BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1d ago
The whole "private property cannot be seized" has to be one of the greatest missteps by the founders of the USA. There are lots of times where taking private property makes total sense (like income tax for example), even the US's current civil asset forfeiture regime leaves a lot to be desired.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
1d ago
Americans really need to brought down a peg in their delusions of self grandeur to the same level as the rest of humanity. Yes they'll wail and whine and throw tantrums about being seen as the same as rest of us but we have a duty to not humour them, after all, as they say: when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
The top level post below yours is uncritically discussing the following proposition: "is our culture good because it is American, or is it American because it is good". From the perspective of someone in Europe the complete non-consideration of the possibility that "American culture" may, in fact, not be good is galling. It's as if the possibility doesn't even register in these people's minds.
It's always satisfying to see the mighty brought low and while I have no particular love for China when the inevitable inevitably happens I'll bring out my deckchair and grab a bag of popcorn so I can watch and make snide quips from the sidelines.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
5d ago
Fair enough, with that I agree, it did feel slightly "off".
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
5d ago
I disagree, I don't think it was boring at all, surprisingly this was the first I've heard of China's new Free Trade experiment.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
14d ago
Yep, I'm talking about that. I would say that's not a completely false description, the whole reason this kerfuffle started in the first place was that the claimant got arrested for saying mean things online about some people who had said mean things about her online and she took the force to court over the wrongful arrest and then the force started prevaricating and delaying but now the truth has come out about how this was indeed a wrongful arrest where unnecessary physical force was used.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
14d ago
Hey, we all have our needs you know...
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
Neither are thunderstorms, but I find them quite welcome when they're part of the monsoon after two months of the hot season and very unwelcome when I have to bike through them in January in the UK.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
Birthday: October 9, 1,830,656 BC
Location: Just behind the third cobweb after you turn right down the landing of the entrance of the CvC castle.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
Sure, if there's some sort of clause in the contract or disciplinary policy saying you must not do anything bringing the company into disrepute (which yes, most well drafted contracts and disciplinary policies will contain). Equally, even if so the requirement for procedural fairness will mean the person would first have to be suspended then a hearing would have to be arranged and held which all takes time during which the mob will move onto the next issue du jour meaning they won't get their blood when they are baying for it regardless which acts as a factor discouraging such mobs from forming in the first place.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
I want to stop hearing what Americans think in certain but not all areas, much like how I might like to listen to a rock band during a concert but not if they're playing at full blast at 11PM on a Wednesday in my neighboring apartment while I am trying to go to sleep.
Just checked, I'm still not in jail. I'll update tomorrow and let you know if I've been detained.
EDIT: Still not detained, the bobbies really need to up their game...
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
Oh, I agree it's not unidentified. It's loud and proud foreign influence...
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
A wrongful arrest can be expunged and removed from your record quite quickly and if handled fast can have much less of an impact on your life and career trajectory than a wrongful firing.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
It's a place where underage girls are regularly raped by gangs of Pakistanis who kidnap and imprison them. Is that acceptable?
Nope, that's misleading as well, in the same sense that saying the US is a place where innocent Black people regularly get killed by the police is misleading. That also happens more than once a year in the US.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
The mean tweets definitely play a part in people getting arrested but almost always there's more to the story and when there's not in the unlikely event of an arrest it (eventually) gets classed as a miscarriage of justice (see how Northamtonshire Police was recently forced to pay a £50k fine for a wrongful arrest of someone for just "mean tweets", not to mention their legal costs and damages to the person who was wrongfully arrested).
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
People who have never been to my town feel confident to tell me what life in my town is like.
Oh, very much so. Perhaps Americans can also deign to stop trying to talk about how bad things are like in the UK without having a shred of lived experience (much as I dislike that phrase) of the place. Saying that the UK is a country where people regularly get arrested for saying mean things online is like saying the US is a country where schools regularly get shot up. It's misleading at best and outright false at worst.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
15d ago
None of this would ever have happened in a non-At Will jurisdiction. The mob could howl as much as they wanted and the boss would just go "Sorry, the laws of this country prevent me from firing this person without good cause, if you don't like it vote to change things" and this would suddenly blow over.
