Is the Mail's feature claiming that women at Wimbledon are "selling tradition short," claiming "once there was only ever the briefest glimpse of utilitarian sports knicker":
a) a commentary on modesty, tradition and the way in which the media sexualises female atheletes while passing judgment on their bodies
OR
b) a pun that offers the opportunity to print picture after picture of tennis player's bottoms ?
Con Coughlin in The Telegraph deals with the substance of the allegations against BAE and an impending US investigation by.. entirely ignoring them and repeating the rationale for dropping the UK investigation:
To follow up on the numbers discussed earlier showing a drop in marriage in the UK, here's the second part of the story that's rarely, if ever, mentioned. Religious marriage is in long-term decline .
Religious ceremonies in England and Wales have dropped steadily, from 179,459 in 1981 to 85,870 in 2002. Over that same time period, the number of civil ceremonies have also decreased - from 172,514 to 168,530 - but nowhere nearly as severly. The main drop in marriage is due to a drop in religious ceremonies - softened by a choice of secular ceremonies in their place (figures taken from here).
To go into a little more detail, Church of England ceremonies have dropped from 118,435 to 58,710 and Catholic marriages have dropped from 26,097 to 9,980. Suddenly, the panic over the sanctity of marriage becomes a little clearer: both congregations are losing the ability to dictate terms for adult, long-term relationships.
Since 1992, there have been more civil than religious ceremonies and the gap is widening. In 2005, 65% of marriages were conducted through civil ceremonies, and there's no sign that this trend will do anything other than continue.
Everyone's favourite journalist for the next ten minutes, as Mika Brzezinski refuses to make Paris Hilton the lead story of the day:
Having failed to set fire to the script, she started to tear it up before offering it to a colleague. "Will you burn this for me, please?" she asked. "I'm about to snap." When he refused, she took it back and rose from her desk, saying, "I'm shredding it."
The most disgusting part is where her co-hosts mock her for not taking Paris Hilton seriously enough and for attempting to actually report the non-socialite news. YouTube has it here.Not quite sure what the Telegraph is angling for here:
Oh no, the homosexuals are destroying marriage.. ah, wait.. it's the straight people, making decisions for themselves :
Sometimes I worry that Melanie Phillips will become less crazed and deny me a rich source of humour. Then she drops something like this into the middle of a column :
Hazel Blears replaces Ruth Kelly as Communities Minister: while there are few major equality bills on the horizon, it's encouraging to see Blears has been present for the vast majority of votes on equal rights - with TheyWorkForYou rating her as strongly in favour of gay rights.
However - and it's a big fat however for liberty - she also ranks as strongly in favour of ID cards. But, instead of getting into Blears (an unfortunate turn of phrase) let's take a look back at the woman she replaces. Around here, Kelly is most famous for being the minister responsible for equality who tried her very hardest not to actually get involved in equality legislation.. at least, when it came to the deadly deadly homo.
As a member of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic religious sect which regards practising homosexuals as sinners, Kelly spent most of her time ducking the obvious questions (such as "do you agree with the Pope when he opposes civil partnerships?") and pretending that her religious convictions had nothing to do with her political life.
This declaration of hypocrisy made by her defenders - "yes, she has convictions but she doesn't intend to use them" - was used to accuse her critics of anti-religious fervour, all the while avoiding the conclusion that a distaste for "teh queer" might make her a fantastically bad choice for the job of protecting the rights of gay people. But then, this wasn't going to be the only time where Kelly's defenders would argue her personal beliefs had no impact on her political life.
To the credit of Kelly's passivity, the Sexual Orientation regulations outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexuality did pass into law - to the sound of awesome silence from Kelly herself. The only murmur came when cabinet colleague Peter Hain jumped the gun and introduced the regulations in Northern Ireland, ahead of the rest of the UK.
Even when the debate was at its most heated, Kelly was entirely absent - surfacing briefly through surrogates who claim she was hurt that people thought her commitment to a conservative religious sect might make her less than pragmatic.
Apparently, the assumption that she would be against equal rights for gay people when she was a member of a sect that is against equal rights for gay people (itself part of a larger, Catholicism which also disapproves of those pestilent queers) was just unfair and unreasonable.
The fact that Kelly never really appeared in public to make this argument herself or to explain how she didn't agree with that part of her faith (or to explain why she'd been missing from so many previous equality votes) - didn't help her case. Only when Blair himself stepped forward to announce there would be no exemptions to equality laws for religious organisations did Kelly offer a non-committal statement.
It was a nearly a full month later when Kelly finally stepped up to praise the legislation - only after it had passed through the Commons and wrecking amendments had been dismissed in the Lords. That Kelly's previously undetectable support for the legislation emerged suddenly as glowing praise (when there was no longer any risk of appearing to take sides when it could have counted) is probably the best example of opportunism you can find.
