Another one from the you-couldn’t-make-it-up department, found in a Samizdata comment, is this Times story about the police wanting to ban drinking standing up.
Police in Preston already have an alcohol harm reduction and prevention team. Sergeant Andy Hobson, the team’s alcohol project manager, said: “If people are sat down there is less potential for flashpoints than with vertical drinking. This is not designed so much to affect the amount they drink; it is the proximity of other people when you are stood up, which is where the problems can start.
“People go into these places and crowd round the bars, then the next you know somebody gets a push, the pint goes over and that’s it.â€
There are so many problems with this, not least the existence of an alcohol harm reduction and prevention team in the first place, that I’m just going to skip to the end:
I think the ultimate cause of this is a kind of lazy utilitarianism. Risk must be minimised, and no principle can stand in the way of that goal. No-one even stops to think that there might be something wrong with threatening publicans and their clients with violence to marginally reduce the risk of violence in pubs.
This is almost as silly as…
[link]
“Young women in Sweden, Germany and Australia have a new cause: They want men to sit down while urinating “because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity, and by extension, degrading women.”
Riiight.
Argh…
To both.
(link) has a few echoes.