!?

The Grauniad has a fun article on the renaissance of the exclamation mark!

Personally, I'm with Terry Pratchett on this.

Yet Another Call To Legalise Drugs

The Guardian points to a new report from Transform (Transform Drug Policy Foundation bill themselves as UK's leading centre of expertise on drug policy and law reform).

They say:

The UK Government specifically claims the benefits of any move away from prohibition towards legal regulation of drug markets would be outweighed by the costs. No such cost-benefit analysis, or even a proper Impact Assessment of existing enforcement policy and legislation has ever been carried out here or anywhere else in the world. Yet there are clear Government guidelines that an Impact Assessment should be triggered by amongst other things, a policy going out to public consultation or when ‘unintended consequences’ are identified, both of which have happened with drug policy in recent years.

So, Transform set out to do as much of a cost-benefit analysis as they could. Using, as far as I can tell, the Governments own figures. They came up with the following numbers:

The net annual benefit of a move from prohibition to legal state regulation and control of drug markets would be:
Scenario a) 50% fall in use, net benefit = £13.943 billion
Scenario b) No change in use, net benefit = £10.834 billion
Scenario c) 50% increase in use, net benefit = £7.724 billion
Scenario d) 100% increase in use, net benefit = £4.616 billion

That is, if drugs were legalized and controlled by the Government and use of Heroin and Cocaine subsequently doubled (there's evidence that when cannabis was briefly reclassified as a Class C drug that that usage among 16-24-year-olds actually fell). The Government would be £4 billion better off, which could probably go someway to paying for AIG's next big party.

I really don't have the time or the expertise to question Transform's sums, but that looks like a good deal to me...

Freedom Of Speech Only For The Hardest

Over at the Guardian there's a discussion of how much abuse is too much for a footballer. The general rule seems to be if you're being racist or homophobic you've definitely gone too far (and if you're being both then you're probably a Spurs fan abusing Sol Campbell - and, yes, saying you'd like to see a black man hanging from a tree is racist).

Some ask if we should chant abuse at footballers at all. In a perfect society, probably not, but it doesn't help that you can imagine these vocally abused footballers crying themselves to sleep every night on a huge pile of money.

One commonplace is this sort of comment:

In my view the standard for any reasonable human being (OK that excludes quite a few fans I grant you) should be that anything you say whilst sitting/standing anonymously (cowardly even) amongst thousands of your ilk, you should also be prepared to say to the target of your views if you were face to face with him in the street whilst accompanied by your mother and your small child and what you say/do is not going to get you arrested.

Which, to me, suggests that if you are a sociopath or psychopath, or perhaps just hard and uncaring[1], then your range of free speech is much greater than the normal person. This doesn't seem right.

Personally, I don't care about bad language that much. It's an intensifier. Surely if you're calling some one "useless" or a "useless prick", say, it should be the "useless" part that hurts. If you are just shouting "prick" at a footballer, then perhaps it is time to reconsider (unless you're shouting it at the disappointing Harry Kewell, in which case go right ahead).

[1] Actually, it occurs to me that if I told some footballers what I thought of them to their face, my mother might join in.