Latin America is clearly a terrible, godless place – especially for unworldly Brits. Why, Mr Hutton has been drawn into a murder conspiracy, and Mr Salad can’t even find a decent pub.

British TV is certainly responsible for some exceptionally good comedy programmes, particularly ones which are a single writer’s personal creation – and it’s nice to see an American critic acknowledge this.

However, the hideousness mentioned in this post’s title single-handedly drags the UK’s average sitcom quality down well below that of Chad or Mongolia. And that’s even before taking My Hero into consideration.

If you do find either of these shows funny, please let me know in the comments, so that I can take steps to have you painlessly neutralised.

Peter Webster is morally equivalent to Bryan Drysdale. Given that Mr Drysdale killed Mr Webster’s daughter, this is probably not an irony that the latter would relish.

At worst, Mr Drysdale sought to take a trainload of passengers with him while killing himself, by parking his car on a railway line. At best, his disregard for the danger to others while pursuing his aim of killing himself was reckless.

Mr Webster’s disregard for the danger to others while pursuing his own aims is clearly similarly reckless. Should his legal action against the train company who he believes killed his daughter (despite Mr Drysdale’s blatant culpability) succeed, UK train companies would be forced to provide seatbelts.

The direct cost of providing seatbelts would be significant. The indirect cost, however, would be enormous: such a move would mean an end to standing on long-distance trains in the UK – and therefore, an end to the turn-up-and-go system that we currently have, and a dramatic reduction in peak hour capacity. Such a change would significantly reduce the proportion of journeys taken by rail.

Since cars are an order of magnitude more dangerous than trains, this would – very really, very literally – kill people. More people than Mr Drysdale. Hence the moral equivalence.

(BTW, if I ever become deranged enough that I attempt to cause people’s deaths in order to ease my suffering, please can someone shoot me?)

(link via Longrider. See also Safety is Dangerous at the now-sadly-defunct Transport Blog.)

I disagree with the UK’s planned religious hatred laws on principle. There are no sensible grounds to make a distinction between shouting "kill all Muslims" and "kill all Bolton fans" – being a Muslim or a Bolton fan is an individual act of choice, and both identifications are shaped but not determined by one’s cultural background. Neither group is inherently harmful, even if both could be described as somewhat misguided.

But while it’s wrong for the law to treat the two utterances differently, the new laws’ practical impact on satirists, or indeed almost anyone else, is zero. Saying "Islam is bollocks" will be legal; taking the piss out of Mohammed will be legal; saying "kill all Muslims" will be illegal – just as currently in the UK, saying "blacks go home" is legal, taking the piss out of Nelson Mandela is legal, and saying "burn down the blacks’ houses until they go home" is illegal.

Under the UK’s existing ‘incitement to racial hatred’ laws, there are less than four prosecutions a year. The people prosecuted have included antisemites (of various colours) and black power demagogues (including the first person prosecuted under the laws), as well as white anti-black and anti-brown racists.

In other words, only people who make blood-curdling threats of death to people of different faiths will face legal action, and historical precedent does not support the hypothesis that only people who make anti-Islamic comments will be targeted. Indeed, given that they’re the main group in the UK to make such blood-curdling religious threats on a regular basis, I’m strongly expecting some extremist Islamists will be among the first groups to be prosecuted. If anyone is.

(this is an expanded version of a comment I made over at Discarded Lies)

If you only read one article this year on how politicians following Bernard Lewis’s wrongheaded theories have buggered up chances of Middle Eastern democracy (and whether the situation is salvagable), make it this one. An excellent read.

In other news, America needs to cut its current account deficit now or face a long and deep recession. That’s Japan-levels of long and deep. Given the economic competence and willingness-to-take-unpopular-decisions of the people in charge at the moment, it’s probably time to buy shares in repo companies and loan sharks.

Speaking of sharks, we should reintroduce them to Britain’s lakes and seas. I actually wholeheartedly approve of George Monbiot’s suggestion of adding more wild animals to the UK (he suggests wolves, bears, lynx, wild boar and bison): it’ll make the countryside much more exciting, and has no drawbacks (I don’t count ‘farmers being eaten’ as a drawback, so much as a socially useful way of reducing headcount in that pointless, dying industry).

Unbelievably awesome: Rodeohead.

(via Explananda)

Factoid: Optical of Ed Rush and Optical, and Matrix of International Rude Boys, are the sons of Blunkett cuckold Stephen Quinn.

Their mother is Mr Quinn’s first wife, not Kimberly Fortier, so hopefully there’s no danger of Blunkett-ular involvement in their parentage… (via Mike S in Harry’s comments)

Under the draft UK ID card legislation, the following summons could legitimately be sent out: "You are required to attend the summit of Mt. Snowdon at 0300h tomorrow morning so that we can take your fingerprints; failure to attend will be punished by a civil penalty of £1,000.". And that’s not even the silliest bit.

Read Chris Lightfoot’s latest article on the subject, and then shoot David Blunkett join NO2ID.

A lot of people are spouting a load of nonsense about Bhopal, presumably in order to celebrate the anniversary of the tragedy there. "Hooray, it’s the anniverary of a tragedy, we can go bash a multinational! That’ll be worthy and tasteful."

The Union Carbide factory in Bhopal made pesticides to be used on Indian crops. Government tariffs made it economically unviable to import pesticides from abroad. Union Carbide set up a plant in India not to dodgily outsource production to somewhere cheap, but because it was the only way to do business in India. Famine was eradicated in India after the introduction of synthetic pesticides.

The Union Carbide factory in Bhopal met all Indian safety standards. It was designed and built by local engineers, again largely due to the protectionist regulations that banned foreigners from doing much of anything in India.

Following the tragedy, Union Carbide USA sold its Indian subsidiary and used all the money plus additional cash from its US operations to pay half a billion dollars to the victims. According to Union Carbide’s estimate of 3000 fatalities and 3000 non-fatal but disabled casualties, then this works out as $83,000 per head. According to pressure groups’ estimates of 15,000 fatalities and 45,000 disabilities, this still works out as $8000 per head.

The first figure is 80 years’ income. The second figure is 8 years’ income. While it may seem like a pittance in the west, it really isn’t – and if the plant had belonged to an Indian company, then the victims would have got nothing.

The Indian government enormously ballsed-up allocating the money, to the extent that many survivors died before they received a penny. This is not Union Carbide (or its new parent company Dow Chemical)’s fault. If you’re scandalised by Bhopal, go and protest against the Indian government’s incompetence – this is, after all, the thing that has kept India poor for the last 50 years.

Protesting against Dow for daring to buy a company that dared to do business helping people (yes, and obviously making money) in the developing world is somewhat pathetic.

NB it’s not only acceptable, but morally correct, to apply less stringent safety standards in India than in the US. In India, poverty is the biggest cause of premature death. In the US, it is not. Building a dangerous factory in India that makes its workers rich enough to afford food and medicine is better than not doing so (this is also why developing-world sweatshops are *good* – the people who work there are less abysmally badly-off than if they didn’t work in developing-world sweatshops).

I assume you’ve heard of the horrors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Even if you’re a neo-Nazi and don’t belive in them. But if not, then apparently you’re among 45% of British young adults.

Once again, I’m ashamed of a vast proportion of my countrymen.At the risk of trivialising something terrible, if you can’t even be bothered to learn about Auschwitz, you probably deserve to be gassed.