New Poll About Jacqui Smith's Porn.

I'm interested to see whether some bloggers have been covering the Jacqui Smith porn scandal in such a way as to encourage hits, perhaps by including 'Jacqui Smith' and 'porn' in the title of every post, or by referring to the alleged titles "Raw Meat 3" and "By Special Request".

A Post Unrelated To Jacqui Smith's Ravenous Consumption Of Pornography.

Is it me or are the new Police Academy films just not that funny?

Let's Not Dwell On Jacqui Smith's Porn Shame.

Instead let's remember some of the serious initiatives she has promoted during her tenure as Home Secretary, such as this one earlier this month:

Jacqui Smith to tackle 'sexualisation' culture

Good luck with that.

Quote Of The Day.

On Question Time, Conservative chairman Eric Pickles was explaining why he needed to have a second home, despite living just 37 miles from Westminster, explaining that it really was necessary because being an MP meant that he had to be on time and stuff. David Dimbleby replied:

“Like a job, in other words?”

Whilst I'm criticising the Conservatives, Peter Risdon's post about the relationship between Darius Guppy and the mayor of London- Boris Johnson- is worth reading.

Jacqui Smith's Porn.

I really don't know what to say:

The Home Secretary is to pay back parliamentary allowances claimed for pay-per-view television services, reportedly including two adult films.

Jacqui Smith said she "mistakenly" claimed for the TV package while billing for an internet connection.

The Sunday Express claims the £67 Virgin Media bill included two 18-rated features viewed last April.

Ms Smith was not home when the films were viewed, sources told the BBC. She lives with her husband, Richard Timney.

How are we supposed to trust the government with data protection if the Home Secretary can't even keep the fact that her husband has been watching porn secret?

Update: Can I suggest that everyone adopts Daniel 1979's term for this story- "Wankergate".

The Copycat Instinct.

Ben Goldacre criticises the media coverage of a high profile suicide case, on the grounds that such coverage tends to lead to a spike in the number of suicides* . Similarly after a high profile spree killing there tends to be a few similar events that follow. The almost pornographic focus on that German killer recently is an example of the kind of coverage that shouldn't happen.

In other words humans are influenced by what we see or hear about, this includes fictional depictions as well as news coverage. Sure only a very small proportion of people will be pushed into suicide or spree killings by what they see, but the nature of the mass media is that it reaches a large number of people- and a small proportion of a huge number can be quite significant. Less extreme behaviours might be easier to prod people towards.

It therefore seems likely that the depiction of various kinds of negative behaviour in the media will make them more widespread, particularly if it is in a glamorous form. This is a problem if one believes in free speech or enjoys entertainment that features undesirable behaviour, a solution can't be imposed without violating free speech. Naming and shaming the outlets which do revel in horror stories rather than simply report them is probably the only thing that can be done.


* Conversely suicides decline after blanket coverage of a terrorist attack, so if any terrorists do want to kill a bunch of people, but are feeling kind of guilty about the prospect then do so after a high profile suicide and you'll probably save lives.

update: Just to emphasise- this isn't a call to restrict free speech, just a recognition that for all its benefits it has costs too.

Turner Prize Already Settled For 2009.

This is very good:

Rory McInnes, 18, climbed on to the flat roof of his parents' home and daubed the symbol using a tin of white paint, after watching a programme about Google Earth.

Web surfers can view detailed images from satellites using the Google software, enabling them to zoom in on their homes to see them from above.

You've got to admire his initiative.

The Thieving Welshman Myth In Action

A Welshman picked £50 from my pocket today, well I didn't actually see him taking it because I wasn't paying attention but I am fairly sure he did. When I went to the police they patiently explained that seeing as I had no evidence that he took anything I couldn't really expect them to arrest him and that no jury would convict him without any proof. In fact they even suggested that I might have lost the cash!

What I find so depressing here is that they believe I would go through all the hassle and stress of bringing this guy to court if I believed that it was anything other than theft. It seems that the idea that people frequently lie about being pick pocketed is so prevalent that it is now seen as the norm. Not only that, but their view of people who accuse the Welsh of theft is so low that they believe us incapable of judging for ourselves what happened to us.

Why should his story be believed over mine? Again, this idea that innocent Welshies are getting banged up left, right and centre has skewed the public’s perception of justice.




What's that you say? My idea of justice is perverse, grossly prejudiced and would invariably result in thousands of Welsh people being locked up for no good reason because they had lost their right to be presumed innocent in a court of law?

Yes it is, and in fact the incident is completely made up, but I'm only following the line of argument being expressed by a contributer to the weblog of the feminist site "The F Word" when it comes to rape convictions.

Down With The Blue Eyed Devils!

Has Yaz begun writing for the President of Brazil?:

"This was a crisis fostered and boosted by the irrational behaviour of people that are white and blue eyed," he said.

Now if he had said "white and one eyed" then he might have a point.

Derek Draper & Pyschotherapy.

Channel 4 news had a piece on the Internet phenomenon that was Daniel Hannan's speech delivered to and about Gordon Brown. To respond to it they had Derek Draper, a sometime Labour hack who after leaving politics in disgrace in the late 1990s became Psycho the Rapist a psychotherapist* and has subsequently returned to work with Gordon Brown.

