undercover police fathering children with women they're spying on is treachery beyond belief.

[alicethehorse]

Story here Undercover police had children with activists

"Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring ...

"In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers ? whom they have not seen in decades ? were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children's mothers for many years"

What a monumental abuse of trust

I try not to think about it too much and change things when and if I can. Like handing out fliers on child poverty in the states, at a local occupy demo.

I think the references to the Second World War fall under Godwin's Law and therefore the lentil weaving old Marxists we win.

I'd be more ashamed of having a father who lied to my mother about his identity in order to monitor my mother and her friends.

MrsTerryPratchett

No, in this case both partners did not have an equal responsibility to worry about contraception.

Clearly the police officers, who knew they were breaking the rules and behaving unethically by sleeping with these women, had a far greater responsibility than the unsuspecting women to ensure no children were fathered as a result of their moral and sexual incontinence.

And a very good law too. I shall be bowing out now as I have some lentils to knit weave.

fridakahlo I've been thinking about this stuff more recently. It feels like there's stuff going on, SOPA for example, and the economic "downturn" .

ah yes. the first stages of rampant paranoia

Going off topic a bit, but the thing I've never understood about our system is that surely the "bust" is as inevitable as the "boom"?

People seem to remember the good times as if that's what capitalism really is, and the downturns are an anomaly, someone's fault (Gordon Brown!).

But aren't the downs as inevitable as ups in a system based on greed.

References to the WW2 do not fall under Godwin's Law, which says nothing at all about who wins the argument.

moah, There are cycles in most things, not just in systems based on greed.

the weather , the seasons, your life, the generations

You could argue that bust is not only inevitable but a needed part of capitalism. If workers aren't afraid of losing their jobs and ending up homeless/starving/dead they won't work for the low wages that make the profits for the people who own the means of production. The people who make the money just buy more in a recession and wait it out (buy low, sell high). They don't care about the busts as long as they have a stake. Keeps the costs down and the fear (of terrorism/war/poverty/the other) makes people blame each other rather than changing the system. The bailout and post-bailout bonuses certainly prove that the bourgeoisie aren't the ones suffering.

Anyone up for a chorus of The Internationale? The Red Flag? Know Your Enemy?

Neither the bust nor the boom is inevitable, except that human nature seems to make it so.

The type of dysfunctional capitalism and weakened democracy we have now is not inevitable either.

Inevitability is the argument that what we have is all we could have and there is no other way of doing things.

But things have changed a lot in the last 30 years.

ah mrs Pratchett, good points

but you are ignoring the fact that some people and industries actually benefit and profit from the downturns in the cycle.

lawyers, insolvency firms, bailiffs, some hedges, etc

"Anyone up for a chorus of The Internationale?"

Easy there, OldMacEIEIO that was a tongue in cheek reference to me not motherofallhangovers being a bitch.

Ironically motherofallhangovers, off licences are one of the businesses that do well in a bust.

mm. this is going too far off topic. byee

Me too. i have an anarcho-syndicalist commune to build.

I remember seeing pound shops for the first time in the recession at the beginning of the 90s. They may well have existed before then, but I'd never seen them, and suddenly they were popping up all over London.

And I have to get some sleep to work on inventing something much nicer than capitalism :)

For anyone who may interested in alternative economic systems, may I recommend reading 'Rare Albion' by Christopher Houghton.
Rare Albion
As for the main issue in this thread, what those men did was much worse than your common or garden variety bastard, as they were receiving state sponsership for their lies.
And we live in a democratic society