Over
in the UK, there's a chap who's facing strident demands for his
resignation, after his secretary leaked (i. e. sold) some ripe emails
between him and a male friend. These, it's claimed, showed he was at
least a misogynist and very possibly a mass murderer. You know the
sort of emails I mean as we all receive them. The most profligate of
my providers of dubious funny stuff is, in fact, a woman. Here's an article on
this brouhaha headed Are
the social-media Stasi entitled to pass sentence on someone for what
they think that he thinks? As
it happens, the writer is a woman too
So,
has the internet got out of hand? Is it the sort of thing 18th and 19th
century thinkers feared would come about as a result of democracy
leading to mob rule? The high-volume bad driving out the good? Possibly. But the
other side of this coin is repression. Only this week week we've had
Spain's
major bullfighting organisations calling on the government to take
action against people making "despicable" comments on
Twitter. And the government itself has arrested anyone it could lay
its hands on who'd made comments they didn't like on the internet.
Which wasn't very many, it's true, but that's because most internet
trolls aren't dumb enough to use their own names. I think most
offenders had commented on the politician shot last week or even on all Spanish politicians. But repression is never very far away here, one way or
another. Old habits die hard.
How
many bureaucrats in Brussels take home more than the British Prime
Minister, do you think? No, I didn't have the faintest idea either.
But it's reported here that the number is 10,000. Who'd have thought
it? Well, anyone who knew what a gravy train it is, I guess. The
reason for the high salaries is, of course, To
attract high quality staff.
It always is.
Another question - How many of
you know that it's an offence in Spain to move your head more than 45
degrees when you're driving? And that it's the cop's word against
yours that you did? So, you can't look left or right? Or over your
shoulder to check your blind spot? Can it really be true?
Talking of driving . . . It's
good to see that equality has made great strides there too. The last
3 people to swerve past me on a zebra crossing have been (young)
women.
Finally . . . I got my water
bill today. My campaign to reduce the volume has been a tremendous
success. Only 2 cubic metres. The bill, though, doesn't reflect this.
Thanks to all the fixed charges, the percentage reduction in euros is
much less than that of the water. Nice of me to subsidise all the big
Spanish families. Not that they're that big these days.
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