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nothing much
Aug. 12th, 2008 12:55 pmThis is just a stop-gap entry before the rest of my Wacken write-up. Hopefully I'll find time for that before going to Bloodstock on Friday. For some reason, most of my friends are going on Thursday morning, and thus will probably arrive at the festival site before the campsite even opens. Since I'm not up for taking an extra day off work to sit around on the campsite for an extra day, I need to find some way of getting there on Friday.
As usual, various news articles annoy me. Contentious subject first: one I saw today was about a rape victim getting compensation. Ostensibly the article was about her compensation wrongly being reduced due to her being drunk. But if you read between the lines, it appears that the victim has been compensated for a crime that was never actually proven in court. That sounds rather suspect to me. It relates to a lot of the complaints that Britain's rape conviction rates are really low compared to other countries and that the answer lies in changing the legal process. It might just be that we have a wider definition of rape or that there are more false or marginal allegations. I don't know what the truth is, but surely the point of the justice system is that there's no crime until it's been proven?
On a completely different issue, the situation in Georgia is quite interesting. Predictably, the West is up in arms about Russian aggression, completely and deliberately oblivious to the fact that we'd already set a disturbing precedent in intervening in sovereign states on so-called humanitarian grounds, and that we are more than willing to help secessionist areas redraw their own borders as it suits them, as in the former Yugoslavia. Why did we think this would be any different in Georgia? The West tacitly approved Albanians claiming part of historical Serbia as their own, so why can't Ossetians or Abkhazians enjoy that same right? The hypocritical nature of the response really bothers me. I wonder where this will happen next... Somaliland and Puntland? Trans-Dniester? Flanders? Yorkshire? Ok, maybe not Yorkshire. Borders are a mess though. I'm all for national identity, but I don't think nations and states are really the same thing unfortunately.
As usual, various news articles annoy me. Contentious subject first: one I saw today was about a rape victim getting compensation. Ostensibly the article was about her compensation wrongly being reduced due to her being drunk. But if you read between the lines, it appears that the victim has been compensated for a crime that was never actually proven in court. That sounds rather suspect to me. It relates to a lot of the complaints that Britain's rape conviction rates are really low compared to other countries and that the answer lies in changing the legal process. It might just be that we have a wider definition of rape or that there are more false or marginal allegations. I don't know what the truth is, but surely the point of the justice system is that there's no crime until it's been proven?
On a completely different issue, the situation in Georgia is quite interesting. Predictably, the West is up in arms about Russian aggression, completely and deliberately oblivious to the fact that we'd already set a disturbing precedent in intervening in sovereign states on so-called humanitarian grounds, and that we are more than willing to help secessionist areas redraw their own borders as it suits them, as in the former Yugoslavia. Why did we think this would be any different in Georgia? The West tacitly approved Albanians claiming part of historical Serbia as their own, so why can't Ossetians or Abkhazians enjoy that same right? The hypocritical nature of the response really bothers me. I wonder where this will happen next... Somaliland and Puntland? Trans-Dniester? Flanders? Yorkshire? Ok, maybe not Yorkshire. Borders are a mess though. I'm all for national identity, but I don't think nations and states are really the same thing unfortunately.
