Madame editior wakes up to the ''cocaine threat''

we know this thanks to a rambling screed in wednesday (july 4) I.T, which to be honest i can't be arsed pointing out all the logical flaws and pathetic argument contained therein. however i'll do a few.

first the totally unsupported assertion...

''Cocaine has become a major threat to our society''

..contains the usefully vague word society. how is it a threat, and to what exactly? society isn't a thing after all.

next this statement...

''It is highly addictive and is associated with physical and psychological effects, especially when taken with alcohol. Five deaths from cocaine were recorded in dublins coroners court in a single day this year.''

just to make clear since madame doesn't is that didn't die a single day they died over 2 months in 2006 the cases just happened to fall on the same day

''and there have been a growing number of leg amputations''

i dealt with this already, this is in here for shock value.

this is just stupid...

''Cocaine related offences quadrupled''

really from 1 to 4? from 1000 to 4000? but oohh, it quadrupled that's big.

the best is last however

''But we must also send an unmistakable signal to young people that cocaine use is not only harmful to their health, but may have negative legal, psychological and social consequences for them.''

what. the. fuck.

did madame leave her brain at home or did she just wake up feeling particularly authoritarian and patronising that morning? does madame think that she somehow has gained some right to tell people what to do? is it only because they're ''young people'' and therefore must be morons that just need to be given a good talking to.

jesus h christ

Women injecting cocaine have had legs amputated......sort of

this was in fridays IT. a story about cocaine which is now apparently the new heroin to the media. the latest drug according to them anyway destroying our communities and with plenty of scope for salacious horror stories.

i think the beauty of cocaine use to certain media people is that it allows them to write about hubris... lots of celtic tiger cubs reaping the whirlwind from their consumerist/materialist or secularist lifestyles. and allows them to bemoan the (alleged) fall of family values, religion or ''community'' and/or the selfishness of our liberal/neo-liberal society.

like a lot of these drug stories there's lots of anecdote and assertions but not much actual reportage. this piece basically just repeats statements made at a ''conference on cocaine use'' with some opinion from the reporter thrown in. and also as usual it reports as effects of drug use effects which should be more readily laid at the illegality of drugs.

anyway to the title of the piece. you might wonder how many women had their legs amputated?

"At the moment, we have one amputee on our programme, but we have seen a number of others."

one. but they have seen a number of others. so how does cocaine use result in leg amputation? indirectly it turns out as they result from the use of dirty needles....

"There is a huge health problem among the client group we work with, a big rise in HIV infection rates, particularly a lot of abscesses, and more recently, for the first time in the 12 years I've been working in Saol, a number of amputations have happened because of blood clots and septicaemia from cocaine use."

the same as heroin incidentally but needle exchanges can't be offered or letting them buy new ones is out 'cause the government fears that might encourage it. so we had the same thing with heroin and now (apparently) with cocaine but there'll be no change in policy presumably because that might result in fewer horror stories with which to scare nice middle class kiddies. fewer HIV infections and other disgusting ailments. instead we'll go with ''drugs are baad, m'kay''.

next we have...

"And if it's not cocaine use it's family members involved in cocaine use, and there's families in huge debt, there are young people under severe threat, threat of life and limb, threat of death. Families are having to go out and borrow money. The whole area is absolutely swamped with cocaine," she told the conference.

''threat of life and limb'' once again because it's illegal and therefore the trade ends up in the hands of the most ruthless and violent. duh

other problems with the piece, assertions....

"In the community where I work in the north inner city of Dublin every street and almost every house has been affected by cocaine," Ms Byrne said.

Dr Brion Sweeney, a consultant psychiatrist working with the HSE's addiction services, told delegates that the State's response to the cocaine problem had been too slow and that the drug barons were winning the battle.

and

''The whole area is absolutely swamped with cocaine''

this bit...''that the drug barons were winning the battle'' is just priceless as it implies that our poor innocent children are being led astray by drug barons and if they didn't exist no-one would take drugs.

if anyone's wondering why i'm being so hard on people who are trying to help their fellow citizens it's this quote....

"We constantly struggle for funding. We do not have enough staff . . . we try to manage . . . A lot of my time is spent searching for funding when it should be spent actually delivering the service."

...that makes me think that a lot of these stories are are trotted out in an effort to squeeze money out of government. also illogical thinking annoys me

question and answers

let me save you from ever having to watch question and answers ever again with my handy template.

first off the panellists...

