@aidan,
Quote:I meant exposing you to positions you will come up against if you take matters further than your own responsibilities.
When I wrote that Rebecca I was thinking of the specific case you have in hand. But on reflection it has a more general application. spendi's Red Flag Law for all occasions except maybe artistic endevours. The artist is never responsible. What you get with responsibility is lower-middle-class art and the lower-middle-classes can talk it up all they like in the journals and the "art" programmes for the well-educated person (has a certificate), but it ain't art. It takes one to know one. Coronation Street does art a bit. It flatters its patron. Responsible art is the lower-middle-class flattering itself, like at wine tastings, and that class of persons has been plastered with so much odium since Homer that it is hard to not admire it for keep coming up for more. The plastering is the emblazoned emblem of the artist. Sid Vicous singing My Way for example. Have you ever heard somebody sing that with a Birmingham accent. I once did it in a Lancashire accent and it brought the party to its knees. You should hear me do Tom Finney's version of Blowin' in the Wind.
We get anaesthetised from responsibility when we take certain drugs only some of which are licenced. With a constant search by scientists for a new one to beat the testers. One that blows the mind that hasn't been legislated against yet. Cheap to produce so that toffee bottles full of it can be sealed and buried in a safe place for when it is.
Hence the up-take of such chemical responsibity inhibitors is scientific proof that there's a significant demand for responsibilty inhibition even at the risk of social disapproval expressed in a calibrated range up to where you are professionally engaged. In China they shoot the most disapproved of.
Many a person, a lot of whom you will know, owe their very existence to a lapse in responsibility. Just the one. Maybe two if they were discussed
ab ova with a view to aborting the mission and survived it and are a bit of an asshole now.
The key words there are "calibrated range". What you have in your prison is a calibrated system. It has been managed by the best experts we can get for the money and it is the rsponsibilty of a senior member of the Cabinet. And has been for a long time. You are challenging the position calibrated. And it will answer--"Who is this bloody Yank schoolmarm shoving her nose in here with the Florence Nightingale flounce plus a slow drawl and spouting her liberal, rote-learned, fancy ideas as if these lads are a cage full of budgies being trained to know where to perch." To render that authentic insert a few obscenities here and there as you think fit. Change a noun or two as well. And worse than that.
It's very complicated Rebecca. The whole system of calibrated disapproval is designed to produce an agreed stasis.
It's like sin only you have to live it in this life. One might move religious penances up and down in terms of severity depending what one wished to achieve. One might make pre-marital sex a sin to give it that exciting frisson of naughtiness and then institute three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys as the approved penance to encourage the swains and wenches to desist from engaging in it. Within a short while the bells are ringing for the weddings and not long after for the baptisms and within a few years there are fleets putting to sea to conquer the world. Calibrated.
You might as well play chess against Boris Spasky. Or try to get Andrew Strauss out with your underarm long-hops.
You might be running the men in America but here it is all faked.
