astraboy

I am.
Three minutes silence for people who have been washed out to sea and only one minute for people who have died to protect our freedom.
Thats what I love about the media, their sense of proportion.:wack:
Answer me this, who decided to grind the country to a halt at noon today? When the truckers tried to do this they were put in their place very quickly.
rant over.
astraboy.

Karl 227

It's not just the UK either astraboy, it's the whole of Europe!

Andrew Dixon

The silence was suggested by the EU presidency last week.

astraboy

So Mr. Blair is to blame then
astraboy.

gtr_man

When a solider goes into battle he or she knows the risks. The 150k people lost to the sea didn't sign up to anything - they were innocent. Children, families, entire communities wiped out. If you can't spare 3 minutes of your miserable life then I pity you.

astraboy

However the 1000's of people that die every day in ethopia get **** all apart from what Bob can raise for them.
But why are the Tsunami victims on the front pages and they are not? Cos of the 150,000 who are dead, 100 or so are Britons!
Media manipulation has a lot to answer for.
astraboy.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Not in WWI and WWII

What was the penalty for desertation or treason?

CrisPDuk

I would imagine Nike, Adidas, et al have some connection to it too. Coz I bet a fair proportion of those that died slaved in one western corporation sweat shop or another

Patt@firstime

Yes I agree that the starvation in in 3rd world countries doesn't get the same level of coverage as the disaster in thailand etc but famine has been going on for 10+ years and without sounding cruel I doubt the Tsunami will be front page news in a months time, probably back to such headlines like 'Jordan Pregnant' etc

Whatever though, at the end of the day 150,000+ people have died so show some respect

CrisPDuk

FYI From the Dark Ages, right up until the end of the fifties, the young male population of this country had no say whatsoever in that matter Are you familiar with the policy of National Service?

Tiggs

its all media led based on our own proximatey to the event. if this was in bangladesh (like the flood in the 70's that killed more) or in china (like the earth quake that killed 600,000) we wouldnt do a thing....because no one goes to sun their fat **** on their beaches.

if ppl where taking package holidays to ethiopia and having locals take them paragliding im sure it would all be different.

T

Tiggs

noooooo...dont shatter the illusion!

gtr_man

astraboy - I agree the media does have a lot to answer for, it creates and massages the sensationalist culture in this country. People are whipped up into a frenzy and just go with the flow. Like you guys says it'll all be forgotten in a month. Its just a sign of the times.

A very moving quote from a survivor (BBC news website),

"We were lucky to escape, but before long, mothers came crying ... they had lost their small children in front of their very eyes and seen them floating out to sea. They were unable to hold them since they hadn't been able to grab them under the water."

Patt@firstime

How people can start to 'bicker' and get arsey with each other on here over such a horiffic tragedy amazes me

If you think the silence should be 1,2,3 or 30 minutes, who cares!!! It IS 3 minutes now get over it

pflowers

Interesting fact for you here, my mum has been plagued with phone calls saying she has won competitions etc for months now, all recorded messages. She has tried everyway of stopping them, next step was number change.

Anyway, she even had them christmas day this year, but on boxing day they stopped, no more. She used to get at least two a day.

Wonder where they were coming from ?

Patt@firstime

You must be very pleased knowing that the people who were doing there jobs are now dead

Tiggs

Christmas elves using the bosses phone?

gtr_man

Given the choice I would rather be a solider serving with pride and fighting for my country. Than watch my family and neighbours being washed away. I cannot think of a more terrible, terrible curse upon thee.

CrisPDuk

I too have noticed that we aren't getting these nuisance calls, but hadn't actually made the connection till now! My God I need to be more careful about who I shout '**** off and die' down the phone at

Tiggs

you dont get to pick your death!

option 1......you are forced onto a French beach and told to run at the guns!

option 2.....you are sunning on an Asian beach and told to run from the wave


i'll take option two and some Nikes thanks...if we get to pick.

gtr_man

It is indeed a sad state of affairs and IMHO a reflection of the attitute of the younger scum in society ("what the **** do I care?") when we mock those less fortunate than us. You are lucky - for when you hit hard times you'll be down, but I prey that you do not suffer like these people have suffered.

