:opinion/

3 rants

It’s pretty typical that during a period when I am absolutely not inclined to write anything — my friend Insa having died, as some of you are aware, thanks for the condolences — there should have been so much that demands a rant. So here are three little rants, or “rantettes”…

Rant 1: They seek those paedos everywhere…

Tessa Jowell revealed herself to be a little bit dim when she watched Brass Eye on Channel 4 and thought that it was making light of paedophilia. However, I feel positively benign towards her compared with Beverley Hughes and David Blunkett who do not deserve to hold any sort of government office in a democracy.

Ms Hughes and Mr. Blunkett each pontificated about how bad the programme was and how irresponsible it was of C4 to broadcast it once let alone repeat it without once having seen it themselves:

One of [Blunkett’s] deputies, Beverley Hughes, called it “unspeakably sick” again without having seen it; and, when challenged 24 hours later by Jim Naughtie, was defiant in her determination not to see it, even though sending for a video might have been considered a prudent manoeuvre if she was to go on braying about the scandal of it ever being shown.

This is the cretinous sort of thing we’d associate with lobotomised Fundies (“Oh, I don’t need to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian to know it’s blasphemous…”) and right-wing duffers (“Shouldn’t be allowed…”), not a fairly young minister in a supposedly left-wing government. Oh, I know, I know, don’t get me started…

Look: if you limit free speech, you don’t have free speech any more. In the modern world we need free speech, and occasionally having fuckwits like the BNP sticking their head out of the cesspit is a price worth paying.

But Brass Eye isn’t in that category. What Chris Morris et al were satirising wasn’t paedophilia or paedophiles but the media’s tendency to froth at the mouth whenever the P-word is mentioned. And they did it brilliantly. So brilliantly they actually provoked the thing they were satirising.

The part — was it ten seconds long? — when Chris Morris says he’s going to keep his children safe and with him at all times then slides shut the drawers of filing cabinets with the kids inside said all you need to know about the futility of trying to keep children away from every danger — and it was funny, too.

Stop for a minute. How many paedophiles do you know or know of? I’m not talking about people you know of from the newspapers or television, I mean people you have met or friends of yours (or even friends of friends) have met. The chances are most people reading this will know of not one paedophile. Paedophilia is very uncommon.

That’s not the impression you get from the papers, of course, which make parents feel as though every corner hides a lurking Paedo waiting to pounce. The result of this hysteria is that paediatricians get attacked. Truly irresponsible rags like the News of the World publish pictures of “paedophiles” and then a perfectly innocent guy in a neck brace gets attacked because one of the pictures also featured a man wearing a neck brace. Where were Tessa Jowell’s and Beverley Hughes’s and David Blunkett’s castigation of the irresponsibility of the press on such occasions?

Is it too cynical to wonder if the Government want to keep up the paedohysteria to give them an excuse to snoop on e-mail, etc?

In a healthy democracy Chris Morris would be honoured as performing a vital function. In a healthy democracy the content of television programmes is not a legitimate matter for government string-pulling. The hideous control freaks currently occupying the government benches need to be told where to get off.

Rant 2: Everbody knows…

I thought the self-righteous cant spewed out about Brass Eye was bad, but if anything the comment from certain quarters about the SAS ‘widow’ was worse.

If you missed the story — I know some people did — this was about a young woman who was the partner of a guy in the SAS. She had been with him for about eight years and was pregnant with his child when was killed on active service. She’s been given a one-off payment of a couple of thousand pounds but she won’t get an army widow’s pension because she was neither married to him nor had she been living with him for six months before he joined up. Of course, that would have meant they would have had to be living together since they were 16…

This sucks — and despite what some dimwit pundits were saying, it isn’t that hard to tell when a relationship is serious; certainly, once you’ve got to the seven-year mark and started having children there can’t be any doubt of that.

But what was truly egregious was some of the comments by the Conservative trotted out to discuss this on C4 News: Lady Olga Maitland (braying Serbo-Scottish aristocrat, not really aware of what is going on, none is trying more — and few are more trying — than Lady Olga Maitland). Her performance reminded me of what a desperate medical student, temporarily unable to recall the word eructation, described as “farting through the mouth.”

