-Wren, ex-PA to Lord Mountbatten, now slightly demented due to a hospital trust that I won’t name that in my opinion mismanaged her discharges (yes, plural) following a kidney removal, aka her Nephrectomy

Mum lives on her own somewhere in Hampshire. Her husband, my step-father, died suddenly, in the kitchen one morning. I know where she lives, of course, because I am down looking after her for a while. I am down looking after for a while because the government hates old people.

The previous government loved hospitals and wanted all its pals in the “private sector” to love hospitals too. Hence, somewhere in Hampshire there is now a ‘Super Hospital’. This is ‘Super’ in the sense of “Oh my fuck, I am super angry at their utter disdain for old people!”

Mum’s operation was just before Xmas. I’m not going to go into the tale of how the Super Hospital tried to discharge her on Xmas Day – having said, on Xmas day, that it wasn’t going to. I am not going to go into that story yet.

I am going to make a note here about how the Hospital Trust sent a letter about a follow-up meeting from the department of Anaesthesia. To repeat, it’s a follow-up letter, sent to an old lady.

In part it reads:

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The NRA tries to talk to the kids.

How the NRA Isn’t Playing Games

The NRA tries to talk to the kids.
The NRA tries to talk to the kids.

The National Rifle Association (aka the barmy, right wing, gun lovin’ fellas… aka The NRA) has released a game. It’s called NRA Practice Range. It has guns. Elements of the games media find this hypocritical or somehow ironic.

Not only do these reactions portray a failure to grasp the meanings of both words, they also illustrate a huge problem with a perfectly respectable working press that wants to be seen as a political or even art media: writing about games is respectable without having to “defend” games. It is okay to exercise the critical muscle.
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The Plate has opinions too.

Quoting Toby Young

The Plate has opinions too.
The Plate has opinions too. Quote the plate.
Toby Young ran one of those non sequitur hit-begging pieces aimed at goading lefties and making the Right Wing crow and squawk and shriek in agreement at what passes for ideas in their world.

He uses George Orwell selectively to batter home a point about how dead George would have hated a prize that co-opted his name after he died being given to people who he may or may not have agreed with but we will never be in a position to know.

I like to call this technique ‘The Puppetry of the Corpse’

All in this Together

All in It Together – Past Lives and the Chav Demon

All in this Together
A British Labour Party cartoon from 1929 is eerily apt for 2013 in the UK.

Old Tory ideas never really die, they are just too Conservative for that. This cartoon, a Labour recruiting poster apparently (via David Milliband) certainly indicates as much.

It comes from the year of The Wall Street Crash when the chaps further up the ladder learned what the markets really could do when feral forces went to work. 1929.

The year The Great Depression stirred in Britain. But the satire portrayed in the poster is true in 2013.

Yesterday’s Welfare Debate, featured much old thinking including the deserving and undeserving poor and the Striver and the Skiver, which was largely uncontested by the current stagnating Labour rump and its hangers-on.

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New Statesman’s Staggering Hit Beggary

New Statesman Burgers
Apt story for the death of the left

I write now as a lefty and not as someone whose day job is trying to get people to read the commercial website about video games (‘videogames’) that I edit. Sadly I find myself writing about this sad piece of hit-begging nonsense masquerading as economic analysis in the New Statesman magazine (Est 1913).

Diablo III is a popular product, famous in its Personal Computer (PC) gaming commercial niche. It is a game of dress up and pretend. It has a hokey premise and mildly exhilarating yet still very conservative (as are most video games produced by large publishers as opposed to the imaginative small indy makers) set of mechanics. It is played out by thousands of people who enjoy it and do no harm.

Recently its makers – Activision/Blizzard, an offshoot of Vivendi – decided to introduce real money auctions to this playground. This is a way to make more money from the harmless people playing the harmless game.
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What a Total Hunt as MP Lets Bell End Fly

Just a bit of fun… as Conservative MP for South West Surrey and Secretary of State, Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport and friend of the Murdoch’s Jeremy Hunt unleashes Olympic terror with a bell end.

Let’s see what else Jezza can do…

Olympic Breakfast News: Judge Bans BBC Riot Show

BBC and London RiotsIn the lead up to the London 2012 Olympics, a judge had banned the BBC from broadcasting a program that featured interviews with people who rioted in the UK’s capital in August 2011.

The BBC has offered a brief statement:
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LOCOG’s Low Blow to Linking

London 2012 is a Good Leader
I lived in Sydney during the 2000 games and I don’t recall the level of extreme cock-up + nastiness (well, if you exclude Kevan Gosper’s daughter) in the lead up than is occurring at the moment with the London Games.

This maybe whimsy on my part, my memories of living in Sydney are almost all positive. It maybe that SOCOG had the same entrenched, mean-spirited, profit-centred (not driven), secretive agenda as LOCOG.

BoingBoing has pointed out that London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) committee, “says you’re only allowed to link to their site if you have nice things to say” and that calls for some investigation.

(Please assume some ‘Detectivey’ music to suit the sort of sleuthing that appeals to you – I am playing the music from the scene from All the President’s Men where Woodward and Bernstein are sitting in the Library of Congress and the camera pans up and away from them.)

Oh, here we go, from LOCOG itself:

“a. Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner.”

(My emphasis) That excerpt comes via the excellent Index on Censorship and its prime mover Padraig Reidy. IoC, that’s Index on Censosrhip not the nastily unpleasant International Olympic Committee, is a must-read. As a declaration of self-interest, I wrote one single piece for it few years ago, but no one else is going to blow my trumpet about that.

This suggests that, I can’t link in a fair-comment, critical manner that is also derogatory to a website of a commercial interest – and remember that LOCOG is a private and commercial organisation.

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Toby Young: Disability Back Pedal

Good old Toby Young. The Spectator columnist and Free School advocate has had some views on inclusion and disability. They were ill thought out and much amended.

The long and short though is that Mr Young feels that nasty Politically Correct school additions such as ramps not only means that disabled kids get to go to classes, it also means that disability gets in and probably infects the school. The infection is Inclusion.

My own daughter was heavily disabled and was confined to a wheelchair but also had access to mainstream education in Sydney. She or rather we and her school carers and friends used ramps… a lot. Ergo, I find Mr Young’s views to be unpleasant, stupid and offensive.

So, here’s a tiny little bit of criticism.

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The Least Honest Piece of TV Ever?

Thought UnprovokedThe video you can see after the break is described as, ‘The most honest three and a half minutes of television, EVER…’.

It shows “the new HBO series The Newsroom explaining why America’s Not the Greatest Country Any Longer… But It Can Be.” Yes, once more Aaron Sorkin manages to tailor more new clothes for the emperor.

This is apparently classifiable as thought provoking stuff. What thoughts, other than, “Isn’t that a speech from Mr Smith Goes to Washington or some other Frank Capra movie and one thing that most nations need is a memory which isn’t drenched in sentimentality?”

Or maybe the thought, “When was this period in American history when the USA public was more informed?”

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