Despite having written about Kelly repeatedly, there's no personal animosity - rather the strong belief that she was entirely the wrong person for the job she'd been given. I can't imagine life was easy on this issue for her deputy, Meg Munn, under-secretary for women and equality whose voting record places her firmly in favour of gay rights - and whose work in successfully steering the eventual legislation has probably been under-recognised.
Though hardly free from her own accusations of hypocrisy, here's hoping Blears is better suited to the job.
Timed to be conveniently lost in the re-shuffle news, there's this announcement:
While it's nice to hear an apology from the MOD for past discrimination and persecution of gay and lesbian service personnel, it would be even better if they could get their act together in the present and the future - rather than panicking about negative impact of those personnel being out in uniform in public.
The text in full:
The BMA conference voted in favour of speeding up access to first trimester abortion, and discussed the possibility of nurses and midwives handing out the required drugs - leading to this response:
Julia Millington, political director of the ProLife Alliance, said: "The proposal to allow nurses to carry out first trimester abortions is outrageous. Why should nurses be made to do the dirty work?Why outrageous? Just because you say it's so?
"With only one per cent of all abortions performed because of a serious risk to the life or health of the pregnant woman ... we have abortion on demand in the UK. Liberalisation of the law is the last thing we need."
While much has been made of the claim to the wearing of a chastity ring as an expression of religious conviction, rather less attention has been paid to this part of the argument:
Lydia first started wearing the ring in 2004 after attending an SRT 'live show' in South London. It included music, drama, sketches and workshops to help young single people look at the 'blessings of sexual abstinence'.
She says she was deeply moved and vowed to stay a virgin until she married. She insists this was something she did because she believed in it and not to please her devout Christian parents. [...]
"At my school, sex education starts at 13 and it concentrates on safe sex, using condoms and contraceptive advice to prevent pregnancy. There was nothing about sexual abstinence, nothing about Christian teachings, and I felt that was missing."
The tabloids and broadsheets all seem to be talking about justice reforms focussing on prostitution - most of them making hay out of the proposal to drop the phrase "common prostitute" from the statute books. The Mail opts for the most obvious lie to pretend that the word "prostitute" has been banned. Surprise! No, it hasn't.
The funny thing is that no-one's talking about the words we could use to describe the men who use prostitutes. In fact, while there's plenty of discussion of "repeat offenders," of women who have been "caught selling sex more than twice in any three month period," there's no mention of the people who pay for the sex at all.
Hmm.
The journalistic instinct to quote anti-abortion groups in any discussion of abortion for the sake of "balance" tends to distort what's actually being discussed. Case in point is the handling of the plans to discuss abortion reform at the BMA's annual conference. From the BBC:
Oh, the hilarity of a Tory MP who says this:
It's official: the Daily Mail is now stealing my best ideas and diluting them by using other, non-monkey tiny animals.
Polly Curtis has a strong feature in the Guardian on sexual health services in UK schools - and the opposition mounted by the anti-abortion lobby. The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child and others make the argument that they act by "alerting" or "mobilising" parents.
Leaving aside the gloriously one-sided and oftentimes distorted presentation of facts by the anti-abortion lobby, the larger strategy has clearly been to use local and national media to mobilise wider public opinion - including local religious communities that have little (if anything) to do with the schools in question. As Curtis details, one meeting to discuss sexual health services in a school had to be rescheduled a parents-only by invitation after details were circulated to local church groups.
Choice of strategy aside, I'm also suspicious of the argument that the underlying objection is that young people are receiving advice or treatment without their parents' knowledge, particularly when it just happens to coincide with a wholesale objection to abortion (and to a lesser extent, sex education and contraception).
It's a wedge argument being used to further a particular agenda: we can detect this in the way the argument conveniently ignores how parents might be in favour of abortion. It's important to recognise that the argument in favour of parental consent is not the same as an argument against abortion, and that one issue should not provide cover for the other.
Your hackles might also be raised by the casual way in which some groups - such as the Family Education Trust - presume to speak for the "silent majority," or by the concern-troll quality of asking if access to health care will "encourage early sexual experimentation" (when there's no research to support the claim, and evidence to show that good sex education actually delays sexual activity).
Go over and read the whole thing.
Stonewall - who seem to be releasing some great research recently - points to the ongoing problem of homophobic bullying in schools:
Stephen Pollard in The Times on the "purity ring" court case:
So the RAF and the Army have banned personnel from wearing their uniform if they want to attend the Pride London march on Saturday, despite the RAF joining the "diversity champions" programme run by Stonewall in support of the rights of gay and lesbian staff in the workplace. Apparently, it would be against Queen's Regulations.