There's a reason all this "firing" people for saying bad things stuff seems to be localized to the US (on both sides of the aisle).
Or else you continued to get laughed at and have power moved away from you because the rest of the (western at least) world stops accepting you as the primus inter pares and then lose the exorbitant privilege of running 6% yearly deficits because you have the world's reserve currency and can freely export away your inflation. If the UK tried the level of profligacy which has become standard in the US we'd end up under an IMF programme in 2 years.
The levels of contempt I am hearing against the US and Americans in my personal circle are basically the highest they have ever been. This isn't just a me thing, there was a recent piece in the FT how the appropriate response for the EU now given the US reducing its support for Ukraine is to hit back hard on US tech with tariffs rather than the "roll over and take it" with the 15% tariffs they accepted earlier this year. It's now becoming fairly standard that when I meet someone new from the US they'll volunteer by themselves unprompted within the first few minutes that they "are one of the good ones"...
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
18d ago
Yep, equivalently US citizens who move to Europe largely move to big cities and live in apartments.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
18d ago
Our version of single family home in Britain is a bit different from that in the US. This picture from your link shows a nice symmetrical structure in the middle which Americans might think is a single house for a single family. In reality it's two houses (semi detached) for two different families which share a central wall.
Fully detached houses etc. do exist but they are very much an exception and even then we don't have "suburbia" in the sense the US does, you'll often find such fully detached houses a short walk away from a 6 storey tall council estate and a commercial area a few minutes away too. There is very little "this is where houses are, full stop.".
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
18d ago
I've lived in a big apartment block which had exactly 0 year space and the nearest grocery store was literally on our ground floor (though it was more expensive than the supermarket 5 minutes walk away). And yeah I had access to a well maintained very large green space two minutes from the apartment lobby much bigger than the yard even massive detached houses have.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
18d ago
Agreed. The whole "suburb" thing as defined here in uniquely American. Here in the UK we also have homes with a yard and a dog and a car (though some of the most expensive properties in central London won't have an exclusive yard and potentially not even off street parking given that they literally share walls with their neighboring super expensive properties (they are terraced, not detached). They are amazing places to live (hence the prices) but Cowen's phrasing would put them as not "attractive".
Plus the whole controlling your school district is a very American thing as well, it just seems quaint and weird in the UK: schooling should be run by professionals, not the whims of a bunch of parents who don't know shit about pedagogy. As we move to a more and more multi polar world US citizens need to realize that the rest of the world doesn't think like them and while in the past they had the luxury of being able to ignore what we said without much consequence this is fast dissipating and they will now need to learn some cultural sensitivity like the rest of us.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
19d ago
Both things can be true at once.
BurdensomeCount
Misinformation superspreader
20d ago
Honestly I would not claim to know what any of these people were thinking, remember this was said in the early 20th century so their standards of civilisation and decadence were probably quite different from ours, but the general sentiment of Americans being seen first as uncivilised barbarians and transitioning straight to being parvenus when they finally get wealth still is as relevant today as it would have been then, if you ask my non American social circle (the Americans I know would half agree and half vigorously deny it, in the "doth protest too much" sense).
Currently there's an incentive for people to act in dodgy ways to make money because unless the fact that they acted illegally can be proven to a criminal standard (high bar) the worst that can happen to them is that the proceeds of their acting in a dodgy way can be taken away from them, which is a probability less than 1 event. Hence there's some non-zero probability they'll get to keep the proceeds of their dodgy behaviour so the expected value not accounting for the time it takes to set up and run the dodgy scheme is positive as the worst that can happen to you unless you're extremely stupid and write down "I'm going to do this illegal thing to make a lot of money" and mail it to the police is that you're put back on Square 1 where you started as if you'd never done the illegal thing in the first place. The incentives are lined up towards making people want to do dodgy things.
With a proper civil asset forfeiture scheme you can have rules like "if we prove to a certain standard that you did something bad then we're not just going to take the money you made through your illegal actions, we'll also come after a portion of the rest of the wealth you own" which can make the expected value of dodgy behaviour negative because now you're not just risking wasting your time and effort when you do something illegal but rather you're risking actual bankruptcy which helps to keep people's incentives to not do illegal but profitable things aligned.
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