You might have thought she had been embalmed in the Fifties, along with attitudes to match. The woman, she said, was responsible because she hadn’t married her partner. Oh, so it’s her decision alone, is it? The SAS man would simply have to go along with whatever his partner wanted, would he?

“The child,” Olga pontificated, “is the important thing.” No, you dummy, the child is an important thing. Just as important is the dead man’s partner who has lost her life partner and is now having to cope with grief while bringing up a young child.

Everyone knows, Olga maintained, that children of married couples do better than children of unmarried couples.

Yes, you read that right. She didn’t say that children of stable couples do better than children from a turbulent household, or that children of a stable couple do better than children of a single parent — defensible positions. She seriously believes that the possession of a marriage certificate automatically means that children will do better.

When questioned about this — not very aggressively, I have to say, although Krishnan Guru-Murthy did look as though he was stunned by what he was hearing — she said, “Well I’ve done a study…” Oh, all right then, we have to believe her, don’t we?

It’s extremely unlikely that Frau Olga will be looking in here (I feel like having a bath just at the merest suggestion of the thought), but in case she does, let me point out that there are plenty of good reasons why people don’t get married:

  1. Getting married is fucking expensive. OK, you might say all you really need is the cost of the actual wedding ceremony itself which is not enormously expensive (of course, that depends on how much money you have to start with), but most people don’t want a dirt cheap wedding — it is, after all, a significant event in one’s life, even if you don’t buy into the “best day of your life” crap — and I’d bet Olga had the best wedding she could get.
  2. A lot of people — and I know the intellectually challenged types in the Tory party really can’t grasp this — see no reason for involving the state in their personal relationship. They are committed to each other, all their friends know they are together — why involve the state bureaucracy?
  3. Something else which needs to be battered into the head of Olga & Co. (preferably with something both sharp and heavy) is that there are many, many people in this country who are not Christians. I’m not just talking about Hindus and Muslims, etc., but also about atheists (who may see marriage as an institution with no meaning outside of religion) and the growing number following Western nature-based religions — Wicca, Druidry, Odinism and so on. Most people who are not Christians can’t be married by their priest and have that recognised by the state. The solution, clumsy thought it be, is to have two ceremonies: one at the registrar’s office and another within their faith. Unsurprisingly, quite a lot of people from the Pagan end of the spectrum undertake their rituals and see no good reason to have a redundant civil ceremony.

Fundamentally, it is — or should be — none of the Government’s business whether people are married or not, and more particularly it is not the business of employers, whether in the public or the private sectors. Consign the bizarre “family values” fascists like Oberfrauenführer Olga to the dustbin of history where they belong.

Rant 3: ’Bye ’bye Net

As the end of July approached, I had other things on my mind so I didn’t pay too much attention to news or the Net. Even so, somehow I began to be aware of dire warnings of the imminent collapse of the Net.

When I started to pick up on what was being said, I couldn’t shake off a sense of unreality. The FBI were warning of dire events. Servers were going to be crippled. Web pages were going to be hacked. It would be the end of the Net as we know it. Yeah, right.

The reporting of the Code Red “virus” was pretty short on detail. It was several days from the first report before I learned it only threatened servers. I’d have found that out sooner if I’d been online, but it was instructive to get information solely from the mainstream news sources. I haven’t heard so much hysteria unleavened by information since — well, the last big virus scare.

Then I finally saw one report which explained that the Code Red worm attacked Windows 2000 (because of a “security loophole”), and that’s when I started laughing.

Windows 2000? Ooh-er, the Internet’s gonna die! Not.

What was staggering was not that the journalists didn’t understand what was wrong with what they were saying, but that none of the “computer experts” they dug up pointed out that the Internet doesn’t run on Windows!

Oh, sure, there are some NT/2000 servers out there — but the majority of servers (even some of Microsoft’s servers) use UNIX, and they were never going to have any problems with Code Red at all.

Still, I’m sure it was a threat to Win2000 boxes. Which is as good an illustration as anyone can want of the reasons why Net servers should stick to UNIX. Security has always been a bit of an afterthought for Windows.

It’s time the news media actually got clued-up technical advisers — that is, people who don’t get all their information from Microsoft press releases. It’s also time they realised that the only people who really benefit from over-the-top virus scares are the people who sell anti-virus software and the virus authors themselves.

Further reading:

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