Scum

There is, according to a government spokesweasel, a direct connection between truancy and poverty. The attempt here was to suggest that poverty causes truancy, in the same way that similar spokesweasels have tried to suggest that poverty causes crime, vandalism, drug-taking, exam failure, bad nutrition or whatever social ill you care to name. Connection, being just as much a weasel word as correlation (one Al Gore might even know the meaning of now), and neither of these are ‘cause’. Pointing out a ‘connection’ is useless. I can say that there is a connection between politics and expenses fraud, but this tends leave other links in the chain like, for example, thieving politicians. So let’s sort out directly connected links and look at causes. The children of scum, whilst turning into scum themselves, are more likely to play truant; scum are the cause of most crimes, either to feed a drug habit or because they have never learnt right from wrong; scum impoverish themselves, because they are generally … lazy dole-scrounging scum. And if we go further we see that the welfare state and government busy bodies increasingly ordering people’s lives and destroying that thing called reponsibility, cause scum. That government spokesweasel should have said, “Tosser politicians trying to apply a bankrupt ideology are the cause of the scum in this country, but then they are lazy thieving scum themselves and like the company.”