Two sided stories blog

Eduardo was filmed cheating in a football game, well covered from all angles, - it was proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
So what do you think the punishment should have been, or should be in such cases?
Apparently Arsene Wenger is in his usual mode of blaming everyone but himself and his players - "outrageous" he shouts, qualifying that with the statement that it is outrageous that this player should be singled out for punishment...
there's a hint of truth in that. Michele Platini Uefa president, admitted that he unashamedly sought to dive and knew all others did so too - before TV cameras made it harder. So a two match ban for Eduardo might not be enough...
all filmed dives could be retrospectively punished to stop dumb people like Mr Platini encouraging cheating...

I personally favour Fifa imposing a year's salary fine on both player and manager, for every proven dive, all divisions, all leagues. - the funds thus raised to go for paying for subsidised seats for the next world cup for fans from developing countries.

On the subject of draconian punishments, rather than football, my wife says I am totally over the top for someone otherwise so liberal in views - but there is a point to the "over the top" punishments I suggest, its not blanket rules to lay waste to masses of people.
For example -
for those who double park their tanks (Land Eater or Nissan Squash-us-all, Toyota Plunderer or whatever) outside a shop to "just nip in and buy the paper" - a pack of fags, some choccy, a scratch card, a loaf of bread plus some rat poison for the baby... and in the process it blocks the entire street as a bus cannot get through,
...when there are several parking spaces less than 50 yards away, then... "the anti-tank road clearing device" seems eminently well suited.
This simply works as a dozer permanently on the front of every public bus or dumper truck and they bulldoze said vehicle out of the way so the rest of us can get through...wrecking the vehicle in the process.

Stay with the various implausible elements for a moment to look at the principle...
It has two key elements that work here - punishment needs to be instantaneous (no waiting for a ticket long after the event) and it needs to punish the arrogant lazy rich where it hurts most, as a fine doesn't.
It has also to be seen to be done without prejudice - then it works as an effective deterrent.
It does not punish poor people because poor people don't double park their vehicles outside the shop, if they can do this they are not poor.

In certain countries all driving offences are punished with means tested/ income proportionate fines - this at least takes into account the need for a system that deters the rich from offending as much as the poor.

Then there's the bankers...
if there is proof that they cheated or connived their way to a short term bonus, and despite warnings, publicly argued for no taxes on their £millions - a clandestine air trip to a far away drop zone in a foreign country with no extradition treaty (they can have a parachute, that's humane) and permanent passport removal... would be a simple way to empower the notion that talent does indeed leave the country sometimes.

Litter louts...
another simple one, when spy cameras reveal an offender's recidivist tendency, and enough concrete evidence is compiled - the litter-pick up community sentence is served in a uniform that looks like a McDonalds pack, for an unpaid working year - seems apt. (you could have a selection of uniforms designed on the basis of the most frequently found litter - branded fag packets, beer cans, alcopop bottles - thus encouraging those firms to do something about their refuse creation too.)

Robbery from vulnerable old people in their own homes...
tough one this, they already tend to get a prison sentence,
but prison should be tailored to their crime - no accessible toilet, a diet of laxatives and Complan, a TV permanently playing 'Home and Away' on a loop tape - all geared to emulate and symbolise having Alzheimers, no teeth and living in a cheap nursing home...

On being a prime minister or president who decides to undertake an offensive or occupying force, war...
obvious really - they have to go there with a sword, on their own and challenge that country's leader (or nominated champion) to a duel to the death...or nominate one of their children to do it if they are really too old for this...

being a one eyed Arsene Wenger...
mmmmm, the right punishment would be to have someone keep kicking his legs about 4 times a day in such a clever way that when he turned around there was no one there.

You too can have fun with this (comment is free) - but they need to be both fitting/instaneous and draconian - or fitting and include some other instantaneous and publicly humiliating way of making sure there is a huge deterrent effect.

Other ideas on these lines welcomed...
go on!
its therapeutic.

