Tag: FPQ

Wednesday. Fandango’s Provocative Question once again. I’ve think this morning was one of my longest telephone sessions yet – I think 4 of the calls each took about ¾h, and my ear was sore by the end. It is almost 3PM and getting showered is still on my “to do” list, so the upshot is, I’m gonna try to keep this brief. Today, Fandango asks us:

Do you believe, with respect to the judicial system (or systems) in place where you live, that justice is, indeed, blind? Why do you feel that way?

Okay, brief. Probably the most obvious place to start is race. In the our most recent census of 2011, the population of England and Wales is around:

This information comes from the UK Government itself.

Now, in England and Wales, we are about 60+ million. This number comes from Worldometers. Now, we’re maybe not the largest country, but not a bad sample number, don’t you agree?

So, if justice were blind, don’t you think we’d expect to see broadly those numbers reflected in the prison population? Okay, not exactly, because there are so many variants here, but broadly. Instead, what we see is:

England/Wales Prison Population (c.80,000)

these numbers from Wikipedia.

So, at this point, I shouldn’t have to say anything further. It’s not really something we need to debate, because the numbers speak for themselves. If you’re BME, you’re more likely to be banged up.

But it’s not just race. In the last few years here. We have seen big restrictions here on Legal Aid. (Legal Aid is the help you get here from the state to defend yourself, or to take somebody to court. It was pretty tough anyway but has been toughened further.) So the bottom line is: don’t tangle with the law unless you can afford to do so. The result is that a rich person can use the law far more to their advantage than a poor person. So, the discrimination is very much based of poverty, too.

Wednesday. Fandango’s Provocative Question once again. I’ve just had a busy morning and am having a late lunch, so I’ll try and get a few words down now, and just knock it into publishable shape tonight. This week, Fandango asks:

Are you satisfied with your life at the moment. If so, what is it that brings you the greatest satisfaction? If not, what might you do to achieve satisfaction in your life?

I think the difficult thing here is not so much defining what satisfaction is, but recognising that there are several aspects of life, each of which might be satisfactory/unsatisfactory in its own right. Coming up with an aggregate is not so easy.

Some examples, not exhaustive. And I’m going to use the Columns Block just to wind up all you classic-lovers:

Off the top of my head. As you can see, some of the things I am dissatisfied with, I can’t actually do anything about. So, in terms of what do I do?, it’s a case of tough luck.

Maybe you can read something into my overall satisfaction level from the relative lengths of these lists? I dunno, if you can, that’s probably just as good a guess as I can make.

Wednesday. Fandango’s Provocative Question once again. I’ve just had a busy morning and am having a late lunch, so I’ll try and get a few words down now, and just knock it into publishable shape tonight. This week, Fandango asks:

Have you ever committed a crime? If yes, tell us about it to the extent you feel comfortable doing so. If not, is there a crime you might like to commit (i.e., fantasized about committing) if you knew in advance that you’d never be caught or prosecuted for it?

Now you mention it, something like this did come up, but not the other day. This was five or six weeks ago, and was more along the lines of what we considered to be a crime. I don’t remember who posed it, except that it was a prompt on WordPress.

My definition of “crime” is something that goes against my morals. Easy. Specifically, if something happens to be a crime in the statute books, I couldn’t care less. The only thing I judge things on is my own standards.

According to that definition, I don’t think I have committed a crime.

But Fandango supplies a definition of crime which is different to mine. He says that crime is: an action or omission that constitutes an offense that may be prosecuted by the state and is punishable by law. It’s can also be an action or activity that, although not illegal, is considered to be evil, shameful, or wrong.

Compare that definition to mine, and half of his definition, I don’t care a jot. Going on Fandango’s definition, I have probably committed many crimes (the most recent of which was probably less than an hour ago). And no, I’m not going to tell you about it.

The second part of Fandango’s question is more interesting.

The short answer is that yes, I would certainly entertain the idea of doing so, although I’m not sure I’d have the balls (or the means) to actually go through with it.

The not get caught bit is irrelevant. The circumstance would be my terminal illness. Rather than just fizzle out quietly, I would love to buy a gun, and take some evil motherf*cker out with me. Some politician who had consistently voted to allow other people to suffer, for example? Somebody who had maybe wanted to wage war on other people? Maybe some neo-nazi? But you know, the notion of doing the world one last favour before I went, by removing them from it.

The trouble with that notion is that my definition of nasty will not be the same as the next guy’s. So I wouldn’t be making an objective decision – there’s no guarantee that my judgement is any better than their’s. In any case, a lot of people are probably better staying alive, just because every word they utter, they do more to harm their cause than I ever could.

I read the other week about the 75yo “activist” somewhere in upstate New York – and I wouldn’t necessarily dismiss that idea out of hand – I can imagine that lots of people are pretty angry about stuff by that time!

Wednesday. Fandango’s Provocative Question once again. This week, he asks:

Do you believe there is such a thing as ESP? Or is what some suggest to be ESP merely that there are people who are highly intuitive and are very good at reading people’s very subtle signals?

ESP? Nah, not for me.

I think broadly in human history, we started off not understanding thinghs, and called them supernatural. Or will of God – I lump the two in the same category. Then bit by bit people started understanding little teeny bits, and called it science. For example, why the sky is blue in the day, black at night. What stars are, and why the stars appear to move in the sky when we observe them night after night.

I just think that ESP is one of those things we don’t yet understand. There are lots of things that we don’t understand.

Even my own experience with stroke – strokes are suficiently common, you’d think we would know everything about them, right? Wrong. I started getting we don’t know from about the second question. Really. There is an awful lot we don’t know, especially if we want to start talking specifically about the brain.