But then there's this:
However, Admiral Sir Jonathon Band, the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, declared that members of his service would be allowed to wear a uniform at the march.
His only condition was that sailors should restrict their uniformed attendance to the march and should not wear uniform at the subsequent rally. Queen's Regulations stipulate that service personnel should not be in uniform at events with political connotations.
While one branch of the armed forces is happily joining a scheme which supports - somewhat politically - the rights of gay and lesbian staff in the workplace, a different branch is using the political quality of Pride, which supports the rights of gay and lesbian people everywhere, as the reason for a ban.I'm looking to buy a laptop: let me know if you've seen any good deals. I'm looking at the cheap end of the market, though wireless and a decentish processor are essential.
In The Times' briefing on the Silver Ring Thing:
The Silver Ring Thing preaches against handing out condoms or instructing teenagers in safe sex [...]
Medical research is divided over the merits of preaching abstinence. A study by Columbia University showed that belonging to an abstinence group delayed the start of sexual activity, but that when the teenage convert eventually did have sex they were one third less likely to use a condom, and were thus at higher risk of pregnancy or contracting STDs.
Further research published in the British Medical Journal showed that the partners of boys in an abstinence programme were more likely to get pregnant.
It's Friday, and that means:
A long week that's not over yet: out to run for a couple of miles and then back to the screen. As ever, mail me if you see something I should read..
As a student heads to the High Court to fight for the right to wear a "purity ring" at school and DK shares some of my HPV posts with the wider blogosphere, let's take a look at the wider picture of abstinence-only schemes - schemes which proponents seem to think are better than vaccines for cancer or traditional sex education.
The main problem has never really been that such schemes encourage abstinence before marriage and sexual fidelity within it. The problem is that the schemes promote this strategy to the exclusion of everything else.
And why is that a problem? Abstinence pledges have been shown (through research at Yale and Columbia Universities) to have an extremely short shelf-life - with the vast majority breaking the pledge before marriage - and that young people who break their pledge are less likely to have protected sex. In other words, it's a short-term solution which leads to riskier behaviour in the longer term - where unwanted pregnancies and exposure to STIs are both more likely.
Part of this effect may be due to the use of scare tactics and outright lies in some programmes - an effort to mislead which drives young people away from having safe sex when they finally decide to become sexually active. A short sample of the worst offenders, via the Washington Post:
Possibly becoming my new best friend, here's Bryony Gordon in The Telegraph on Colin Hart of the Christian Institute - and it's too good not to quote heavily:
Fortunately for this country's young women, [Hart] is not an expert. Not in cancer anyway, though his role as the director of the Christian Institute does seem to have furnished him with some ridiculous and outdated views, not to mention a gift for misunderstanding things.
Doctors have not suggested vaccinating girls of 12 because they think they are all having sex. On the contrary, it is because they think they are not having sex: the vaccine is more effective if given before a girl becomes sexually active.
But let's not allow a lack of medical experience to get in the way of sharing thoughts on how it is that one develops cervical cancer.
"It is a disease that you can only get through being sexually promiscuous," Mr Hart continued, not polishing the stethoscope he doesn't own. All that time he didn't spend training to be a doctor obviously means that he hasn't had a moment to think that there is every possibility a woman could sleep with just one man during her entire life, and that he could still give her HPV.
I get rather confused by the diatribe from religious followers directed towards promiscuous people. Surely they have their own lives and are free to live them as they choose?
What these so-called Christians are effectively saying is that they prefer more women to die of cervical cancer as they believe this will deter others from promiscuous sex.
Stephen Green of Stephen Green's Voi.. uh.. Christian Voice offers his own uniquely fucked-up view of the HPV vaccine:
Stephen Green, of Christian Voice, said girls would assume they were protected against other sexually-transmitted conditions such as chlamydia, and that could make them infertile.Let's follow that logic: protecting someone from a potentially terminal disease that they might one day contract from someone else, even if that's the only sexual partner they ever have, makes them a tart.
"I expect school health outreach workers from primary care trusts and the like will be giving Gardasil to girls behind their parents' backs," he said.
"Since the vaccine works best before the onset of sexual activity, they will be treating these girls, to put it bluntly, like tarts, saying they are lacking in self-respect and the basic morality required to keep their virginity.
"The message is one of despair, disrespect and low expectations."
Really good news: the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has decided all girls aged between 12 and 13 in the UK should be vaccinated against the virus, and the Scottish Executive has said it hopes to start immunising by late 2008.
Less good news: the committee has decided against recommending a catch-up scheme for all those up to the age of 16, and the government has yet to decide if the scheme is financially viable in England and Wales.