2 politicos, 1 government, 1 opposition. no programme is complete without the input of these gods of the irish nation. in fact they are so important that when the dail closes for a nice long summer break apparently politics stops cause the programme also goes on holidays

3 commentators. now a note on this, these tend to be members of a lobby group that get invited on when their particular hobby horse gets an airing.

if you happen to be a lobbyist you can get your hobby horse onto qanda on a slow news week by releasing a study or survey with preferably shocking finding. or so you will say, if they're not actually shocking muster some outrage and appeal to the damage it will do to (godsend to busybodies everywhere) that
usefully vague but positive word society. with statistics, something like 70% of teenagers said they know how to get heroin or that 9 out of 10 cats do not prefer whiskers, good and shocking

at least one of these commentators will undoubtedly be independent (relatively speaking in that they're not pushing a particular agenda today) these tend to do awkward things like pointing out the stupidity of your plan. just ignore them nobody will notice.

now the show goes like this......generally 3 questions are asked and ''answered''. brush up on these or better yet forget them completely, makes it easier on your eyes as theres no need to roll them in utter contempt as often.

audience member kicks it all off by asking a question..... surprise.

government minister. blah blah...we have spent 400 million euro (tap table for emphasis)...blah blah (more statistics) blah.

opposition guy. blah blah...waste...blah...when we were in government...blah blah blah.

lobbyist. blah blah... if we value our society... blah blah blah... more funding (never more money far too crass)... blah.

now repeat for all subsequent questions and shows. if you are none the wiser and have gained no insight about any of the topics, that's ok that's not what qanda is about. it's really just an avenue for propaganda, despite appearances no actual discussion took place, you just thought that's what happened what with all the talking and raised voices and emotion.

if you have actually learned something then something has gone wrong with someones spiel. or there was a really awkward panellist on.

the form of a discussion rather than actual discussion

i caught a bit of saturday view today and it just confirmed to me the reason why i don't listen to or watch political shows anymore. they basically only have the form of a debate, people sitting around together talking about issues of the day but unlike an actual debate there's no real information exchanged or real understanding of the views proffered.

the reason is the stupidity of the topics and the essentially talking head nature of the programmes by which i mean the tendency (it seems to me) of the participants to simply take turns to make speeches and not to actually have a debate. the discussion on these shows tends to be full of meaningless phrases and buzzwords which have very little meaning and convey no information and result in no actual argument but a kind of argument by label, i.e whether these phrases/buzzwords have a positive or negative connotations to the audience. the use of vaguely defined words or words that have an ambiguous meaning result in either misunderstandings or pretty meaningless answers.

that happens most with questions and answers where basically various interest groups and politico's get 3/4 of an hour to deliver un-illuminating propaganda. i'll do a separate post about that programme.

anyway back to saturday view and the very first question sets the tone....

is there a fear now that we are building more of an economy than a society ?

what i'd like to know if anyone has heard of a false dilemma? why is it asked as if the two were mutually exclusive? also the inherently vapid nature of the question renders the resultant answers both vague and pointless. first off we build neither an economy or a society, as both are the name we give to the emergent outcomes of the interactions between people.

they are not built as that word is usually used which implies working from a plan to get to a specific outcome. it's this kind of sloppy use of language which deludes all kinds of social engineers into thinking that with just enough legislation and spending that they can change the ''plan'' and build a better (as defined by themselves) society, economy or whatever.

take the examples above.... society, economy and some of the words used later in the show like quality of life, social cohesion, celebrating diversity. what the fuck do these mean exactly to people who used them? using words that have ambiguous meaning just results in other people not understanding exactly or even generally what you are saying. how the fuck can you have a discussion like that? what's the point of listening to a show like that?

take ''debates'' on immigration for example. celebrating diversity means what exactly? what actions does that entail? or the option usually expressed in opposition to that assimilation. assimilate to what exactly? what are the values that immigrants should have gained so that they may be deemed assimilated? who decides what these values are? but all you get on these shows are people bandying about these terms as though these terms had not only a very definite meaning but that also the audience knows them.

totally fucking pointless waste of time.

sorry about the ranting nature of the post

bloody flies

a freaking fly just committed suicide in my cup of tea. and a cup of the good stuff too, well the more expensive stuff at least. incredibly disappointing.

fudge it: part II, or do-gooders propose a stupid idea

this from the IT about the first ''national seminar on taxation, health and tobacco''(1)

Ash Ireland is campaigning for the Government to follow other European countries and remove tobacco products from the basket of items which are used to measure the CPI.

Ash argues that if tobacco products can be removed from the CPI - as has been done in other EU countries - the Government will have greater flexibility to increase tobacco prices because related inflation increase will not be an issue.

i wrote about this before removing tobacco (or anything else) from the CPI means that any tax increase will have no effect only on the reported inflation rate not on the actual inflation rate. the whole point of a CPI is to attempt to give the central bank and government some information on the actual inflation. so this idea is immensely stupid.

if we were to follow the logical stupidity of Ash Ireland in say, measures against climate change , we could remove CO2 from the list of greenhouse gases. this would allow us to pump out as much CO2 as we liked and it wouldn't affect the climate. if we say it doesn't have any effect then it doesn't have any effect!! wooo hooo!!!.

what a bunch of assholes.

now for rhetorical sleight of hand...

Ash Ireland chairman Professor Luke Clancy said raising tax on tobacco would be easy to administer, easy to justify on public health grounds and would guarantee an increased tax take while reducing consumption

public health grounds used to refer to dangers that were a public danger, in other words that affect anyone involuntarily like communicable diseases. now apparently it means anything that affects the health of an individual member of the public even if it can't affect anyone else.

"It is important for the Government to remove tobacco from CPI if they are serious about tobacco control and the denormalization of smoking," he said.

(emphasis is mine) good to see social engineering and manipulation is still around to make sure we make the right choices(2)

(1) a national seminar, makes it sound official and wide ranging, however it's not exactly non partisan...

