the situationists have taken over the asylum

There's something about the lede of this story that makes me deeply proud to be British:

Members will this week be shown copies of thousands of receipts and other documents due to be published under the Freedom of Information Act. They will be invited to redact the documents, blacking out information they do not want to disclose.

Other countries have corruption. Other countries have censorship. But we, the British, have a free media which reports that - in the coming weeks - our elected officials will finally be forced to release details of their expenses after a lengthy legal battle, but not before those politicians have been invited to censor their own records.

I'm not sure this joke could possibly be improved. To have said, "Yes, I've released the details of my tax-payer-subsidised kitchen... into the mouth of a volcano" might have involved some kind of pleasing delayed-gag wherein the meaning of "released" is interpreted literally instead of figuratively, but I'm not sure it could improve this exemplar of darkly ironic comedy.

The fine detail of the story merely reveals the richness of this exquisitely honed parody. We learn that:

Most public sector bodies required to publish give the task of editing to other people not involved in the case.

but

MPs argue that they must still be allowed to vet their own claims because, they claim, they have unique knowledge of their constituencies and any "local issues" that may be raised by disclosure.

Translation: the people who actually voted for me might find out how I've spent their money and that would be disastrous. And look - "no date for final publication of the edited receipts has been set." Truly, no opportunity to performatively enact the grasping venality of our political class has been overlooked.

Can I suggest that our addition to the sporting events at the Olympic games take the form of a self-destructive spiral into the alienation of the majority from the democratic processes of representation?

capitulation

Long-term readers will know that I've been keeping a careful eye on Policy Exchange ever since they attempted to silence BBC Newsnight with legal action over the content of their report, The Hijacking of British Islam, back in December 2007. As you may recall, Policy Exchange accused Newsnight of making "libellous and perverse" allegations which they threatened to pursue "relentlessly, to trial or capitulation."

You may now find yourself suddenly short on adequate supplies of schadenfreude. Courtesy of Liberal Conspiracy:

The right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange has been forced into a humiliating climbdown over its report, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, for making allegations in the report that it now admits were unsubstantiated.

The next part of the game, of course, is to pursue those newspapers and pundits who cheerfully reported Policy Exchange's conclusions without a hint of critical engagement (though some, it should be said, have already published partial corrections to certain claims).

You may also recall the following defence mounted by Charles Moore in the pages of The Telegraph in January 2008, accusing the BBC's Peter Barron (with no small absence of irony) of "vanity broadcasting":

Mr Barron's judgment of the Policy Exchange report came under attack from colleagues: his flawed methodology - the original decision not to broadcast - had lost the entire corporation an important story.

Mr Barron decided to try to prove himself right. In the private sector, there is something called "vanity publishing", where people pay for their own works to be published.

Mr Barron's vanity broadcasting was, of course, at the expense of the licence-fee payer. He put the crew of the flagship on to investigating Policy Exchange's receipts. For six weeks, they turned on the staff of Policy Exchange, who had come to them in good faith in the first place, and treated them like criminals. [...]

I don't blame Newsnight for reporting questions about receipts, though I deplore their methods. I do blame them for trying to kill the much, much bigger story about the hate that is being preached in our country.

Oooh. Awkward. As I pointed out at the time, the critique of "vanity publishing" is a curious claim to make on behalf of an organisation that commissions and publishes its own research without outside editorial input, or peer review of supposedly "academic" work.

I am certain we can look forward to a full apology to the Newsnight team from Charles Moore in recognition of their justified professional scepticism, occuping a position of equal public prominence in the pages of a national newspaper.

the wrong kind of extremism

Shorter Richard Littlejohn: a man who has committed no crime should be locked up in Guantanamo Bay because I don't like what he says.

Even shorter Richard Littlejohn: I hate free speech.

It's increasingly interesting that that right-wing columnists modelling themselves as the voice of common sense (or "authentic" liberalism) have so little interest in free speech, fair trials, innocence until proven guilt etc. etc. Could it be that their main problem with Islamic extremist authoritarianism is that it's Islamic? (c.f. homophobia is only a problem when it's not the Christian kind).

Also note that the "paralysed by the fear of being called Islamophobic" meme is spreading:

It's the same warped mindset which sees groups of young Muslim men, accompanied by faceless women in burqas, waved through airport security without so much as a cursory glance, while old-age pensioners from Tunbridge Wells on their way to a long weekend in Madeira are subjected to the full Spanish Inquisition and a humiliating strip search.

The authorities are terrified of anything which might lead to charges of 'Islamophobia' being levelled against them.

Beyond Littlejohn's entirely imaginary example (and he forgot to make the pensioners white Anglicans carrying puppies and orphans) consider what his logic suggests: that young Muslim men should justifiably be the subject of interrogation and intrusive searches simply because they are young Muslim men. That, presumably, would be the right kind of oppressive extremism because it's being done by us instead of them.

Note: Littlejohn's faux-concern for people using Luton airport might sound a little less like an empty populist gesture if he didn't write his columns from a gated mansion in Florida, while continuing to pretend he's a regular Brit on the street. As is perhaps obvious, Littlejohn only sees Britain through the pages of the right-wing press and his self-reinforcing mailbag.

melanie phillips: even as I write this nationally syndicated column, I am silenced by the claim of islamophobia

I'm running out to teach, but I think we can deal with this helping of nonsense quite quickly. Melanie Phillips - determined to draw even more attention to a tiny minority of extremists - writes:

The repellent spectacle of Muslims demonstrating in Luton against the British soldiers returning from Iraq does more than turn our stomach. [...]

When the returning troops of the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Anglian Regiment paraded through Luton they had to run the gauntlet of Muslim protesters waving placards saying: ‘Anglian soldiers: Butchers of Basra,’ and ‘Anglian soldiers: cowards, killers, extremists.’ [...]

Yet if anyone objects to any of this, they are called ‘Islamophobic’.

Uh, no. A large number of people from different backgrounds - Islamic and non-Islamic, Christian and Muslim, ordinary member of the public and batshit insane columnist - have objected to the protest (held, again, by a tiny vocal minority) and even though I've combed through a stack of newspaper reports, I can't find a single person criticising the protests who has been accused of Islamophobia.

But - even if they had - that would be a stupid thing to claim, and its very stupidity would make it extremely easy to dismiss and ignore. It might be fun to suggest that tolerance of the free speech of extremists of any flavour is part of the extended conspiracy of Political Correctness but it's also very, very dumb.

As has been argued elsewhere, Phillips' brand of hyperventilation does the extremist's work for them.

some simple advice

The best way to avoid bankruptcy because of institutionalised concealment of child abuse would be to.. not be the kind of organised religion that lies about abusers and moves them to fresh parts of the country where they can abuse again.

That, however, doesn't stop the Catholic Church from attempting to adopt victim status:

Roman Catholic and Orthodox Jewish officials in New York are mounting an intense lobbying effort to block a bill before the State Legislature that would temporarily lift the statute of limitations for lawsuits alleging the sexual abuse of children. [...]

“We believe this bill is designed to bankrupt the Catholic Church,” said Dennis Poust, spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, a group representing the bishops of the state’s eight dioceses.

No. The bill is designed to allow the victims of abuse to claim some measure of justice - justice which the Church has done its very best to limit. Bankruptcy would be an entirely incidental (some might say happy) side effect.

numbers, crunched

Using the Daily Mail's coverage, we can conclude that the percentage of women treated so far showing minor adverse reactions to the HPV vaccine is around 0.19%. The number of cases involving more serious problems is 6 - or 0.00086% of over 700,000 women.

In case you were wondering if any lessons had been learnt since the debacle of MMR, here's the Mail's front-page headline:

Concerns over safety of cervical cancer vaccine after 1,300 girls experience adverse side-effects

Where's my anonymous, passively voiced outrage?

Some have dubbed it the 'promiscuity jab' because it is given to girls to protect against the sexually-transmitted HPV virus which causes 70 per cent of cervical tumours.

It was actually happily referred to as the jab for tarts and slags - but who's counting, really?

The HPV vaccine has absolutely nothing to do with promiscuity: as with many, many STIs, a single exposure to an infected partner is enough. HPV is also far more common than any other STI - between 50% and 75% of sexually active men and women contract genital HPV infection at some point in their lives, and most people do not know they are infected. Vaccination is not a comment on sexual morality; it's a comment on not wanting to die from an avoidable cancer.

So, is it that the Mail really loves cancer, or really hates women?