Apr. 19th, 2006

Oh, Canada

Apr. 19th, 2006 12:24 pm
thessalian: (contemplative)
1) Ham-Fisted Editor has done it yet again. The last time he was in, he bade me write an email to an author whose paper has accidentally been placed in limbo for six months or so. In this email, he blamed it on admin and said that admin should be, and most likely would be, replaced with machines. Since admin = me, I was not pleased by this. But there was something else that didn't sit right with the email he wanted sent. He said, "Still needs revision, see referees' comments". Except the only referee we had commenting on it since its resubmission was our statistician, who said it needed no changes. I think he went through the old file, dug up the old referees' comments from back in July, didn't check the dates, assumed they were recent and judged her paper based on that. It would have been fun if I'd scanned those and sent them to the author only to have her come back and say, "But I fixed those!" *sigh* So I've emailed the editors and explained to them why this email is not right in the politest possible terms. Now, here's the question: could a machine look at something you told it to do and inform you that, "No, you don't want to do this, you will be embarrassing yourself and it makes no sense"?

2) The William Hamlet Hunt thing. For those of you who belong to no LJ communities or just manage to avoid the ones this has hit so far, here're the basics. Woman gets attacked by guy. Kicked in the face and generally beat up. And all of a sudden, it's turned into this big LJ viral cause thing. Yes, it is horrible that this woman got attacked by this man. Yes, it is great that we have names, and can try to track the fucker down (at least if we live in the US). But why is it that when you read about this sort of thing happening every single day in the news, no one gives an almighty damn beyond saying, "Oh, that's a pity", but when it's a bit of LJ news, it's somehow personal and therefore starts a crusade? Is it the illusion of intimacy LJ gives? Or is it just because the girl's pretty? I'm betting that if I got smacked around and had the sheer balls to do this kind of thing, no one beyond my personal circle of friends would actually give much of a shit. Because I am not drop-dead gorgeous by conventional standards (and let's face it; that sort of goth look is conventional whatever the kindergoths say), my pain would be the same as the pain of all the other people in the news; relegated to a "Oh, what a shame" status by all but my friends. I know it sucks that this kind of violence happens. And it's nice that people are trying to do something about it. But why do they only do it when there's the illusion of intimacy and/or a pretty girl involved? Besides, spamming LJ communities at random about this is only going to relegate it to "that sucks, oh well", unless the whole thing is suspected of being a hoax. LJ has a lot of those, too.

Livejournal's a weird thing. Well, it is. It's part soapbox, part social hotspot, part AP ticker, part private journal (if you use your privacy locks, anyway), part art gallery, part firing range. Like so many other things in life, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. You can go and randomly troll people if you want to. You can do huge political rants and achieve a certain level of fame. You can turn the whole thing into a showpiece. You can use it like you'd use a regular diary, whether other people are allowed to read it or not. Or you can just seldom update and leave the thing to rot. Entirely up to you. However, it tends to mean that if you do just use it as a general journal, source of information and amusement (communities) and a way to keep your long-distance friends in touch with what you're up to, you have to put up with a lot of bullshit. Random trolls, hoaxes, memes that will not die, LJ fads, drama and sheer wank just seems to hit every so often. And because we're all an average of six LJ users away from anybody else in true Kevin Bacon style, we all get to hear about it unless we're the most casual of LJ users.

Funnier still, this whole beaten women thing happens just after we in England start hearing about this draft guideline that states that men who apologise and show remorse after beating their partner should be spared a custodial sentence. Yes, I know the prisons are overcrowded. However, look at it like this: the man is married to this woman and is now hitting her. He must have put on a very good act to convince her that he was not the sort of person who would do that. Therefore, it's not exactly unfeasible that, when he says "I'm sorry" and looks all remorseful in court, he might be lying. If prison overcrowding is really that much of a problem, stop jailing pensioners who are doing a no-pay protest on the obscene council tax bills they're getting. Jail is for people who present a danger to society, not for little old men who are sick of having the government renege on its promise to take care of its people in their old age by taking them for every cent they put into their government pension over the years. But between this and the new take on rape that gives the men the benefit of the doubt instead of the woman (thank you, lady who took a case to court when you couldn't remember if it was consensual or not), no woman is ever going to want to bring up a case against a man who's assaulting her ever again. And yet LJ gets up in arms about a man who's already being chased by police. Yes, I understand that this is to ensure that they do their jobs, but as of now, it feels like the legal system in this country's job is to ensure that women are allowed to live in fear as long as it doesn't inconvenience them too much. Well, a little bit more than the rest of the population anyway.

It occurs to me that the world really is going to hell, or at least this country is. The men who shot de Menezes are going free. Rape trials are a joke and they're trying to make it easier for husbands to beat wives (or vice versa, I assume, though you don't hear about that so often). Tony Blair insists that he will stick with his NHS reforms despite the fact that they're destroying the Service. The government pension is dying a death (without a decent government pension or a properly functional national health service, why the hell are we paying NI?), there's that stupid Abolition of Parliament Act and I don't think the government could possibly care less about the will of the people than it does right now.

I want to move back to Canada. I want to go to a country where the biggest bit of news in terms of politics is that the Tory PM is going to the mat on giving parents a child-care allowance as opposed to a national childcare programme and the fact that the US is shoring up its borders and making mandatory things that I always did to enter the US anyway (passports for us, ID cards for them). Where "People from Alberta Want Respect" is a major news item because there's really not much else. I could romanticise it, but frankly, I don't need to. The people are generally polite, the national health service works, the government doesn't screw its people over on a regular basis and they have a history of not getting involved in idiotic wars (ref: both Gulf Wars and Vietnam). Of course, they also have a reputation for kicking arse when they do get involved in a war (come on; they not only turned back American invaders; they pushed the US army out of their country, through what are now at least five states, burned the White House flat, then said, "I think we've made our point; we're going home to party now"), but that's kind of beside the point.

I want to live in a sane country again! Waaaaah!

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