I think we should be told….
[D’Souza pic shamelessly stolen from Sadly, No.}
bigotry
Found: Wingnuts’ Missing Brain Cells
So IOKIYAR is a medical condition now.
Damn. I know I’ve always said wingnuts were lacking something upstairs, but looks like Rachel Moraon and the other idiots just like her could have a physical excuse for theirr dreadful behaviour.
From the BBC:
‘Altruistic’ brain region found
The brain area was more active among the altruistic group
Scientists say they have found the part of the brain that predicts whether a person will be selfish or an altruist.
Altruism – the tendency to help others without obvious benefit to oneself – appears to be linked to an area called the posterior superior temporal sulcus.
Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person’s real-life unselfish behaviour.
The Duke University Medical Center study on 45 volunteers is published in Nature Neuroscience.
Selfless tendencies
The participants were asked to disclose how often they engaged in different helping behaviours, such as doing charity work, and were also asked to play a computer game designed to measure altruism.
The study authors say their work could have important implications.
They are now exploring ways to study the development of this brain region in early life and believe such information may help determine how altruistic tendencies are established.
Researcher Dr Scott Huettel explained: “Although understanding the function of this brain region may not necessarily identify what drives people like Mother Theresa, it may give clues to the origins of important social behaviours like altruism.”
[…]
Argh, why do bigots and shit-for-brainers always get a cop-out no matter how bad the things they do are?
Next thing you know IOKIYAR will be listed as medical condition, they’ll be claiming disability and soon they’ll raising money from Scaife and his cronies for lobby groups and thinktanks to agitate for in favour the altruism-impaired.
Bur wait! They already have one. My duh.
Could He BE Any More Up Himself?
I worked on a Tesco’s checkout when I was a law student, to make money for my children’s Christmas presents and to pay off pressing bills, so this condescending blogpost really got my goat.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Blogging Comes of Age …
There is a golden thermometer that I and others use for technology known generally as the Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT). This is the test of what happens when someone, with often limited ability, has to use technology in order to carry out their job tasks, such as credit card checkers, changing till rolls, rebooting an electric till etc. It comes as a shock to me then to have been standing in a queue in my local Tesco tonight and hear two checkout girls discussing the optimal ways to ensure comment moderation in their blogs and discussing the merits of Blogger versus MySpace, Facebook or TagWorld. In fact when it came to my turn to be served I went and stood in another queue and left them to it so I could listen some more.
I don’t know when Julian was at university but grants no longer exist. The person serving you in Asda or KFC may well be putting themselves through a course in nursing or astrophysics.
He should be a little more careful – for all he knows the heart surgeon doing his triple bypass in 15 year’s time could be the same girl he’s taking the piss out of on his blog this week.
Aside from that, who the hell is he to assume that even fulltime non-student supermarket staff have no intelligence or aptitude for technology?
But ah, yes, I forgot. They’re checkout girls. Naturally their grouindstate is brainless and they have no life other than when they’re pushing his lasagna-for-one over the scanner.
Julian, you may be a fellow Pratchett and Guido Fawkes fan and Blears-hater, but you’re still a condescending sexist prick.
Rachel Moran*: amoral monster
Anybody who has been blogging for a while knows how easy it is to write and publish something that in the clear light of day you may have been better off not to, as it reveals slightly more about you than you might want to, or it’s likely to be taken the wrong way, or because what you thought was hilarious others turn out to find just offensive. And if you’ve blogged, you also know that once you did post something like that, it’s very very hard to take it down again. You may delete the post, but it will have been noticed, read, reposted, discussed and judged already. Everybody who blogs will have these posts and they’re a bloody nuisance, but they can also be a good thing. If not for the poster, then for their readers.
Case in point: Majikthise pointed to a blogpost by one Rachel Moran, who wrote with some pride of how to deal with homeless people:
Eddie also had an interesting story to tell about a homeless man, in Naples, who asked him for a dollar. Eddie told him no and got in his Caddy and the homeless guy started punching the glass, so Eddie got out of the Caddy and the homeless guy punched him in the jaw and Eddie left the homeless guy twitching in the street.
[…]
He told us this story at Mastry’s during the second round and when he was done, me and Lil Sis went up to the bar to order more. I was waiting for the bartender to come around when this scraggly-haired homeless guy comes up behind Lil Sis.
He had his claw extended at her and he was probably about to touch her hair, because she is startlingly platinum blond and the light at Mastry’s flickered an excellent, sexy pale blue onto her hair, like she was in a video game where she was, like, the leader of a gang of fierce cougar-girl mutants or something.
[…]
We have decided that the homeless problem in St. Petersburg is becoming entirely out of control. Part of the problem is that a bunch of idiot liberal ‘Burgers will just stand there and let homeless people ramble on at them and then fumble for money or let themselves get yelled at when they don’t have any. I seriously know girls who are, like, afraid of downtown during certain times now, which is horrendous, because, for Christ’s sake, this is St. Petersburg, not Manhattan.