He is known for being thin-skinned and resorted to the libel courts when the Sunday Times business section ran a series of stories about the extravagant specifications of the group's new Edinburgh headquarters.

It was alleged that he had ordered the construction of a special kitchen for preparing scallops close to his office. This was airily dismissed but it subsequently emerged that there was indeed a food preparation area near his suite so dishes could be transferred while still hot.

The person being talked about was regarded as one of the greatest of banking talents we had in this country - and he wasn't attracted here from abroad nor did he leave here for sunnier more bonus laden climes...
He is, of course, Fred the Shred, the most symbolic of all the Bankers to cause the credit crunch solely motivated by greed - so most reckon.

The media that promote the Banking industry are once again busy telling us that regulation that might tax or otherwise restrict bankers incomes to something less than obscene wealth will surely mean that these great talents will simply move abroad and create wealth for some foreign country - and we wouldn't want that - that would be counter productive...

In a word...Bollocks.

If we had managed to regulate bonuses sufficiently in the nineties - and all these "great talents" (there are many on incomes and bonuses much greater than Fred Goodwin was) had decided to up sticks to Hong Kong or New York - would we not now be DOUBLY better off?

We might have avoided the credit crunch's worst effects by not having greedy ambitious bankers selling our money down the drain for a quick million for themselves, and we would have been rid of their smug, arrogant, fat cat faces emerging from some Park Lane excess expenses paid dinner...

If they are chasing millions harder than they are working on family relationships and cultural life then they are not really that talented in any real sense and we can happily let them go. Besides, I don't believe that regulation could ever make more than say, five people who might actually help our economy in the long run, leave the country...

The fact is that people with real talent are not that meanly motivated and live where the quality of life suits them - and mostly that means our best talent wants to live and work here, where their roots are, where family are. Rich people who do want to move freely and live anywhere in the world - choose where on the basis of culture, language, user friendliness and then, maybe remuneration (seeing as they all earn enough for twenty families to live very comfortably anyway).

This latest repeated "Banker's bleat" is a pathetic lie by an industry that wants to protect its fat cats because they all have that stupid dream of becoming the richest banker in town...
Let's stop them wanting that.

I propose that we start a campaign to formerly redefine the word 'banker' as to mean Wanker - it's close enough already and, given the way that language only really changes with common usage, all we really have to do is make sure that when we are really, or jokingly, pissed off at someone we shout out,
"YOU...YOU BANKER, You!"

bring on the brain drain if this is the sort of talent we are going to lose as a result...

Big business and governments have conspired against the people since Genghis Khan's time.

Today we have a growing noise from public, scientists, motor vehicle companies, green activists, and the oil vested interests...
to promote hydrogen fuel cell technology for cars.

All of this is likely to leave the general public with an apology for a transport system and the focus still on money spinning rather than the earth still turning.

So where should we be putting our vocal energies? what types of transport, if any, do we believe will help save human beings from their own self destructive ways?
It is clear that the petrol and diesel powered vehicles that rule and ruin our lives today have got to go - but we are utterly dependent upon them as a society...
I can hear the naive "green" revolutionaries rejoicing at the collapse of capitalism (...as everyone starves to death).

Having weighed up the evidence it is clear that the most publicised "Hope for the future" is the hydrogen fuel cell.
There is plenty of effort, particularly in California to promote this, so much so that they deliberately sabotaged and legislatively did an anti-green U-turn to kill the electric car
The lie that is peddled is that these fuel cells will somehow be much more practical than the electric car...
the real agenda is hidden, the electricity companies are not the best loved friends of the oil and transport lobbies. If we did have an entirely plug-in electric powered industry, certain people would suffer catastrophic loss of income - these would be the filling stations, the repair garages and the oil companies themselves - who are investing heavily in the hydrogen fuel cell business.

The electricity producing lobbyists don't seem to be too bothered about this...why not?
I think its ultimately because they know they will sell electricity no matter what. Even if the Hydrogen fuel cell is developed (I used to believe in it - I no longer do) then it will take enormous quantities of electricity to create hydrogen and then somehow shrink that gas into little car sized containers (no one has explained to me the costs in energy terms of how the lowest condensing temperature gas will be condensed).
So the companies will sell electricity to other big business interests instead of the general public - no problem for them, a huge loss for us.

the attraction of this system, as far as the industry is concerned, is that it will still take a barrel full of experts and filling stations to service the fuel cell driven economy.
they are scared to death that transport might become the egalitarian all electric plug-in that is being developed - against all subsidy pressures and lobbyist tactics...a plug in point at every home and work place would easily cover the transport needs of the general driving public - too easy for these money men, too much power given away to the general public.

We already have a practical, fast, working electric car,- have had for years (Jeremy Clarkson is only one of many who work against us knowing this truth) - with new generation lithium batteries we can make a practical car with a 250 mile range - all servicing can be done in a clean garage that lubricates the moving parts but basically just replaces batteries.
No more oily hands, no more worn out exhaust pipes and silencers, no risk of explosive fire, no dirt, far less noise, the list is a long one...

"But what about the carbon in the electricity generation!" I hear the cries. Yes, currently we use carbon fuels to create electricity, and, let me add, I don't believe nuclear is the answer, digging up another unsafe mineral from the ground is a short term solution with long term (poisonous waste) consequences.

The fact is that, even right now, electric cars use about a third of the carbon fuel per mile compared to a petroleum driven car. In the future as, solar power creation matures, this figure will come down more and more in the favour of the electric car. Eventually we will, because we have to, develop solar energy, wave energy and wind energy to a level that supplies all our power needs.

We still have to find a greener oil free way to transport large goods weights across continents and oceans - but barges and sails on huge vessels are heading us "back to the future" or "forward with history". Most of these goods (apart form food, which must be grown more locally) are not time dependent, they can move slowly, as long as they get there regularly... that's what canal barges (horse drawn if necessary) and ocean going ships are good at.

So the future need not be as depressing a place as some doom-mongers imagine (on your behalf). Transport problems can be solved - but not by the oil lobby or the hydrogen fuel cell. If we are to have a future at all, we need to change our whole culture into one where solar energy, newer lighter batteries, local food solutions, old fashioned canals and non oil using boats, all feature strongly - a culture of economic neutrality and collaboration world wide, not growth/debt capitalist dogma.

And I hope to see enlightened green politics that will join these together in a symbiotic relationship to create a win-win world. Fred Goodwin and Fame Academy types will not help us get there - its down to you, me and Joe next door, and all our children, to shout out about what is right and needed.

Radio 4 this morning featured a short lived debate about why black athletes might be genetically better able to win certain athletic events.
Its an old debate, albeit often raised by fed up losers...

Typically, this discussion revolved around Jamaican sprinters and Kenyan long distance runners.
There was a brief mention of the fact that its not just Jamaicans like Usain Bolt - Afro-Americans also feature heavily in sprint records, as do a few British West Indian immigrants. The Kenyan Rift Valley phenomenon was also passed over, because it might be seen as a possible environmental influence as much as genetic (but in a stable static population surely one influences the other in evolutionary terms?)

What disappointed me was that they didn't expand into what the common factors are between those world class athletes from Jamaica and the Americas in general.

Two factors: both deemed to be of questionable taste for morning radio I suspect...
1) They have discovered that 99% of Black Americans (and Jamaicans) have white mixed ancestry from the slave trading/owning days, and,
2) The slave trade was a massive importation of people, as free labour, from Africa - but they were selectively bred over a few generations - i.e. the weakest of the imported slaves died either in the prisons or on the transport ships, or later in the fields. (50% apparently, a heck of a wastage rate).

Combine these two factors and we have the genetic ingredients to ensure that in those countries where people of slave origin are now allowed to pursue athletic goals freely, they disproportionately win the fast race...
I note that swimming, discus and shot putt are not among the sports that these slave trade progeny excel at...environmental factors or genetic?

