Linkdump 09-07-2012

• Where does all the best comedy come from? Death and war
  "I attribute the darkness and strangeness of the comedy made by that generation to the war[...] a whole generation subscribed to their take on the war as something horrific, but also absurd". RIP Eric.
  (tags: comedy )
• The Locations and Ranges of London's Olympic Missiles
  Survival Tip: don't be in these circles.
  (tags: policing acab Olympics London 2012 )
• Magazines for sale in Blade Runner, 1982
  Hahahah. /Magazines/ for sale. Made out of pressed wood pulp, no doubt. Some interesting artistic design here, but I wonder how much of it was visible on the big screen.
  (tags: movies )
• The lie of ‘unaffordability’
  "...a very sharp old lady nailed [David Willetts...] by challenging the idea that we can’t afford to maintain the welfare state today when we could afford to construct it from scratch in the immediate, crushingly-indebted aftermath of World War II". Now with many, many graphs.
  (tags: bloodytories politics welfarereform welfare )
• Welcome To The Security Games
  Nothing here we didn't already know, but a nice summary.
  (tags: Olympics London 2012 acab )
• British democracy in "terminal decline"
  "Britain's constitutional arrangements are `increasingly unstable'[...]; public faith in democratic institutions `decaying'; a widening gap in the participation rates of different social classes of voters; and an `unprecedented' growth in corporate power, which [...] `threatens to undermine some of the most basic principles of democratic decision-making'." Joy.
  (tags: news politics democracy )
• The Olympic torch – from Hitler to Headingley
  "I think this particular response to the torch relay, though, also reveals a distinct measure of what I think of as ‘ritual anxiety’ – that is, an uneasiness around the whole idea of ritual activities. It’s something I see in relation to all sorts of other ritual occasions and commemorative events, and particularly strikes me on Valentine’s Day, when a whole army of people emerge every year to complain that we shouldn’t need a special day devoted to something we should be doing all the time, that it is meaningless, too commercialised, misogynistic etc. But it also crops up in relation to Christmas (goods in the shops too early, probably not really the date of the historical Jesus’ birth), Easter (it’s a pagan festival really!, no it’s not), and almost any other ritual or commemorative occasion you can name."
  
  I don't know anyone like that. Oh noooo.
  (tags: society ritual Olympics London 2012 )