We are thinking about proving this nuisance and need for civil action by making a short film called “Eddie Rolls on the Homeless,” whereby Mark secretly videotapes me and Lil Sis in a variety of situations to see how many homeless people approach us and, then, how many of these situations escalate into harrassment. Then, he’s gonna videotape Eddie in the same scenarios, only Eddie is going to beat up every homeless person who escalates the contact after being told that his panhandling is illegal and annoying.
Quite clearly she has written this expecting approval and praise, but even in her own comments reactions are largely negative. She comes across as priviledged, vain, selfcentered and nearly psychotic and the friends and family she mentions look as bad, if not worse.
Oops.
Too bad for her, but good for us. It’s a revealing insight in how six years of Bushism on top of decades of has created a moral climate in which people like her, who does probably think of herself as a good person, can not only draw up plans to assault homeless people, the most vulnerable people in society, but do so openly and expect to be applauded for it! But what do you expect from a country whose leaders have started an illegal and immoral war, abandonded the victims of the greatest humanitarian disaster that hit their country in decades and have taken great pains to establish they are not bound by any laws?
In this context, I think Majikthise’s theory on “trickledown amoralism” is right:
I have a theory about crime that’s exactly the opposite of the “broken windows” theory. Broken Windows says you crack down on petty little crimes in order to stop bigger crimes. That’s bullshit. It’s the corruption at the top that breeds petty viciousness on the bottom. When people realize that the privileged can take whatever they want, a lot of folks will either cash in, or give up.
Read more about:
Rachel Moran, homeless, human rights
* Not the distinguished UC Berkeley law professor.
Bread, Racists & Circuses
I can’t get Channel 4 so haven’t seen for myself what this racism on Celebrity Big Brother row is about. So I had a little dig at YouTube and found this video of Jade Goody asking Jermaine Jackson (yes, that Jermaine Jackson) whether or not he is black and if so, how is it his brother is white. See for yourself and cringe:
I think that settles the question of whether Jade Goody is a racist or not, don’t you?
But leaving the jawdroppingly banal yet strangely fascinating onscreen behaviour aside, all the hooha in the world press over this, encouraged by Channel 4 and Endemol, is all just so much bread and circuses to pacify the proles. Look! Over there! Slebs! Behaving badly! I would not be at all surprised if the remaining three inmates, all of whom are hungry for fame, had come to some mutially beneficial arrangement with Endemol : how very odd that this happened just as rating slipped…
Lenin calls Bg Brother and other ‘choose your evictee’ type shows ‘placebo democracy’ and says they originate from the same political place as control orders and ASBOs, a way of allowing people an illusion of control so that they don’t notice the lack of real democracy.
That glass box, again. posted by lenin
The whole point of Endemol’s shit-fest on Channel 4 is to force together personalities so incompatible that normal human comity would be impossible, never mind solidarity under the stress of sensory deprivation and constant surveillance. Getting ‘celebrities’ on the show (three of whom are only ‘celebrities’ by dint of a previous connection with the show) therefore guarantees a daily hit of scandal, and therefore mega mega advertising revenues. Further, since C4 controls every condition obtaining in the show, and since their interventions are designed to be humiliating and bizarre, they can always confect a bit of controversy when phone-in rates slump and the tabloids find something else to gyrate over. And what is more, when the bad guy of the hour is evicted, a new balance is created and the recipient of much sympathy the day before can become the latest villain. The infinite malleability and masochism of the characters is one of the dramatic points on a desperately boring programme. So, rancour, humiliation, indignity and daily bullying are part of the mix, and it is entirely hypocritical for people who watch and like this show to complain about it.
[…]
can’t help but think of this whole ‘Neighbours from Hell’ drivel we get in the British press, in which readers are titillated and outraged with daily tales of torment from hideous people next-door or down the road. If it isn’t kids spitting and swearing, it’s old men flipping the bird, or trimming the hedges from over the fence. If it isn’t rowdy couples, it’s gyppos settling on the commons, and asylum seekers eloping from the back of a lorry. These are the people New Labour promises to “boot out” and leave to fend for themselves “in a crackdown on yobs”. These are the people who are expected to face ASBOs and “welfare disincentives” as part of the government’s Respect Action Plan. These are the families the government pledges to put in “Sin Bins”, a conceit that could quite easily have been supplied by Endemol. These are the people New Labour pledges to evict from the very country. New Labour’s campaign message – vote to evict the arsehole! Let them fend for themselves in the ghetto. The tabloids will feature pictures and descriptions of new arseholes every day and encourage readers to participate in a phone-in poll to demand eviction. A daily diorama of candidates for the Sin Bin will be the topic of quasi-anthropological inspection and curiosity, their fate to be decided by our placebo democracy..
There’s only one arsehole I want evicted and he’s sitting in No. 11 day-dreaming about his ‘legacy’ and ignoring the fuckups he’s created. Well, Tone, here’s your legacy in all her glorious ignorance and ill-educated spite. I give you Jade Goody, the ultimate product of Blair’s Britain:
Doesn’t she make you proud?
Read more: UK culture, UK politics, Racism, TV, Big Brother, Jade Goody, Jermaine Jackson