Was it worth it?

Gone to Hell

This country (the world) really has gone to hell. Between Coppers Blog, Mr Chalk and Random Acts of Reality you have the perfect picture of everything that is wrong with society and how it's not likely to get better any time soon.

Do I have a solution? Does anyone have a solution? Don't know.

Touchy feely doesn't seem to have done the trick.

Maybe it simply comes down to coming down HARD on miscreants. If you want to to be an all -round obnoxious moron who is of no benefit to society in any way, shape or form then don't expect any sort of human right and caring about your feelings?

Being right-wing has got corrupted. It now means racist and facist. Dictatorial and controlling. What if it just meant attempting to be a reasonable human being? Expecting a good level of behaviour, mutual respect.

The Daily Mail gets a lot of bad press for its attitude and rightly so, but if you look at their underlying cause, is it really so bad? Respect. A reasonable sense of morality. Put down the race card and step away.

Maybe it's all about simply not being an arsehole.

Mansfield

The council can complain as much as it wants. Mansfield is still a complete dump. Would you go drinking there on a Friday or Saturday night???

And then it get a mention on TV last night's TheBest and Worst places to live in Britain

BBC Retraction

The story in my previous post has now be replaced.
NOT another story as a follow on from the original article, but an actual re-write of the story at the same URL.

Not good and smacks of rewriting history.

Minority Rebrand

What complete and utter drivel. The BBC are reporting that the government are thinking of renaming ethnic minorities. Excuse me? Do we just say "you're Indian-British now" and expect everyone to start referring to themselves as such?

Phrases like that will start getting used in official documents and that will be as far as it goes.
Any French-British out there? German-British maybe?
Or, as is usual with this sort of thing, is it all based around branding "communities" who can easily be identified by the colour of their skin or their religion, i.e. lazy?

Or is it that these particular groups get identified as communities simply because they still have a sense of one? The average town does not have anything that you would call a white community. It may have a large proportion of white people, but you'd be hard pushed to apply the word community to it. You're lucky to know your next-door neighbour's name.
I never hear reference to the Catholic or Protestant communities outside of Northern Ireland or Glasgow either.
Do "communities" only arise when there is a need to bond together in the face of a common foe, fear or some other perceived threat?

Infertility

It's great that the government are introducing one free round of infertility treatment on the NHS, but the one aspect I have a concern with is the BMI (Body Mass Index) being used to determine if someone is obese.
BMI is all well and good for the average person, but for a strength athlete or bodybuilder it is totally meaningless. Being 5'10" and 16 stone would not be unusual for a reasonable bodybuilder with low bodyfat, yet BMI would class them as obese.

What is wrong with just using body-fat percentage?

Academia for all

This comment on a discussion board over at Motley Fool talks about the folly of our current approach to education.
I mean, really, what is the point of forcing all children down the same academically inclined educational path when a large propotion don't have the interest, aptitude or simply intelligence to gain anything from it?

What would be wrong with taking the non-academic types out of the system at a much earlier age and appealing to what DOES interest them?
Vocational courses have always been a poor relation to the academic and we're doing a great many people a disservice with this attitude.

Take the obnoxious little chavs and give them something to do that makes them more useful to society that simply keeping the gut-rot cider companies in business.

Even beyond the disruptive scumbag types, what about those who just don't want full-blown academia? The artists, musicians, linguists, sports(wo)men, carpenters, builders, etc? If a real vocation and propensity is shown at a fairly early age then take it and nurture it.

In the UK we're constantly talking about getting more and more people into higher education. Besides the fact that it's not the life for everybody, what exactly are we going to do with them all? I still want my car fixed, my drains cleared, my house wired and my bins emptied. This does not make anybody doing any of these jobs "below" someone with a degree. Personally, I think the guy emptying the bins is worth more to society than your average investment banker or computer programmer (and I work in IT).

We're a big hive of interdependent worker bees and we need to start accepting that everyone has a role to play irrelevant of educational background.  And start giving everyone the chance to do what they are good at without cutting them off at the knees before they've even reached 16.