The spider equivalent of suicide by cop

[alexsarll]

Spent much of last week listening to people talking about testicular cancer, furries, school shootings, how all love is Stockholm Syndrome, and the general benefits of being evil - or to put it another way, Edinburgh previews. No disrespect to the intellectual and verbal gifts of any of the stand-ups involved, but it's the distance and the novelty that make it all funny as much as the careful formatting. Compare the recent problems with my front door, which apparently of its own volition decided opening was so yesterday. This saw us all entering and leaving via a complicated arrangement of windows, doors and staircases not our own: the first time it's an adventure! - but by the third, it's just a bloody bind. Mercifully, we appear to be sorted now.

The Wire actors lived in the same apartment building during filming? Now that's a reality show I'd like to have seen.
Picked up Thursday's Metro just because I was so flabbergasted to see a pro-cannabis front page on an Associated rag, but was glad I did given it contained a Wire interview with Aidan Gillen, whom I'm still yet to spot in Finsbury Park. They also talked to Clark Johnson who plays Gus in the fifth season - I had no idea he'd also directed for The Wire *and* for the second best cop show of the 21st century, The Shield.
In another pleasing piece of linkage between all that is good and right in the world, Alan Moore's been getting into "the most stunning piece of television that has ever come out of America, possibly the most stunning piece of television full-stop"; he even concedes that, allowed a similar arrangement, he might be prepared to write for HBO. Big Numbers USA, anyone?
Of course, if you'd gone back a few years and told me how brilliant The Wire was, and then told me Lauren Laverne would be interviewing its creator on the BBC, then I would probably have filed that as a similar convergence of loveliness. But that would have been before any of us had the misfortune to see The Culture Show.

"Motorists involved in the most serious cases of causing death by dangerous driving should be jailed for at least seven years, under tougher guidelines. Such cases could involve persistent bad driving, drink or drugs, the advice for courts in England and Wales will say. Causing death while reading or writing text messages on a mobile phone should attract a term of up to seven years." Excuse me? In each of those cases, drivers are causing someone's death by illegal action. This is sometimes known as murder. Seven years for murder is not 'tough', it is risibly feeble.
How's this for tough? First of all, purge the current culture where traffic policing is more about revenue targets than law enforcement. But once that's gone - red light cameras exist, yes? Which - and OK, this requires proper cameras, not the shoddy stuff CCTV firms often use, but that's hardly beyond the limits of human ingenuity - can definitively show whether a motorist has hit someone while jumping a light. So if they have, the guilt's not in question - put their head on a pike at that same traffic light. Should give the next prick who's in such a tearing hurry that the light doesn't apply to them pause for thought, no?

Comments

[alkennedy.livejournal.com]

"In each of those cases, drivers are causing someone's death by illegal action. This is sometimes known as murder."

Unless they set out to do it, no, it's not. It's manslaughter. And seven years for manslaughter is about par for the course, for better or worse.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I thought that was more for the accidental, prank-gone-horribly-wrong or should-have-looked-behind-that-tree-before-chopping-it-down stuff than doing something you've been specifically told not to do which causes an entirely unsurprising death of an innocent? Because if not, that's a bit fucked also.
(See also corporate culpability, but that's a whole other rant)