There are two effective ways for a society to avoid mass public drunkenness and disorder. One is to go down the Saudi route and apply draconian punishments to anyone caught drinking (and they need to be draconian and enforced: US prohibition failed for this reason); the other is to position alcohol as a perfectly normal part of life and not some kind of special, magical taboo.
Kinnell. Cameron’s Tories are really going for the unexpected candidates. I thought it was far out when they got Zac Goldsmith, editor of The Ecologist and one of the consistent frontrunners for most hated Tory on hatemytory.com, to stand for MP.
But now they’re ditching Steve Norris as their attempt at London Mayor. Good. People made a big deal about ‘Shagger Norris’, but in the words of Michael Franti, I don’t give a fuck who they’re screwing in private, I want to know who they’re screwing in public.
It would be nice to live in a world where the [note: fictional, written by me for the purposes of this post] piece below was a representative sample of the London media. It’d be even nicer to live in a world where it was a representative sample of the Tehran media – but ‘getting your own house in order’ has become a cliche for a very good reason:
Our country is embroiled in a major diplomatic incident with a foreign power. Relations between us and the foreign power are poor, although have so far fallen short of outright war.