And then there's this:
[A] Manchester University study of parents' attitudes, only a minority of those asked expressed concern about the sexual implications. The report concluded that most - if convinced the jab was safe and effective - would support the vaccine.
In any event, parents would have the final say as to whether their child received the injection.
Tim Worstall's claim that abstinence education is as (un)successful as traditional sex education is entirely misleading.
The method of abstinence education is to prevent people from having sex, full stop: that's never been the motivation of traditional sex education which seeks to provide people with information about sex to allow them to make their own decisions, encouraging them to take measures which will reduce unwanted pregnancies and disease transmission.
Abstinence education is a failure because - measured against its own professed methods and promises - it does not have any apparent effect in making young people abstain.
So when Worstall claims research actually shows that "abstinence education works exactly as well as the more conventional sex education" he's missing a crucial recognition of criteria. Abstinence education is a failure because it fails to have any impact on the one thing it's interested in: stopping people from having sex. As in the report he quotes:
As The Guardian reports that the honours committee that recommended Salman Rushdie for a knighthood did not discuss any possible political ramifications , it's also true that no-one thought about the media response.
As A.L Kennedy pointed out last night on More 4 news, there's rarely been a photograph of Rushdie in the tabloids that doesn't make him look like some kind of hood-eyed fiend; the fact that Rushdie has an attractive wife has also been the recurring basis of snide remarks. For his part, Rushdie hasn't ever been interested in playing along with the tabloids' desire for exclusive reveal-all interviews.
It's almost been entertaining, watching certain papers straining with the effort to both attack and defend Rushdie at the same time. The latest game, played with great glee by the Daily Mail, is finding people who've never read his works to tell us how bad Rushdie is at writing. Following Ruth Dudley-Edward's incoherent diatribe yesterday, there's this:
One more thing the self-appointed moral warriors keep failing to mention about the proposals for HPV vaccination: parents would have the final say as to whether their child received the injection.
Why don't "family values" campaigners think that parents will know what is best for their children?
Almost forgot to mention: Aphra at Text and the World has a great post up reading a pair of articles in the Guardian on homo/hetero friendships - touching on the problem of "fag hag" label and the kinds of self-worth that it helps inscribe in gay men.
There's a personal shudder at the appearance of another word to describe homosocial identities - the brotherly romance of the "bromance," which attempts to summon the intimacy of fraternity while avoiding the suggestion of incestuous desire. I'm not sure it's a complete success. :)
You can only pretend for so long that the objections to a cervical cancer vaccine aren't driven by misogyny. But when "ethical" campaigners would prefer to enforce their private policing of women's lives than see them escape death by cervical cancer, then there's little other choice. From today's Telegraph:
There's no real effort involved in catching the Daily Mail trying to whip up a controversy through lies and misdirection. For example, paragraph one:
Every woman admitted to hospital with an injury should be asked if she has suffered domestic violence, controversial new guidance suggests.
Professor Gene Feder, who helped write the report, said antenatal departments and A&E were most likely to pick up on the problem. For one in three female victims, the abuse started in pregnancy, he said.
Launching the guidelines yesterday in London, he ruled out "routine" questioning of all patients seeking medical help, saying the evidence in favour of such an approach was not strong enough.
I spy with my little eye something beginning with "total bollocks":
He said they would help secure borders, help people avoid fraud as internet use soars and would help avoid "a proliferation of plastic, passwords and PINs".
Exactly how the hell will an ID card secure me from internet fraud? And given that it won't replace any of my bank cards, my driving license or anything else, how will it reduce the amount of plastic I'm carrying? Once again - these are not convincing arguments for an ID card scheme; that the public might eventually tolerate a scheme forced upon them says nothing about the merits of the scheme.He said he planned "to meet those with views shortly to begin this conversation".
So that's a meeting to decide how it should be done, not whether it should be done at all. Perchance Mr Byrne would like to take this opportunity to - as the anglo-saxon vernacular puts it - fuck off and stop thinking up new ways to waste money while standing on my civil liberties?
There's no-one to beat the cosmetic industry for top-quality nonsense:
The repeated use of a cocktail of chemicals can affect the skin, it has been claimed. Biochemist Richard Bence, founder of BeingOrganic.com, will ask an industry debate in London if consumers really understand the contents of their skin care.
He said that in a year, a woman may absorb up to 2kg of the products she applies to her skin, but unlike chemicals we consume, those which are absorbed through the skin enter the blood stream directly.
OH NOES! CHEMICALS! DIRECTLY INTO BLOODS!It's a very special day here today as low-grade hackery collides with literary criticism. Ruth Dudley-Edwards takes a couple of thousand words to attack Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, mainly by contradicting herself.
Having expressed pride at the way "the state swung behind this shocking assault on freedom of speech" and declared "I loathe political correctness and believe to the core of my being that writers should have the right to offend," Dudley-Edwards excoriates Rushdie for failing to.. uh.. self-censor:
Rushdie had been brought up Muslim and claimed to have a deep understanding of Islam, so he should have known that as an apostate he was guilty of a capital offence and should not have been amazed that Islam's self-appointed spokesmen took umbrage.
Did he really think through the consequences of his words? I rather doubt it; he was just an intellectual adolescent who just enjoyed taunting authority figures.
In the middle of a feature on Cameron's attempt to lead the Conservative party "from the centre," there's this:
The survey of 128 MPs was conducted by Populus between May 9 and June 1 and the sample was weighted to reflect the balance of parties within the Commons, so 70 Labour MPs were included, 39 Tories, 13 Lib Dems and six others. [...]While we can argue over the size of the sample and the methods of weighting, compare and contrast these findings with this survey of public opinion released by Stonewall a few weeks ago, which found 85% in support of the 2007 Sexual Orientation Regulations and 73% agreeing that anti-gay prejudice needed addressing.
[O]n several key questions Tory MPs are deeply divided. For instance, against the view of Mr Cameron, just 46 per cent of Tory MPs agree that gay couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples, with 54 per cent disagreeing. For comparison, 83 per cent of Labour MPs and 92 per cent of Lib Dems agree.
One of the weirdly unchallenged traditions of our democracy might just be allowed to fade away:
Journalspace, which used to host this blog, has deleted the archived posts from before February 06. I've yet to check if the internet archive or google cache has preserved anything, but apologies for any dead links you discover in the meantime.
Some of you may be relieved to hear that no tiny monkeys have been lost.
HA and indeed HA:
Patricia McKeever does not like to be photographed. She does not like people to know where she lives and prefers to communicate with the outside world by letter or e-mail. But, from the security of her home, the 58-year-old former secondary school teacher has co-ordinated a relentless campaign to name and shame gay Roman Catholic priests.
Her newsletter , Catholic Truth, has so far confronted up to a dozen priests about their alleged homosexuality and has named at least four as being gay or allegedly associating with gay men. [...]
A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Glasgow accused Ms McKeever of perpetrating a "medieval witch-hunt". He said: " Catholic Truth is a tiny group on the fringe of the Church, utterly unrepresentative of mainstream Catholicism. They are a self-appointed team of heresy hunters, who have made a habit of bombarding the Vatican with ludicrous letters."
While anyone being stalked by McKeever has my sympathies, the idea that her beliefs and actions are "utterly unrepresentative" of mainstream Catholicism is ridiculous, given the very vocal portion of the leadership of the Catholic Church which regularly speaks out against the deadly deadly homo. Starting at the top, examples include the Pope's declaration that gay marriage is a form of "evil" and Cardinal Keith O'Brien's belief that gay adoption is "gravely immoral" - all on top of the generic belief that gay people are intrinsically disordered.Rape is an issue which causes a large proportion of ordinarily sane minds to dissolve into hate-mongering goo. So this morning's report in the Scotsman of the enormous discrepancies in the ways in which accusations of rape are investigated and prosecuted leads to the standardised claim that the conviction rate is low because the majority of those who report rape are - and I quote from the comment section - "immorally bankrupt women who are short of a few bob, get the compo and are destined to be lonley [sic] old women."
Misogyny and stupidity aside, that's not even slightly what the disparity in figures show. If it were true, you'd expect to see a uniformly low rate of conviction instead of rates ranging from 8.7% in the northern constabulary area to 0.9% in the north-east. What the story shows is that is - as is the case in the rest of UK - that the chance of either a victim or someone accused of rape seeing justice is highly dependent on geography.
As in England and Wales, marked differences in the training, facilities and priorities for investigating rape in different regions produces a system that serves justice to no-one - neither victims of rape, or those falsely accused. It creates an atmosphere where convictions are not trusted, and aids a downward spiral of successful prosecutions because women lose any last lingering thread of faith and stop going to the police.
All of which makes the cries of derision and outrage when we talk about the dire inequalities in the investigation and prosecution of rape more confusing: if there's a genuine belief that a large number of false accusations are ruining large numbers of lives, then the most obvious solution would be a judicial system properly equipped to investigate. Yet somehow, the people holding that belief also seem to believe that there's nothing wrong with the disparity in conviction rates and that "the courts have it about right."
In other words, a generic and pervasive disbelief in the allegation of rape prevents anything being done to prevent the phantom of false allegations from being dispelled - dispelled by a legal system that has a commitment to a uniform standard for investigating rape.
Let's cut to the quick of the head of the Army's "apoplectic" opposition to soldiers in uniform participating in London's Gay Pride march:
One Whitehall source said: "The problem is that Sir Richard is worried that soldiers in uniform will be marching alongside a bunch of blokes dressed as Marilyn Monroe, and this might be seen to be disrespectful to the image of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces."
The Sunday Times seems to think that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is about to give the go-ahead for a large-scale HPV immunisation programme. If true, it's good news - and the details also answer some of the questions raised last week about who would be receiving it:
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is expected to recommend that all girls should be given the jab in the first year of secondary school to protect them against the human papilloma virus (HPV).
The committee, which comprises senior health specialists, is also expected to recommend a catchup campaign to vaccinate all girls aged 12-16. [...] The vaccine has been shown to be effective if it is administered before girls are sexually active. If all 12-year-olds were immunised, which would cost more than £100m a year, the committee believes death rates from cervical cancer could be slashed.
Giving only minor lip-service to the too familiar religious objections, there's space for a new objection:
There may, however, be concerns among parents about children being overloaded with vaccinations. Children already receive at least seven jabs by the age of 12.Is there any scientific support at all for this fear, or is this a re-run of MMR-style misinformation and ignorance? Is there any evidence of the dangers of "overloading"? If there is, it doesn't get a mention here.
The newest Scottish bloggers round-up is here, where I seem to have lucked into having Robert Sharp as this week's editor. :)
There's a time in the existence of every web persona when you realise that nothing you say or do as a blogger will ever be quite as universally popular as a really tiny monkey.
The attempt to cripple the UK's Freedom of Information Act seems dead in the water, having failed to gain a single supporter in the House of Lords. From Robert Verkaik's coverage in The Independent:
From the answering other people's rhetorical questions department:
The Guardian offers more specific details to the Vatican's objections to Amnesty International:
Oh noes, homos:
The Vatican has called for all Catholics and Catholic organisations to stop giving money to Amnesty International - because Amnesty believes safe, legal abortion is better than illegal, dangerous backstreet abortion. Here's the clincher:
He added: "Thanks be to God that there is no international consensus on abortion, as can be seen from the UN conference on population in Cairo, which did not put forward abortion as a means of birth control."
A fine piece of nonsensical smugness, given that the Church opposes all forms of artificial birth control. The pretence of moderation when it comes to reproductive health is ludicrous.
Best ludicrous comment on most overblown story of week:
Jim, Thornhill, ON
What, indeed? And what if the watch jumped straight off Bush's wrist and started shooting randomly into the crowd, tearing at the neck and jowls of infants with its tiny cog teeth? What then? Or rather, what then??!!!???!Because the pages of the Daily Mail are the best place to tell your daughter she's a disappointment :
Credit where credit due, the Independent carries a big feature by Jeremy Laurance on genuine potential problems of an HPV vaccination programme.
The argument that the vaccine may have been oversold in the media (it's 99% effective, but only for 70% of the viruses that cause cervical cancer) which may lead to a drop in screening is persuasive, but it's not insurmountable. As with the (far less convincing) claim that young people will have more unprotected sex because they mistakenly think they're protected from STIs, the remedy is education. The other solution is (ahem) better journalism when it comes to science and health.
Laurance also suggests that the real moral questions - as opposed to the claim that the vaccine will "encourage promiscuity" - may be to do with the scope of any vaccination programme. In other words, who should receive the vaccine free on the NHS?
It's a bad situation when we have to legislate in order to give women the "right" to breast-feed in public - or, as in the proposed law, criminalise those who try to stop them.
However, if you think it's legislative overkill and you can't understand the need for the government to introduce yet another law concerning public conduct, dip lightly into the Daily Mail's comment section. These are from today's coverage, though you can find the same set of objections whenever the Mail, Scotsman or Express raises the issue.
For ease of reading, I've tried to tag the comments with their appropriate taxonomy.
1. Women who breastfeed in public are bad mothers who don't know their place / Breasts are for looking, not feeding
The Daily Telegraph's leader puts some effort into normalising the demand for restriction on abortion .
Lord Steele replies to Cardinal O'Brien's attack on the abortion act and points out (rather too discretely) the Catholic Church's actual position on abortion and contraception - positions which are in no way held by the majority:
The Daily Express opens fire on a documentary that.. uh.. no-one has seen yet, including the anonymously quoted RAF chief who provides the ammunition:
Turns out that year-old babies are more stupid than dogs. What? That's not the spin being used? Funny, that.
Martin Kettle's dismissal of the film "Taking Liberties" makes this ingenious argument - that protestors arrested under an illiberal law wouldn't have had their freedoms impinged upon... if they had obeyed that law:
And that's the title on this feature over at the Daily Mail, as A. N. Wilson makes the radical discoveries that wikipedia isn't wholly reliable and that sometimes advertising companies lie to us. Oh, and that some companies try to build up a record of our activities for the purpose of making a profit, shock.
So we get this superlative example of tabloid hyperbole:
Your child is next door on the computer, destroying the world as we know it and wrecking two of the most fundamental values that underpin society - first, as I shall explain, the distinction between truth and falsehood; second, the inviolability of personal property.Well, then perhaps you'd better stop her. You're such a bad parent - honestly - letting your child destroy the world like that.
"a great deal of web content is not at all what it seems. What passes for "amateur" contribution is often, in fact, professional advertising, or political or other propagandaas an example of an assertion offered as truth, without evidence - which would eventually be flagged for clean-up or deletion.
Wikipedia was started by a clever man called Jimmy Wales. I have often used it, being too lazy even to tap the few extra digits to read a proper online encyclopaedia such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I had never realised until reading Keen’s book that any amateur can write an entry in Wikipedia.A few things: is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, also online, also part of the diabolical plot to end the world? And did you miss the text on the front page of wikipedia reading "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"? Weren't you even slightly curious about the tabs on every page saying "edit this"? Mr Wilson, can you read?
Above: artist's impression of minor blogger, bookdrunk.
I've been nominated for a Koufax award in the Most Deserving of Wider Recognition category which is awful nice and, most likely, the closest I'll get to actually winning a Koufax given the size of the long-list and quality of many (if not most) of the other nominees. Still, nice to feel wanted. :)
Remind me to remind you to vote for me when voting opens.
Will be at my computer doing freelance work for most of the weekend, so drop me a mail or comment if you spot anything interesting.
Ack - template broken, so back to the old version while I work on something else - and it turns out that the resolution of my monitor in my work office is nothing compared to my home, which makes the new version look all *spindly*.
As a peace offering, some tiny monkeys:
The ability of the Catholic Church to veto prospective teachers in state, denominational schools for not being Catholic enough (previously discussed here) is only one part of the strangle hold that the Church retains on Scottish education.
For a superlative example, take a look at the new schools formed when some Catholic and non-denominational state institutions merged back in 2004. Resisted every step of the way, the Church only agreed to schools that had been redesigned to include separate staff-rooms for Catholic and non-Catholic teachers.. and separate entrances for Catholic and non-Catholic students. Apparently, this level of segregation was needed to preserve the "ethos" of religious schooling. Slightly too honest, perhaps?
Can you tell what it is yet?
For most of the political press, the fact that BAE has been bribing a Saudi Prince isn't really news - in fact, you might even say it's the accepted price of doing business, even if it involves turning a blind eye to the moral dimension.
Like most political intrigues, the story isn't the underlying crime but a failed attempt to cover it up:
Seriously weird coverage of Big Brother over at the Times which seems unable or unwilling to publish the word "nigger,"
Are they concerned that people will be offended by seeing it in print, or concerned that people will think they're insensitive for using it? Why the not-that-discreet-at-all veil of discretion? Is it insensitive to even use the word to talk about racism?
Maybe I'm missing something, but "bad words" - or the attitudes they express and support - don't go away because we insert asterisks everywh*re.
I've been having a few conversations recently about those non-uterine, let's say it, male feminists.
The question of whether a man can have feminist sensibilities seems to be a little redundant: you don't need to have a working uterus to wish fervently that people who did had the same liberties, privileges and rights as everyone else. Similarly, you don't necessarily have to be queer to have strong opinions about gay rights - whether your opinions and arguments are compelling is a slightly different, though related, matter.
There is though, I think, an obligation for men who identify as feminists to try and avoid reproducing existing power structures - in other words, in the areas of our culture where male voices and experiences dominate. Part of this problem exists for women - particularly in a diverse movement where white and middle class representatives tend to occupy the most powerful speaking positions. However, male voices are perhaps invited (even if warmly welcomed) guests in feminist discourse, when female voices are not.
(This kind of talk tends to rile people who want to be part of a movement for both men and women equally: that kind of talk tends to ignore both the shape of the existing uneven playing field and the extent to which feminists have always been interested in the positive identities of men.)
All of which points to my pseudo-pseudonimity as a blogger - part of the original intention of which was to direct readers to consider my arguments on their own merits, and not merely virtuous because they are the product of a particular identity. It does, however, and perhaps problematically, circumvent the responsibilities implied by the picture of "invited guest" territory I've suggested above.
That's not to say that writing from a recognisable sexual, racial or religious position isn't enormously productive - and sometimes even vital - but that it's never really been an explicit part of my project here.
Amid various posts discussing support for the recent attempt to enforce a "cooling off" period on women seeking abortion (and rightly seeing it as part of a wider attempt to restrict access overall), it's worth nothing that the bill was rejected by 182 votes to 107. Huzzah.
