I don’t understand some people

You have no doubt heard of the phenomenon of the people who ‘dine and dash’. These are people who eat in a restaurant and then leave without paying. The usual perpetrators are small groups of young men. Why they do it is unclear, since usually it is not because they are hungry and lack money for food. Maybe they treat it as a lark. This is a despicable practice, especially since some restaurants dock the server for the amount of the unpaid bill. Given that servers get paid less than the minimum wage, this seems particularly outrageous.
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The scandal of Catholic orphanages

In the US, the focus of outrage against the Catholic church has been on the abuses by priests and the cover ups by higher officials. In other countries, there has also been widespread reporting on the appalling abuses that took place in orphanages run by the Catholic church. Two excellent films The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Philomena (2013) were both based on true stories and the sheer cruelty of the nuns and priests involved is astounding.
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The ACLU under fire

I am a long-standing member of the ACLU. After the election of Donald Trump, the membership in this group more than tripled. I ran into the then-director of the Ohio ACLU and she wryly told me that while this surge in membership was welcome, there would come a time when the ACLU would take a stand on some issue that would make many of these new members realize that the ACLU was not an arm of the Democratic party and they would react angrily.
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Finally, a police officer found guilty of murder

A jury in Texas has found a police officer Roy Oliver guilty for the murder of Jordan Edwards, a 15-year old unarmed black youth, while he was a passenger in car driving by. The story was a familiar one in which the officer argued that the boy and his friends had been acting aggressively towards his partner and that he had been forced to fire at them in defense. But the body cam videos showed a very different story, that the car had been moving away.
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Scallop wars and French taunts

One of the many contentious issues that will have to be dealt with as part of Brexit negotiations is over shellfishing. Now a row has broken out between French and British fishing boat crews over the rights to scallop fishing.

French fishermen have been accused of throwing insults, stones and smoke bombs at their British rivals in the English Channel in a vicious scrap over scallops.

The clash happened around 12 nautical miles (22km) off the Normandy coast, near the Bay of Seine.

British boats are legally entitled to fish in the scallop-rich area.

But their presence has infuriated the French, who accuse the British of shamelessly depleting shellfish stocks.

The report did not specify the insults the French used but we know from history that they have a formidable arsenal of taunts that the British are no match for. What kind of comeback can you make when someone tells you that your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries?

What exactly is happening with Brexit?

A little over two years ago, in June 2016, the people of the UK voted in a non-binding referendum to leave the EU, what is now known as Brexit. I have been following the fallout off and on but have to admit that my eyes glaze over when I read articles about Brexit, because the issues seem so complicated and technical. None of the major British political parties seem to like the idea of leaving the EU in general, though significant factions within them are pushing for it. There is talk of a hard Brexit, a soft Brexit, and things in-between. There are so many possible directions in which it can go, each of them having major problems.
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Why no women in the list of people we would be shocked by?

In my post and the comments about people whom I would be shocked by being charged with sexual abuse, Crip Dyke asked the following interesting question about the names given by me and other commenters.

I find it interesting that Tabby is the only person to name any women. Are there really no women who would shock the commenters on this post? Or is it that it doesn’t even occur to you that women might be perpetrators, so you didn’t imagine being shocked at an accusation because you can’t even imagine the accusation?

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Misapplying the protocol for the death of private figures to public ones

Larry Sabato is a political analyst who is frequently quoted in the media, usually in the role of prognosticator about who is likely to win seats in Congress. Following the death of John McCain, Glenn Greenwald highlighted a tweet of Sabato’s that has become a routine sentiment following the death of well-known establishment politicians.

Put me down as one of the ‘bitter and vicious’. It is extraordinary how it is mainly with politicians that we are expected to suspend criticisms upon their death and let a wave of praises go by unchallenged. You are far more likely to get an honest and balanced appraisal of the life of a dead writer or actor or musician than you are of a politician. This may be because the media establishment feels more subservient to politicians than to those other public figures. But those who claim that we should ‘keep politics out’ in the immediate wake of the death are in fact committing a deeply political act. By focusing only on the good and ignoring all the bad, they are enabling a form of historical cleansing that normalizes awful actions.
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