Evolution tells us that the strongest survivors interbreeding creates the strongest species - mongrels make the fittest dogs, and you don't breed from losing greyhounds...

is this contentious? - I think not, race is nothing to do with it (technically there is no such thing) racing is for the fittest - the most flexible survivors will be that fittest...

The government of the United Kingdom has washed its hands of the entire affair, allowing the Scottish government total freedom in taking this perfidious action against the families of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103.

This quote is perfidious, not the action.

an open letter of reply to the linked site

Sirs,

your statement of why you do not publish letters of disapproval on your website is as disingenuous as your statement about the release and its supposed context.
I would go as far to say that your inflammatory style demonstrates a typical, conveniently forshortened view of history and selective amnesia for how the western world, led primarily by the USA, has continued to effectively encourage terrorism and avoid the only potential solutions - the solutions as have been demonstrated in Northern Ireland.

The world does not revolve around the USA's idea of "us, right or wrong" and until it learns a little humility in the face of differing world views and stops the exploitation of poorer nations' resources, then terrorism will only grow not cease. I would suggest that, yes, BP are as involved in this exploitation as any other multinational corporation, but also that you pick on BP because they have the effrontery to be like an Amercian oil giant but not American...

Most in the know are well aware of the deals with Libya that include this man's original arrest and trial, the financial "compensation" paid to the USA - and the fact that a jury would have found this particular man not guilty due to inconclusive evidence and the strong circumstancial evidence that it was in fact perpetrated by people from Syria not Libya.
- but the compassionate release of a terminally ill man is not an appropriate context for yet more shouting for revenge based politics (nowhere is this really a good idea). I am Scottish by ancestry and know the legal system that is the subject of this media frenzy of abuse - it is based on far better sentiments and principles than those that allow the death penalty for the improperly defended underclass, torture and extraordinary rendition of anyone with a Muslim name, and more, as unchallenged by a largely sleep walking populace.

I dispute your statement that all letters received against your petiton are abusive. Your boycott statement is more abusive of honesty than you dare admit, hence your problem with publishing countering views...
America has within it some of the best brains and creative minds on the planet, a couple known to me as friends - but their rational and calm voices are drowned by the sheer volume of the fear based, revenge driven, anti -democratic and intolerant ignorance of the majority.

More important than this one terminally ill man's whereabouts for his death bed scene is the wider context of invasive and asymmetric war into which the USA and Britain forlornly hemorrhage our public funds... whilst failing to put world trade and justice above their own selfish consumer pleasing economic demands. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died in this pursuit, over decades now - so many as to make the twin towers itself seem tiny in proportion (though the symbolism will of course never be so powerful when these people die in foreign lands, un-filmed and unfelt in the west).

Let the Vietnamese, Chilean, Nicaraguan, Cambodian, Algerian, Palestinian, Chechnyan, Grenadian, Panamanian and other peoples lecture Scotland on democracy - The USA and UK have no moral high ground on which to stand here.

pace this little matter some years earlier:

I worry for the current living generations of working age...
I will take the risk of sounding like I am blowing my own trumpet but, as I have said, I don't want to share a trumpet mouthpiece with anyone thanks...
I also get a fair few sneers as if "Mr know it all" is somehow a worse position than Mr soap opera addict...

I have been asked several times in the past week, "how on earth do you know this stuff?"... and I am puzzled. I thought "everyone" listened to radio 4, read information from all sources, on as wide a range of subjects they needed to, and from discussions with other intelligent beings, learning all about "stuff" - mainly as life's little issues and points of interest arose, rather than by academic courses etc...

It seems that I, and others, who have this thirst, and absorbency, for knowledge, are in a smallish minority. So, to paraphrase David Byrne, I find myself in another part of the world, in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and I ask myself how did I get here?
and I ask others, why don't you work this?, where is that beautiful mind? what is it about conversation with other people on any real subject that doesn't just make you want to find out more?