In defeat, Ann Winterton attempted to assume the moral high ground:
Roaming around the pages of the Daily Express, I find this argument:
In case you're making a chart of ongoing hypocrisy, you'll note for a newspaper obsessed with sexual morality, it's funny that the Mail has no problem with this image:
Apparently, they'd be just delighted to see their daughters, wives and sisters on their backs on a jet rendered in such a fashion. Remember, it's Just A Bit Of Fun, and Just A Cute Pin-Up.
I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier: the problem with the Olympic logo is political correctness gone mad.
It's a fiendish attempt to force diversity on everyone, as each colour represents a different persecuted minority: the pink one is for deadly deadly homos, the blue one is Eurosceptic Tories, the orange one is Ian Paisley and the green one is uh.. trees. Something to do with global warming.
The sad thing is that this is marginally more coherent than the brand pitch.
The E211/sodium benzoate story is shaping up to the health-scare feature of the year. It's mutated and jumped over to the Guardian, where a feature on food additives warns:
I presume that I'm not the only person who gets shivers down their spine when given this kind of reassurance:
Anthony Horowitz takes time out to complain that political correctness has been the death of the storybook villain . If use of the phrase "political correctness" wasn't already warning enough, Horowitz then cheerfully contradicts himself by citing J K Rowling's Voldemort as an example of the old school villain that's just not possible anymore.
Except that J K Rowling manages it and - as the entire universe is probably aware - is about to release a new Harry Potter novel using the same character.
Then, having complained at length of the paralysing fear of how "a single misplaced sentence can destroy a career and even a life - and everywhere there is someone waiting to hear it spoken" and that "you don't even need to be a racist any more. Simply being accused of being a racist amounts to just the same," Horowitz announces his new villain:
I think we have to be very careful not to confuse the volume of voices opposing abortion with their level of support. Here's Caitlin Moran :
Still more nonsense from the Independent on the unproven dangers of wi-fi. A short selection:
Shorter Times: your best isn't thin enough.
Bonus marks for coaching women to drop a stone in a month in order to acquire "an inner glow," because it's.. umm.. what's inside that counts. Providing you drop another 5lbs.
And, in my attempt to develop a kooky feature that marks me out as an important big-time blogger, here's another of those highly popular tiny monkeys:
Have a nice weekend.
Ann over at feministing has a good post on the supposed dangers of the HPV vaccine being floated by - you've guessed it - socially conservative pressure groups.
An interesting detail is that for many years "uber-conservative groups sounded some of the loudest warnings about the dangers of HPV." Of course, that was before a vaccine was available, and it was still a way to scare people away from sex.
I'm also to take this moment to link to a few of the mountain of posts on HPV I've written since last August when I first started tracking the "this vaccine will make teens have sex" meme.
So, have it in the archives:
HPV VACCINE AND "MORAL" OBJECTIONS IN THE MEDIA:
A previously under-reported consequences of an HPV vaccine is the impact on the developing world, where neither smear tests nor cancer care are widely available - or indeed available at all.
Having spent months arguing that a vaccine for cervical cancer would only encourage junior sluts, the Daily Mail has switched tracks to suggest the government isn't doing enough to make this wondrous drug available to all.
Promiscuity does not give you HPV, but unprotected sex can - and the two are not the same thing. Fans of thinking will note that the choice between treatment and prevention presented here is entirely batshit crazy, given that both abstinence and vaccines are preventative measures. It's almost exactly as though she has no fucking clue whatso-festive-fucking-ever.THE HPV VACCINE AND MALE HEALTH:
Though the vaccination of young men against HPV has been something of a side-issue - and one presented without dire warnings that this would turn them into sluts - research has long suggested the link between HPV and cancer of the penis, as well as anal cancer and penile warts.
The Independent - thankfully not writing about science - covers some of the intellectual dishonesty involved in the abortion "debate" triggered by Cardinal O'Brien's speech comparing abortion to the massacre of schoolchildren. In particular, there's Tory MP Ann Winterton's defence of her proposal to compel women seeking abortions to delay until they have seen a professional counsellor:
Shorter Daily Mail: Big Brother 8 is such a coarse and vulgar failure that we've had to dedicate a whole section of our website to covering it.
The Mail covers the Education secretary's opposition to corporal punishment triggering.. and I'm sure you're getting that feeling of not-suprise.. a comment section full of people declaring "it never did me any harm."
Sure, you're in the Daily Mail comment section advocating "a thrashing from the headmaster [as] part and parcel of growing up and being disciplined and taught you respect for your elders and for other people and property" but there's nothing wrong with you, oh no.