King RA

lol, in bad taste...but v.funny.

Leslie

gtr,

Are you saying then that because servicemen who know the risks when they join the Forces and nevertheless lay down their lives in defence of their country, are not entitled to 1 minute's silence?, because that is what your post indicates. I certainly will not go along with the denigration of their ultimate sactrifice.

I see nothing wrong in showing respect for all those people caught up in the tsunamis, and also for those whose suffering is ongoing because of the loss of relatives and the utter destruction of their lives. I do however feel that 1 minute is adequate instead of three which is going to drag out until we lose concentration on what it is for.

Les

astraboy

Let me make one thing clear. I am not ignorant of the loss of life, nor the human suffering that has taken place.
Neither do I "not care" about what happened. My aunt was on a third floor balcony when the wave came in. If she had decided to get up instead of having a lay in then I would probably be out there, flying her body home.
Neither am I "Younger Scum" who thinks "What the **** do I care?"
What I do object to is the perpetual Silences that are suggested by the media and then enforced by the grief police.
The reason I object is that if this continues, the orginal concept of a minutes silence will be warped to a point when we are having 3 minutes silence everytime a Z list celebrity croaks. By this point, the "mere" minutes silence for those who died in two world wars will become meaningless.
This will bring us a step closer to forgetting their sacrifice for our freedom and THIS is the reason why I object to it.
I reserve my silence for November the 11th and at no other time. And its not because I am ignorant of what has happened, just that I refuse to be controlled by popular culture and the grief industry.
astraboy.

pflowers

Thats a great analysis of my post...........well done !

gtr_man

Lesbo,
I apologise for you total lack of command of the English language. I'm not saying that service men and women should not have 1 min silence. We should never ever forget their sacrifice. For it is the ultimate honour to lay down ones life for their country. However we should not mock the 3 min silence for those that died in this terrible natural disaster.

However I do not believe that astraboys truck drivers deserve 1 minutes silence. However saying that I would gladly observe 5 minutes silence if they promised not to drive two a breast at 55 mph on a busy motorway.

OllyK

<derail>
try tpsonline
</derail>

STi wanna Subaru

iTrader: (1)

This is an article I read.... I think it was from October last year. I feel it has relevance

"After reading this, some of you might think that I'm some sort of cruel, morally-vacuous creature with no empathy for my fellow humans' suffering. But I'm not. I deplore bigotry, cruelty, war, torture and being beastly to animals. I want a world based on love and understanding, not on hate and violence, and it's precisely because of this that I want our football grounds to stop observing 'a minute's silence'.

Who decides about these things? The latest one was for Ken Bigley (though apparently not for the two Americans who also suffered the same fate - are their lives different in some way?) and last week good old Brian Clough got one.

Are we supposed to equate these two things? What does it really mean? I think it's vacuous and shallow.

What are we doing holding a minute's silence at the football? Are we really showing respect? If so, is it to the victim/deceased/group or to each other?

It must be the latter because otherwise why would we be asked to do it in public? And what happens if you didn't like Brian Clough? Are you obliged to be quiet or can you express your disagreement? No of course you can't. There's some kind of collective if synthetic moral outrage if anyone breaks the silence by shouting say "Come on Wales" or "F*** off Wales" as they did on Saturday.

The way these things are forced upon us feels very wrong to me. It feels like I'm being told what to do and what to think. It's prescribing my emotions. I can't feel sadness and empathy for every human tragedy - I just can't and the truth is, as terrible as many things are, if you let yourself get too caught up in them, you'd become a weeping wreck and utterly dysfunctional.

If this minute's silence thing was really to give us all a chance to pause and think "thank God that didn't happen to me", that would at least make some sense to me.