Noel Coward once said, "Life is wonderful, you go on learning and learning, every day, for the whole of your life... then you die and forget it all". The last bit some mystic folk may argue about, but to me the joy of life is in learning - all sorts of learning - the worry I have about the current generation is the sheer massive number whose time is spent in front of a game, a game show, or a deafening noise.

QI is not the staple diet of these people, but life is more than quite interesting, it rewards those who bother to learn. Therein lies my feeling of wealth, same as it ever was.

Look hard at these fields near an old airfield I flew over a week ago...

Cricket pitch sized marks that yes, I did see with my own eyes, (hence taking the photos) - not very random in spacing, almost herring-bone tessellation in layout in some places... I was flying with an experienced farmer who had no idea what they could be...

Any ideas?

and please don't say crop circle or anything remotely related to this idea...note the marks are all at either 90 or 45 degree angles to each other...

there were many more of these in other fields and the pattern went across several field boundaries, different crops, some cut, some not - I have no idea how visible these marks might be at ground level.

thanks for comments guys - I have added my own and this link so you can compare with Google Maps satellite view...

...the synonyms for rightwinger?

The American right is revealed in all its Inglorious Bastard nature in their amazing ability to pick on a few failures in the NHS healthcare system to try and support their, "money buys care, unemployment means fuck off and die" approach to the health of their own nation.

Yesterday a self-employed dance teacher/DJ friend of mine, who could never afford a healthcare policy in the USA, was working on his house (to save money) when he fell badly and shattered his elbow and wrist. I drove him to the nearby community hospital where they X-rayed him, gave him painkillers and called the blue light ambulance, administered dia-morphine, and took him to the major casualty unit 12 miles up the road. He's in there now, having an operation to open up his arm, reset and pin the broken bones, then painkillers, nursing care, plaster fix and follow up, all free - that's the NHS - its good at this stuff.

The horrifying aspects of the USA's own system that few of them seem to have grasped, (apart from the fact it doesn't work for 40% of the population) are:-
that for those who have never had to claim, they will have a massive illusion about how their insurance will actually cover them in a real health emergency, like cancer, heart disease, kidney failure, ruptured appendix, the list is extremely long...
90% of employees schemes will only cover certain procedures and omit extras, such as $500 a day bed space usage, 80% of operation costs, yadda yadda - to the tune of costing, for an average Joe - most of your life savings for a fortnight spell in hospital...
The system's other sense of security that is completely wrong is in the way it skews job mobility.
If you are in a low paid job that nevertheless has health insurance benefits, you cannot afford to do anything that might put your employment status in doubt...we have that freedom, a self employed and unemployed massive number of people freedom (remember that word, Right wing assholes?)

The aspect that really makes me want to puke is how much money the Insurance and medical complex spends trying to undermine all attempts to expose its perversity or provide an adequate alternative. This lobbying power is strikingly strong as is the rich lobbying power of the military and the capitalist banking system.

Why do the public believe in the power of money so blindly?

The notion that they just have to "get some and then life will be better" is such a pathetic and selfish nightmare, and it plays right into the hands of the obscenely rich who can afford to drop the odd million persuading Joe Average that America would be destroyed if the poor had anything like the one little element of security that their $billions give them a hundred thousand times over...

That the right wing promoted unregulated free markets, to the point of world systemic meltdown during a time when their grandfathers could remember the 1930s product of their last great freedom party, is shameful but understandable. The American right will always deny that the only way their system can work, has ever "worked" is with government controls - but they sure welcome the government bail outs when it saves their stinking greedy dirty fingers that wrecked the country in the first place...

Unfettered capitalism is unsafe, and in my eyes, even less desirable than communism.
Social democracy, the middle way, is only a threat to the extreme wealth of the extremely wealthy - not to their health or happiness, quite the contrary. The research backs up, worldwide - that the more unequal a society is the higher are the measures of national trends in things such as depression, crime, homicide, suicide, general malaise and drug abuse.
India and America have these problems in spades - Sweden and Norway strictly proportionally less so...

So please any American with a brain - stop watching your wealth-nut funded and controlled TVs, listening to your rabid rightwinger radio knobheads and reading your insane bloggers that think Communist Russia is the next stop if Obama has his way with health care reform.

Our NHS may not be perfect but its a damn sight healthier than your right wing nightmare of keep-the-poor-out-the-door-on-the-floor pig ignorance...

Came back from an excellent 2 hour dance session,
...with the hood down and powering up the lanes to the common,
once home - a delicious home made Moussaka,
a glass of red,
followed by fresh raspberries
...and a Havana cigar fresh back from a friend's visit to Cuba,
a lie down on the sun lounger and relax in the dark
whilst staring up at the shooting stars
accompanied by a few owls and the quiet chat of my wife and a good friend...

the best night for shooting stars is normally the 12th August but tonight was excellent - saw about ten in ten minutes - weirdly they were nearly all spotted in the western sky tracking from north to south west...(this is not the normal dominant pattern for the Perseids...

So if you get the chance - and the weather doesn't close in, tomorrow, get comfortable and ready to discuss life the universe and everything, and enjoy one of the natural world's shows that depends entirely on comet dust being static in the solar system whilst we rotate through it once a year...

(the cigar and raspberries are optional)

oh, and I don't expect you to get the Tiger Duck reference... though someone far away might just remember...

or Scotland Yard, or The Home Office, or wherever...
does anyone else find it a tad odd?
...that, in a 10.00 p.m TV newscast we should be treated to a correspondent making a report on something a minister or detective said, much, much earlier in the day - probably from somewhere else altogether - LIVE... (note the little badge in the top right telling you its definitely LIVE) from these symbolic places?

I mean... this entails a camera crew, probably a lights man, a cameraman and producer/sound-man whatever often on a Saturday or Sunday night - standing out there in the night, come rain, (no sun at that time) or snow...

Why do we need to see them doing a piece to camera LIVE from anywhere other than the studio? Does a London cab or bus going past in the background lend the reporter more gravitas?
One of the favourite backgrounds (for crime of all sorts, even if it was committed in Newcastle) is the New Scotland Yard rotating triangular sign. Is this supposed to symbolise that the police are watching our every move with their rotating eyes? or more, that our heads are spinning at the stupid actions of the police out to damage or destroy innocent demonstrators..?

Its inane!
sometimes Mr curly lip anchorman has a little two way dialogue with "Our correspondent" facing the screen that shows Nick or Ola, or Bill, or Nina Nananaa or whoever the silly schmuck is paid to stand somewhere meaningless in the rain at night. (You do know that the live correspondent cannot in fact see him at all) Is this supposed to convey the way that the BBC and ITV have their workers "out there" on the job?
In which case I sure hope Nick Robinson doesn't spend his entire life camped outside either Downing Street or Westminster, very sad.
Stop it BBC
Stop it now.
For conversations to camera, keep them in the studio where you already have the lights, the warmth and a cup of canteen coffee...
- its our money, stop wasting it.

What do the obnoxious publicity slave, bullying, vulnerable person molesting, Jeremy Kyle ...and Archbishop Vincent Nichols have in common?

(and yes, you can say - "oooh an awful lot" if you want)

I suppose the most interesting thread I see running through them is a self serving publicity homing instinct, plus a hilarious lack of awareness of just how ridiculous they sound when trying to criticise others and justify their pet modus operandi.

Take, for example, this piece from the Catholic church's response to the vast report detailing decades of endemic child abuse across continents of Catholic pederast influence...

The "BBC" helpfully headlined it: "why-not-focus-on-the-lucky-children-we-didnt-abuse-says-catholic-church".
You couldn't make this stuff up.

There is another, if slightly stretched link I am making as to why I can jointly feature the undesirables, Jeremy Kyle and Archbishop Vinny Nickertwist. It's to do with how, yesterday, the Church's head honcho in the UK pontificated on the issue of social networking sites, "such as Facebook".

