Pica Pica

First off, a declaration that this thought started with an article by Gary Feuerberg in the Epoch Times; the article also refers to a site concerned with undermining democracy.

Feuerberg’s article summarizes a report entitled “Undermining Democracy: 21st Century Authoritarians,” released on Capitol Hill, June 4 – the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre – sponsored by Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia. Its 80 pages find that four authoritarian states—China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—are setting forth a new authoritarian model for countries to follow, and that they have the resources and sophistication to be highly influential in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Continue reading Global Free Information?

The Australian Government considers that knowledge about good methods of voluntary euthanasia should be forbidden, and would like to ban this website about the use of nembutal. Take note before it’s too late!

I guess I’m not entirely sure what I feel about euthanasia, but I’m quite sure that I don’t concede my right to know about these things to the government, or to a list that it draws up in secret.

There were about 3000 deaths, mostly children, yesterday in Africa!

Oh, sorry, I forgot, they died of malaria. That’s not news, is it?

(Thanks to Dr Crippen of the Guardian for this point.)

I read that “cybercriminals are exploiting the worldwide hysteria over swine flu to peddle fake drugs and steal credit card details”. Symantec’s Mayur Kulkarni wrote in a blog that “the scare has spawned a spamming frenzy, like sharks smelling blood in the water”.

All of which underlines my curiosity about why we are panicking at all. Where is the sense of proportion? It’s not that I want to make light of those people who have been very ill – or even died – as a result of this disease. And I do presume that the WHO knows what is talking about, and that there is indeed some cause for concern. But what has actually happened so far? When I last read the figures (and that was yesterday, so they may have gone up since then, of course) seven people are confirmed as having died of swine flu so far in Mexico, over a period of a few weeks. Mexico City is said to be nearly at a standstill. But wait a minute! In a city the size of Mexico City somewhere getting on for 1000 people must die of one thing or another every day, some of them, no doubt, from flu. In America, more than 60,000 people die of flu each year – between 150 and 200 a day. Every one of those, presumably, was as unwanted as the deaths from swine flu. So far swine flu has been responsible for perhaps a few tens of deaths.

Once again, let’s not make light of it, and if the WHO is issuing warnings, no doubt we should take them seriously. Perhaps things will get very, very, very much worse than they are now. But why is there such a panic? Do we find this more comforting to worry about than things like the global financial crisis, Robert Mugabe, the Gaza Strip of the CIA’s “renditions”? Perhaps we feel that by going around in a surgical mask we can do something about this one, where we feel relatively powerless in other areas. Or do we somehow want there to be a pandemic? Does swine flu promise to satisfy an obscure yet powerful need for danger and alarm?

Perhaps there is something I’m failing to understand, and I do hope that I’m not tempting fate when I ask – what is all the panic about?

That is my proposed common name for coriander leaves, known in America as cilantro. OK, I know most people think it’s delicious, but for the rest of us it is vile. I found a website for coriander haters, and know therefore that I am not alone.

What is my take on the taste? Very cheap, dirty, over-perfumed soap.

Non-gender-specific third persons

He or she, it or they? Call me old-fashioned but I find a lot of attempts to write or speak in gender-neutral language tend to range between the ugly and the comical. Recently I saw ‘… and if anyone transgress this vow, may the wrathful deity split his or her head into seven pieces!’. But there is no need for it!
I was brought up to look down on the use of ‘they’ as a non-specific pronoun. And while some of the attempts to be gender-neutral may be too ugly for me to be willing to use, I’m well aware that we really want and need to use gender-non-specific language much more these days than we did decades ago. The use of ‘they’ does the job, but it is deprecated as ‘uneducated’.
But hey! They fooled us again! Just like the grammarians tried to tell us that split infinitives were un-English (by which they really meant “unlike Latin”), they tried to tell us that the ‘singular they’ is un-English. Despite having been used since at least the late 1300s, by such writers as Jane Austen: Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the King James Bible, The Spectator, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans], Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, W. H. Auden, Lord Dunsany, George Orwell, and C. S. Lewis.
Deprecated starting in the late 18th or early 19th century, the loss of a gender-non-specific pronoun has been a problem ever since.