271–280 of 585 posts
As someone who attempted suicide almost ten years ago, I'm disheartened by how cold-hearted the comments on this article are. Accusations of certain wording being "woke" or "PC" and completely ignoring the substance of the article itself, as if the wording were the tragedy here. If we must have this discussion, I stopped using the phrase "committed suicide" when I found out it was a relic of when it was illegal and s…
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>if software developers screw up Well, yes, they did screw up, but the fallout was amplified 100x by bad management.
"The Horizon IT system contained "hundreds" of bugs[0]." If your accounting software has hundreds of bugs then you are really in the deep shit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#:~...
This was depressing to read. Failures at so many levels. 1. Immediately after Horizon was rolled out, issues were reported. But ignored 2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"…
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I don't like the tabloids either but what exactly do you propose we do? Are you sure it's a good idea to undermine the freedom of the press? A government with the power to censor the tabloids is also a government with the power to censor the news outlets that you do like. I'd be careful about opening that can of worms.
Aren't defamation laws in the UK almost shockingly restrictive? How the hell are they able to operate?
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My favourite inspiration goes the opposite direction. The United States has this Supreme Court, a final Court of Appeal, politically independent and empowered even to decide that the government's actions are illegal. Sounds great. The UK had this rather antique thing called the "Lords of Appeal in Ordinary" aka "Law Lords" who were in theory just some Lords (ie people who are arbitrarily in the upper chamber of the P…
The Prime Minister can influence earlier in the chain though: they get to approve appointments to the Lords as a whole. Who then gets appointed to positions within the Lords is none of their business, but they can tip the scale if they need to. It's actually for this reason that for hundreds of years until the early 21st century there was real concern about having a Catholic prime minister. There was even hand-wringi…
None of this matters for the Supreme Court, and thus for about 15 years now. It's true that the Supreme Court's justices are made life peers (its original members were of course already peers having previously constituted the Law Lords, but new members are granted a peerage) - however that's merely a convention, if you don't make them a life peer it makes no difference to their job on the court, it just makes you look petty. I don't even think it's contempt now, because the law saying they should be elevated was repealed - unless the new law also says they must be given a peerage when they get the job, I glanced through it and didn't find that, but it's a huge law because making a Supreme Court was not its main purpose.
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What makes “committed suicide” any more plain or honest than “died by suicide”?
It assigns agency to the person who died. Think about it this way: I have relative who is vegan, so she has been trying to convince me to kill myself for many years now. I can still choose whether I do it though, and obviously I chose not to so far, although during COVID I didn’t have much other social interaction, so I nearly went through with it. I had agency throughout though. I’m not dead because I chose not to g…
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The British legal system is and always has been a litany of injustices dressed up in formal attire. To be avoided at all costs.
Indeed. The goal of the British legal system is to appear serious. Justice is an occasional byproduct.
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I don't like the tabloids either but what exactly do you propose we do? Are you sure it's a good idea to undermine the freedom of the press? A government with the power to censor the tabloids is also a government with the power to censor the news outlets that you do like. I'd be careful about opening that can of worms.
The United States (famously) has stronger free speech protections and weaker libel/slander laws, yet seems to have less of an issue with tabloids. Is there maybe more of a divide between what's alloweable for "public figures" versus private citizens? Or maybe even our right-wing rags are more skeptical of the government? I don't know what the difference is, but you seem to see less of this sort of thing, gross as our…
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"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.
Except colloquially no one today thinks the word has any bearing on whether the victim looks bad. It just means they're responsible for the act. I guess some people take comfort in the idea that suicide is thrust on people and they take no responsibility for their actions.
It follows from that fact that if someone kills themselves, at least one of those things was not true. And those things can and often are thrust on people, or at least occur against the will of the person.
In this case, a bad situation was thrust on a whole bunch of people, and it ended up killing some of them.