We've had minute's silences for the horrors in Beslan (I couldn't work out if I was supposed to be silent just for the children or for the adults as well - it wasn't made clear). We had it for Holly and Jessica. For The Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and The Twin Towers. What good does it do? Does it really show we care? If so, why do we need to show each other we care? And why should we do this at the football?

You can't make yourself care about anything. You do or you don't. It's in your heart or it isn't.

I think it's often nearer the truth than we care to admit to say that we don't really care that much but we're trying to show we really do. This doesn't make us heartless *******s. It's just human. As the commentator purrs "immaculately observed" it's as though we're getting a pat on the back for being so touchy-feely. Aren't we great.

People have just been killed in hurricanes in USA - there'll be no minutes silence for them though. Isn't getting torn apart by nature bad enough? What about the killings in Sudan? Is that too difficult to understand? Too far away? Are they deemed less worthy than the kids in Beslan? What criteria is being applied here? Does the amount of people killed matter? Is beheading worse than shooting or getting run over by a drunk driver or shot by a drug dealer? Is it the colour of skin or their nationality?

And just who is judging who deserves our precious silence? Everyone dies in the end so what is happening with the minute's silence? Is someone making a judgement about the nature of the death or the nature of the person who died?

But do we really know what they were really like? If you are horribly killed by someone and it turns out you were once in jail for burglary, or you slapped your wife around, or you sold ******* - does that disqualify you from a minute's silence? Did you 'deserve' it to happen to you because you were not always morally upstanding? Is that what is being said here?

It's certainly arguable that the minute's silence for Mr Bigley was doing more work for terrorists. Look at the effect they've had on us all. Maybe they'll want to do it again just to see if they can repeat the same kind of coverage. If so, we should consider if we are not being forced to be complicit in such actions.

My dad had three of his brothers killed in WW2. His own role as a gunner in the Battle of El Alamein scarred him emotionally for life (he was awarded a medal for accuracy - in other words he killed a lot of people) and that was not without consequences for me.

From time to time I think about them and what they went through and why but I don't need to do it with 30,000 others people before seeing the Boro play Birmingham City. I don't need to do it with a bunch of boozed-up strangers or while inhaling the dodgy Albanian **** the bloke in front of me smokes and I would object to being told that I should.

I don't expect anyone else to feel like I do about my dead uncles and I would never ask that anyone should. You reading this don't really care about them as individuals but it doesn't make you evil or heartless.

It's like when politcians make sweeping statements about our lives - telling us what we think. Last week Michael Howard told me that I thought the NHS wasn't working and that crime was out of control in my area and that everything is basically crap. Which was a bit odd really since that's not my experience at all and I think the exact opposite. But thanks for telling me what I think Mikey.

But that's the same as an enforced minute's silence isn't it? It rudely assumes we all feel bad so we shall all stand and feel bad together and if you don't feel bad then there must be something wrong with you. Though the supporters of this practice seem to see no irony in showing a so-called respectful silence just before shouting abuse at footballers and calling the ref a ****er. Oh the humanity.

And just what is so respectful about silence anyway? Why is silence the expression of our empathy and sorrow? I loved Brian Clough but I didn't want to be silent on his death, I wanted to be noisy and to have some drinks in his honour. A minute's stream of abuse would have been much more appropriate.

An obligatory minute's silence does not show respect. It doesn't show what is in the hearts of those present. We're told to do it. Most do it for fear of being slagged off. It's vaguely fascist and its an emotionally childish response to events that have been on the Telly.

And that is at the heart of this. It's all a response to stuff that's on the telly. And that's what these minute's silence really tell us - if you want to get public respect, die on the telly. Get your story some coverage in the papers. It's like a macabre extension of celebrity culture.

Football fans are not all knuckle-dragging idiots and we have emotion, empathy and soul but a football match is not the place for us to collectively or individually prove it to ourselves or each other and that's why it's got to end. Let's have a minute's silence for the last time to mark the death of a minute's silence."

Funkii Munkii

I was wondering, the World Bank donated $250m, is the World Bank one of the banks that are owed huge sums by these countries as well as the African countries??

OllyK

Look "suicide" up in the dictionary