Big ol' Fairtrade Organic Dick

 Dickens originally set out to write a Very Serious Pamphlet About the Plight of the Poor in Modern Times, with numbers, and statistics, and gruesome details about the state of debtors prisons. And he realized that it would probably not change a single thing, in the end.

So he changed it to fiction, and made it emotional, and focused on the lives in one specific family.  And he also self-published it, because he realized that a for-profit publishing house wouldn’t want to touch it.  And gave it to friends.

Not only did it help change people’s attitudes toward charity organizations and help reform labor laws, it also (pretty much) revived the whole custom of celebrating Christmas at all.

The pamphlet was going to be called ‘An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’

He decided to write the story because he realised that soap-boxing factory workers and their employers on the importance of educational reform wasn’t going to work on a society-wide scale.

and then they did the Greek Thing and painted naked men fighting the monster 

or, well, a deeply flawed representation of what they imagined the fossil had looked like while alive, an early form of paleoart. 

but sometimes they also just. drew the skull and slapped a black blob monster onto it? anyway i love the greeks.

Later developments from early 20th century (Agatha Christie and such): similarly, police is stupid and easily tricked by criminals, and smart amateurs have to save the day

around 1930s ‘hardboiled’ and noir fiction: police are every bit and corrupt and detestable as criminals, and sometimes ARE the gangsters. These are almost entirely realistic, as they’re often written from actual experiences of real private detectives

1940s, vigilante detective fiction like Batman and the Shadow: where as always, police is portrayed as at worst corrupt and at best useless, and it’s up to brilliant people in masks to solve crimes

1950s: SUDDENLY with Dragnet, police are all brilliant crimefighter heroes who solve all the crimes, and are Always Lawful Good, and criminals are Always Chaotic Evil

onwards: 80-90% of detective fiction is about cops, and usually follows the Dragnet formula (e.g. stuff like CSI)

Thesis: police procedural is a predatory creation that has co-opted the notoriously anti-cop genre of detective fiction, whose primary starting idea was that cops were little more than thugish brutes, unsuited to subtle scientific art of solving crimes, and turned it into shallow propaganda.

conservatives:

Okay.. alright..

British food does not look like that.

That is British food:

This is British food:

Sunday dinner looks amazing right?

This is also British food:

So what cheek do you have at commenting that British food is basically shit. And yes I’m British and we don’t all drink tea and speak posh oh no. That’s due to the area you live in.

Oxfordshire=posh

London= cockney

Midlands= northern

Welsh= north

And Scotland northern

And the food depends on what area you get your food from different areas have different ideas on food such as Scotland haggis and deep fried Mars bars.

So just don’t Diss British food, you’ve probably never tried it.

me: Yes ma'am I’d like to order the Jellied Ox Taint

waitress: Oi cummin roight op govna

Do you mean kinda like this?

Which is mostly used by class-conscious RASH (Red and Anarchist SkinHead) types, but also sometimes by shitty “apolitical” skinheads. If the hammers look like this it’s a nazi bonehead: