Consumer behaviour is reminiscent of the sort of hard-line religious pastors dishing out frothing sermons on morality over the pulpit, all the while being trousers-down with a rent boy underneath it.
We want the moral superiority of decrying tax avoidance, as well as the gratification of crap convenience coffee from a ubiquitous chain, even if it goes against our purported values.
Read my op-ed on UK consumers and tax avoidance in full.
Click on the image to enlarge it.
From the Guardian:
Social media messages written by Britain’s first youth police and crime commissioner are being investigated by the force that employs her following complaints from the public.
Kent police officers are to decide whether Paris Brown, 17, has committed any offences in writing apparently violent, racist and anti-gay comments on Twitter.
If you’re someone who took the time to report Paris Brown, a child, to police in the hope she’d be criminalised for years-old ‘offensive’ tweets, for which she has since given a sincere and grovelling apology for writing, please re-evaluate the priorities in your obviously tragic existence.
Pity the fool who would sacrifice their own values on free expression just to settle an old score with an enemy. What are freedoms worth if you would give yours up just to deny them to those you hate?
Read my opinion piece on the royal charter in full.
We are all helpless victims of our own circumstance, born and then relentlessly conditioned by everything and everyone around us. In our childhood and formative years – the most important period for the moulding of human characteristics – we are as good as powerless against the forces influencing who or what we become.
This must never be underestimated. The struggle to reshape who we are made to be, to metamorphose as a person, is the biggest battle some will ever have to fight.
While we may be empathetic to another human’s plight, it is very difficult to truly immerse yourself in the mind of someone else, see the world through their eyes, and understand how hard it is to change.
It is in this context that we must view families dependent on welfare, who think that an existence on benefits alone is an acceptable, even enviable, lifestyle. Rather than glare through a self-righteous lens, devoid of perspective or understanding, we must be both pragmatic and sympathetic to people trapped by their own personal situations.
Read my full post on welfare dependency in Britain.
