Party Vibe

@smokemary 986242 wrote:

It’s all for the money what ever way the government can get more they go for that

round here they don’t even attempt to hide that fact, a couple of years ago there was loads of documents on Ipswich Council website on the licensing committee (they are likely to be still there TBH, although they are not very easy or interesting to read unless you have local knowledge).

The Police Commissioner (who used to be a pig farmer) got all these consultants/boffins with security cleared access to the Police control room who plotted all these maps of every alcohol related incident in Ipswich right down to the last street and possible links to pubs and clubs.

They also put together this presentation on the costs of dealing with the incidents caused from nightlife against any revenue from licensing fees taxes (bear in mind most alcohol tax goes straight to London rather than local areas) and successfully lobbied for a restriction on new licenses in many parts of town.

The cops even admitted that this wouldn’t stop alcohol problems one bit (that was a job for Social Services and NHS apparently) but it would at least push the problems out of town back into the housing estates where the cops are already patrolling anyway because of the rise in domestic violence since the economic depression started, so the restrictions would reduce overall Police costs.

This sort of thing is happening in other regions and countries, even in supposedly “liberal” countries like NL and DE especially just outside the big cities.

“housing estate” can be anything from what is called a “project” in some bits of the USA to just a “suburban neighborhood” (but ours, and family houses in general are usually smaller).

On a British housing estate there is usually a mixture of social housing (lower rents part or wholly subsidised by the council) and those who own their homes outright via mortgages.

to be fair the so-called “Christians” found in NI and to a lesser extent in Scotland (both Protestant and Catholics) are throwbacks from the 1600s and thankfully are very rare elsewhere in Europe. They are a mixture of Catholics who refuse to acknowledge the changes of Vatican II , and Protestants who are stuck in the time of Calvin and others – both of them are as bad as one another with trying to claim anything vaguely enjoyable is some type of sin and still trying to fight a war that everywhere else in the entire continent put a stop to centuries ago.

There are pockets of these fundamentalist types in NL, DK and I believe there remain a fair few in the USA (I see plenty of web media from so-called “traditional” Catholics who claim that Pope Francis is a Soviet conspiracy and the Church is taken over by European tree-huggers etc) and they are bad news wherever they end up for anyone who lives in the same community and wants to enjoy themselves, but alas some of them are well off and they run local businesses (especially agricultural ones) so still have power over communities.

There is even a “bible belt” of conservative religions types (mostly Calvinists) in the Southern Netherlands; one of them (and he was only in his 30s) assasinated the former politician Els Borst (at age 82) who legalised abortion and euthanasia when in power claiming it was “divine inspiration”, having already murdered his own sister because of her “feminist” views.

In Denmark another lot of these bought the old Ungdomshuset (youth house) only to close it and knock it down, leading to full scale riots in Copenhagen around 2008. (The Council there eventually found another venue for the young people to use).

Some of the presenters of Radio Maria openly hold these types responsible for the rise of atheism in Northern Europe….

I do have an interest in European Christian theology (and the other religions now found in modern Europe) but this is as much because even in modern times it does still impact on a lot of European culture.

Consider that the two main centre-right parties in NL and DE openly state their Christian allegiances, Theresa May still attends Church of England ceremonies (her dad is a vicar), and the UK is also one of the few remaining countries in Europe that has not actually separated church and state (which IMO is also backward).

Even the Pope does not think it is desirable for countries to be biased to any one religion and prevented from practising others (including not believing in any of it at all!)

However I would not even qualify to work as the janitor in the average Catholic university – particularly not the main Austrian one, here you need a degree to get in there in the first place, and it is 20km up some mountain (I remember sending some equipment to their TV studio in the late 90s) with only about 250 students. BE unis are especially good at maths, cryptography and computer science, and the NL ones are globally respected for experimental physics (including levitating a frog about 0,8m into the air with a 18 Tesla electromagnet without harming the animal) :laugh_at: