No Passport, No Defibrillator

This post from Mahablog, regarding attempts to ensure illegal immigrants cannot receive medical treatment, got me thinking about conservative attitudes. I think the key line is:

There’s an old saying, “cutting off the nose to spite the face.” It refers to doing something for revenge or spitefulness that is really self-destructive. This describes the Right’s attitudes toward health care reform. Apparently it's more important to punish illegal aliens than to provide health care for ourselves.

Actually, I'd say it describes a common conservative attitude towards almost anything to do with the government helping people. All recipients of governmental aid can be divided (theoretically, at least, and probably crudely as well) into two groups; those that "deserve" that aid, and those that do not (the specific metric by which one is judged to deserve aid is a topic for another time). Almost by definition, a conservative will tend to believe that the most important thing to do is to minimise the latter group. Liberals, I would argue, tend to focus on ensuring the former group is maximised.

Of course, not only is the liberal approach more empathic (a word I haven't used in a little while, so I feel OK deploying it again), but it has the benefit of not being impossible to achieve. The conservative approach may move the line regarding what qualifies as "deserving", but it is fundamentally obvious that doing so will not decrease the number of people getting something they don't deserve using the new metric, because any line you draw will always lead to people just short of the line claiming to have crossed it [1]. You either accept that, or you give away nothing (which may or may not be something the conservatives in question want, though none of those that I've spoken to have ever admitted to that).

As far as I can see, allowing people who (arguably) shouldn't have X to receive it is simply a cost to be factored in to the process of doing what we're supposed to as a society, which is giving X to those in need of it. You can argue that people don't deserve something, but it seems a fairly weaksauce argument to claim that people who do deserve something shouldn't get it to make sure that those who don't deserve it can't have it either. Contra maha, it isn't a cut-nose-spite-face type of deal, since those doing the cutting know full well they still get to be able to breathe and smell the roses, but that makes the attitude all the worse.

[1] I grant that whilst the number of cheats may not go down, one could ensure the total cost could. Interestingly, though, conservative discussion of the issue often focuses on the people doing the cheating, rather than the specific amounts involved. I admit that that's not always the case, though. Besides, either an amount of money being lost is big enough that I'd be in favour of stronger measures to police the current line (rather than moving it, and wherever possible that the policing be done ex post facto, i.e. we catch cheats after they've cheated, rather than holding up potentially truthful applications interminably), or it isn't, in which case I would suggest it's not worth getting worked up about in any case.

Five Things I Learned In Munich

1. Munich airport buses are tremendously badly labelled. Ingolstadt, however, is very nice at this time of year.

2. It is physically impossible to eat too many Bavarian sausages, or quaff too many litres of beer. It is possible, however, to get home and find none of the clothes you wore in the previous week fit anymore.

3. Nothing says safe sex like an anthropomorphic leering penis with a bunch of flowers. Of course, why bother attempting to acquire prophylactics at all when you can simply move directly to the Travel Pussy? (NSFW, though God help you if you need me to tell you that).

4. Randomly slapping objects with your penis is an entirely acceptable hobby in continental Europe (known as "swaffling"). Limiting this behaviour to the sides of buildings, however, is a weird fetish, and will lead to social ostracism. [1]

5. Bavarian sheep are fucking psychotic. The picture below captures an unsuspecting Ibb mere nanoseconds before a brutal ovine attack. Sharp-eyed observers will spot the malefactor preparing to strike.

I'll probably post more zoo pictures up later in the week. In conclusion, though: it's great to be home.

[1] So Dr F and Waffles tell me, anyways.

Squid Migratory Patterns

Probably little to no posting for the next week, folks; I have a top-level talk in London to not screw up tomorrow, and after that I'll be sampling the beer and maths of Munich (mostly beer, obviously), and will not return to the North East until around 9pm next Monday.

Everyone behave whilst I'm gone.

No... Ticket!

Every time, every single time that I assume I've maxed out on US-related WTF, I come across something new and uniquely disturbing. Jericho, Arkansas is a town so small (population 174) that it no longer has any businesses, but it has 7 police officers. That's 4% of the population, which the city can't pay for meaning they're cutting back on fripperies like fire department. Their desperate need to pay for themselves means it's now apparently almost impossible to get them to respond to emergency calls, because they're too busy writing as many parking tickets as humanly possible, so as to raise funds.

And, when you go to court to contest bullshit tickets, like fire chief Don Paye (edit: Don Payne, apologies) did last week, the cops will show up too, and they will fucking shoot you.

Seriously. They will fucking shoot you. Right there, in court. In the back.

Also, turns out the tickets were void, because the department had no power to write them in the first place.

So, let's summarise. A police force a city can't afford hand out tickets that it can't legally write like goddamn confetti in order to keep itself afloat, still ends up costing the city so much they start getting their fire engines repossessed. Then, when you stiff the guy in charge of using whatever engines were left to stop your city bursting into fucking flames, and he objects, you shoot him in the back.

I believe the relevant word here is guuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh?

At Last I Am Victorious

Confirmation came through yesterday afternoon that my corrected thesis has been passed. I have thus now graduated from telling people "I will be a doctor conditional on not screwing up my corrections" to "I will be a doctor conditional on not burning Durham to the ground by accident." Whilst the latter scenario cannot be ruled out entirely, this is still a tremendously positive step.

Further Competition

Although a casual glance at my various comment threads might suggest Chemie and I agree on almost nothing, now that her own particular facet of the blogohedron has been up and running for a while, I'm adding the URL to "The Competition". If nothing else, reading some of her posts will make you more adventurous in the kitchen, as well as causing insatiable cravings for gummi bears.

Check her out at "Sniffing the Snowdrops".

Who Are You Trying To Kid?

Whilst driving into work this morning I ended up stuck behind a bus for long enough to get a good luck at the advertisement printed on its rear end. "LOVE CULTURE?" it asked innocuously. "LOVE MIDDLESBROUGH".

Middlesbrough has culture now? It has a culture, in the sense that the various cannibalistic mutant tribes that haunt its industrial wasteland have their own language and traditions (the "knacking" of anyone caught wearing a brightly-coloured shirt in the town centre on Friday nights is a particularly solemn tradition, though the yearly sacrifice to the heathen Gods to ensure next year's child prostitute crop is bountiful comes a close second). It has cultures, insofar as at least some of the vast array of moulds and fungi that stain the buildings must have been deliberately placed there by insane scientists to allow to grow into new and deadly strains. But culture?

Please. This is a town whose two most culturally significant local landmarks are a giant metal colour-shifting phallus, and a piece of modern art my brother spent ten years believing to be a climbing frame. A place so grim that it gives people a new appreciation for a shithole like Hull. A locale so relentlessly unpleasant that Captain Cook allowed himself to be horribly massacred by Hawaiians just so he wouldn't have to choke down another parmo.

It's difficult to know what amuses me more, the fact that the original advert I saw on that bus was covered in mud and seen through a haze of exhaust fumes (thus ensuring the picture of my hometown that accompanied the website address above was at least an accurate representation of what lies in wait for visitors) or the fact that the first time I went to the site above I was greeted by the phrase "Supergay!" in huge letters.

Visit Middlesbrough. It's supergay. Don't actually dress gay, though, or we'll fuckin' knack ya.