The event was organised by Ash Ireland in conjunction with The Irish Cancer Society, Irish Heart Foundation and the Research Institute for a Tobacco Free Society.

(2)the right choice is whatever do-gooders tell you it is, not what you think it is. just thought i'd clear that up for you.

greens talking rubbish on housing

a story about the greens here....

Speaking in Dublin today party housing spokesman Ciarán Cuffe said: "We will end the culture of development-led planning, which has left many communities without the basic amenities of schools, hospitals and access to public transport.'' (1)

what a complete load of arse, all these problems have been created by the slow, bureaucratic responses of the government departments involved. politicos seem to give the impression that developers, apply for and get permission, and then build an estate in about 2 weeks. nobody could see this coming, it's all the fault of the greedy developers (boooo).

as anybody with an eye in their head could tell you the time from planning application to even the start of construction takes at least months and possibly years. they can be seen coming. even the much shorter period from getting permission to construction lasts at the very least a month.

even when the estates are built the basic amenities are still not provided, how can you blame developers for that? the primary school in the town where i work has been gathering pre-fabs for the past few years. surely the shock of estates appearing out of nowhere should have been overcome by now and new buildings provided?

one of the ''solutions'' that i've heard mentioned is for planning permission to be withheld until facilities are built. a marvellous plan i'm sure save for the massive retraction in the number of houses built while we wait for the government to get the finger out. it's pretty amazing that developers and builders are made out to be the bad guy because they do what they do (i.e build things) well. apparently not allowed to show up government

(1) in fairness the greens are not the only ones who talk this crap, the article just happened to be about the greens. hardly matters now of course, unless bertie decides he needs their support.

oh no the meedja are out to get bertie

the times today has a selection of letters from people who seem somewhat irked that journalists and papers might dare to question the taoiseachs receipt of £30,000 from his landlord (???).

standard pooh-poohing that you tend to get from party hacks or from true believers, with plenty of illogical rubbish masquerading as some kind of opinion.

letter writers 1 and 2 try to imply that it's unimportant and implore the times to get back to real issues like health, crime, education, blah, blah, blah....

letter writer 1 tries the sob story approach, bertie's being ''hounded'' by vincent brown, the break up of his marriage and so on. (is that a violin i can hear playing mournfully in the back round?)

letter writer 2 says (this is the best)....

i am sick and tired of reading about bertie's £30,000 sterling (equal to weekly wage of a premiership football player) during this election.

equal to weekly wage of a premiership football player? is that all? trivial, laughable really, ha ha ha. not really worth worrying about then is it? but then i remember that 30,000 sterling is around 40,000 euro give or take a few thousand, and that's not adjusted for 13 years of inflation. that works out as one and a half times my yearly salary (at least) so no i don't think it's unimportant or trivial.

letter writer 3 thinks the coverage is unfair and unbalanced, bertie shouldn't be questioned on it 'cause kenny didn't get 30,000 from his landlord, so kenny can't be questioned about money he didn't get so it's unfair.... or something. anyway it's unfair.

i used to think that these kinds of letters could only be written by party members as damage control, until i got in a conversation in a pub (i know) with a guy who thought that this story was all down to the fact that the irish media wanted to like the british media, media peer pressure if you will. and nothing else. needless to say i wasn't convinced by that hypothesis.

sunday indo wants the greens to win.

lol, of course they don't.

today, fianna fail managed to get a typically soft focus interview with bertie ahern into the sunday indo to coincide with the announcement of the general election date.(1) the pr guys are earning their shillings there anyway.

some more enda kenny bashing in a piece by brendan o'connor, though the article is more about the sindos other hobby horse, the abolition of stamp duty. it's full of statements like..

And it might seem like an obvious one now that stamp duty is one of the major issues in this election if not the major bone of policy contention, but that's only because we banged on about it so much we normalised it

i personally doubt that it's a major election issue as o'connor himself makes clear, just cause the sindo goes on and on about it doesn't mean other people care as much.

For years we had all experienced anecdotal evidence about how first-time buyers were unable to buy because of it, how second-time buyers who wanted to have a kid couldn't upgrade from one bedroom to two because of it

that might be true, but removing it wouldn't automatically result in lower prices.

(1)doesn't appear to be a link to it on the website.

wille o'dea is a gobshite

i know it's pretty much a pro government paper but for some reason the sunday indo feels the need to give minister/master of obfuscation wille o'dea a column, which seems pointless 'cause they do a good job of kissing bertie's ass all on their own. anyway the first line of the article, unsurprisingly a personal attack on enda kenny, starts.....

it's hard to know what's more repugnant: fine gaels capacity for dirty tricks, or its sanctimonious holier-than-thou posturing while indulging in them.

ha ha ha ha ha, oh minister, your fine sense of irony really cracks me up. i especially liked that bit about sanctimonious holier-than-thou posturing.

in a previous post i said i wouldn't vote for fine gael, i'd like to amend that. i don't want to vote for fine gael but i'll have to just to get that smug, pompous collection of cunts (also sometimes known as fianna fail) out of power.

damn it.