The Jeremy Kyle show purports to be respectable; it justifies its shameful day time rubbish, saying it offers counselling to the educationally challenged TV fame seekers it allows onto the show in order to humiliate and shame them for a public with a puerile appetite for gladiatorial games.

ITV not only believes in this obnoxious trash, it also owns "Friends Reunited" - one of the early success stories in a type of social networking that is now sadly passe. It faded not just because it was bought and made over by those executives of ITV who believe in Jeremy Kyle, but also because it suffered from a backlash as not-quite-happy-enough married men and women discovered their first loves were still alive and on the site - so they proceeded to run away with them...very Jeremy Kyle - friends reunited/ relationships ruined.

But Friends reunited is nearly worthless now, ITV made a huge mistake - they bought an overpriced share in a dying, superseded product.

There is one much larger product that deserves to die off and be superseded more than any other - but for some reason, it is one of the richest and most secure brands in the entire world, despite its outrageous claims that we should look away from the thousands of children they have abused in order to focus on their "healthy" indoctrination programme.

I actually welcome its latest pronouncement, because the result, with any luck, will be that the common sense of children will see it as the anachronistic fear ridden tripe that it is, and thus further reject this demonic brainwashing sect.

On the logical argument front, the leader's pronouncement on the dangers of social networking sites has two problems...
Not that they are completely wrong about the dangers of over focusing of children's leisure time on computer or TV screens; most of us probably rightly feel that children would be healthier if they spent more time outdoors playing in the park or the woods.
(What parents fear is out there is also an ironic, common and counterproductive phenomenon, if only they realised that woods and street corners were safer than Catholic Churches!).

No, the first little problem the Archbishop faces is in forgetting that his own organisation uses Facebook to recruit people to its youth summer camps...publicly knocking a medium you have already embraced to your own ends is not a clever move.

The second is that he has as much credibility, when he decides to pontificate on the need to avoid new technology and instead use his own organisation to build community, as a 17th century slave master.
The sense of community that young people need is one where hypocritical adults who like to cover up and avoid uncomfortable truths about their responsibility for massive institutional child abuse, have no hold over them whatsoever.

So yes - they do need to play in open spaces, meet on street corners and discover their sexuality through conversations and socially enjoyable meet ups with each other.
But no, they don't need Catholic dogma telling them that their modern tools and technology are far more dangerous than a randy priest taking them into the vestry for confession sessions...

I wonder if Jeremy Kyle does confession?

I am what an American majority might describe as a "bleeding heart liberal" - or communist.
(This means I do not believe in unfettered freedom of markets, brute force and gun ownership, and have some vague dangerous belief in something called society and in human rights...)
So it is as a liberal, and a practicing Quaker, that I take some pride in our collective acceptance of the equality of same sex marriages under the law.

The C of E has, by contrast, been busily whipping itself into a frenzy over female bishops and same sex marriages, and infighting over gay but suppressed clergy and African hierarchical homophobes...
sad and pathetic, but what one would expect from such old power-crazed hierarchies.

The title linked interactive panoramic view is of my own meeting house (try it, its interesting technology). It's a delightful peaceful place where people who might appear very conservative by appearance and indeed, by habit, nevertheless have used their collected decades of quiet gathering to discover the truths of human love...
It doesn't matter what gender you are, if you want to celebrate love in marriage - that's a good thing.

People may not realise that along with the right to affirm instead of swear an oath in a court of law, Quakers long ago sacrificed much to establish their rights. One of these is to perform marriage ceremonies under their own terms that are nevertheless legal marriages as much as church of England or registry office ceremonies.

The Quaker witness to peace is widely known, the advice to live adventurously and challenge those laws and practices that go against a truly developed belief - less so.
I am proud that any Gay pride supporter (and any atheist) can walk calmly and peacefully into the calm of a Quaker meeting and rejoice in that challenge of committed love.