Draper described the speech as "a demented speech from a demented party". Isn't there something seriously unethical about a supposed psychotherapist using 'demented' as a term of abuse? It's like someone who works for SCOPE calling someone a 'spaz'.

* Although Draper's credentials as a psychotherapist may be a bit murky.



Update: Just in case anyone thinks I'm being hypocritical for making a joke about 'Pyscho the Rapist' then criticising Draper for using 'demented', this would only be the case if I worked in a field that involved particular sensitivity towards rape or psychopaths. If some other Labour figure who wasn't a pychotherapist, had used 'demented' as an insult t would just be part of the rough and tumble of politics.

A Leap Into The Unknown.

Earlier in the week some confusion emerged over whether the Conservative Party intended to stick to its commitment to reform inheritance taxes. Officially they are continuing with the idea, but in reality who knows?

Equally as Matthew Parris was saying a couple of weeks ago- no one knows what their foreign policy will be. I'm not entirely sure what their social policy is either, I understand their diagnosis of what's wrong, broken Britain etc, but not the policies that should follow from that.

Given how much of a leap into the unknown a Conservative government will be I can't see any reason to be enthusiastic about the prospect, except in so far as it means the end of the Blair-Brown era.

A Opportunity Arises..... Possibly.

The risible proposals for schools to teach blogging and twittering has generated a lot of criticism and understandably so. However whilst it is obviously a complete waste of time, effort and money, does it offer an opening for lazy bloggers to advertise themselves as blog consultants citing their expertise in the field as reasons why we they should get paid large amounts of money by the government for creating the blogging syllabus? Sure it would be a scam but with the increasing demand to credentialise any old crap there has to be an opening.

Jane Woody- We Will Never Forget You.

Whilst the death of a young mother is very sad, the torrent of sentimental nonsense that the death of Jade Goody has brought forth is getting a bit excessive. The Sun's 30 page pull out was more than they would have produced if World War Three started.

I'm not totally immine to this sentimentalism myself, I've already deleted one derogotary comment I made about her in 2007, and I'm thinking of editing the others.

Anyway here is a round up of the best posts concerning her demise:

1. Dungeekin: Max Clifford to sue Liam Neeson- "In a statement released through his solicitors Frameup, Chasem & Ambulance, Mr Clifford stated that the legal action was to compensate him for loss of earnings after Ms Richardsons' death denied him the front pages of the tabloids."
2. Mark Wadsworth- Jade Goody's intelligent estate planning. There are several posts on a similar theme.
3. A Tangled Web- The 'Dianaification' of Jade's death.
4. Will Self at the First Post- The celebrity death 'freak show'

Update:

Gordon Brown on Jade, January 2007:

“I understand that in the UK there have already been 10,000 complaints from viewers about these remarks, which people see, rightly, as offensive.

“I want Britain to be seen as a country of fairness and tolerance. Anything detracting from this I condemn.”

Gordon Brown on Jade, March 2009:

'She was a courageous woman both in life and death and the whole country have admired her determination to provide a bright future for her children.

'She will be remembered fondly by all who knew her and her family can be extremely proud of the work she has done to raise awareness of cervical cancer which will benefit thousands of women across the UK.

Worst Argument For A DNA Database Yet.

Is David Aaronovitch retarded? I don't wish to be abusive, but he seems to be spending a column unable to figure out the difference between 'guilty' and 'innocent'.

His argument is, and I'm not making this up, that opponents of the current practice of putting innocent people who have been convicted of no crime on the DNA database are hypocrites because they don't object to keeping convicted criminals on the database, and after all those criminals are really just differently innocent because they haven't yet committed the offences which the DNA database might help convict them of.

I'm sure he thinks he's found a very clever example of hypocrisy although if we were to follow his logic we would either have to get rid of all criminal records or give everyone a criminal record because otherwise it's completely unfair on convicts.

Department Of Made Up Statistics.

You may remember the great slapfight in the left section of the blogosphere over Amnesty's abuse of the data to make the claim that 1 in 10 women suffer from rape and violence each year, when as more numerate bloggers this was completely unsupported by any data.

Anyway one of Northern Ireland's hundreds of human rights quangos has produced a report claiming that 1 in 4 men in the province physically abuse their partners each year, because evidently 1 in 10 wasn't ludicrous enough. The actual evidence suggests that even the lifetime rate of abuse is substantially lower than that.

What is the motivation behind the absurd abuse of statistics to try and make out that violence against women is endemic? The actual figures suggest that it is a serious enough problem, but when they produce numbers that purport to prove that domestic violence is endemic within society they achieve three things- demonise all men, make domestic violence seem almost normal rather than deviant behaviour and to make sensible people sceptical of all claims made by the organisations that tell such big lies.

Smile- Or Else!

Trying to measure happiness is a tricky proposition, so for the government to be considering using it to assess schools is odd, although picking arbitary and hard to measure criteria with which to assess schools does make it easier to show 'improvement' year on year.

It follows a recent report from the Children's Society that said that competitive schooling, league tables and selfish parenting was creating a generation of miserable young people.

But the "happiness" measures are being opposed by teachers' leaders, who claim they are almost impossible to quantify.

f one believes that the unhappiness is caused by competitiveness then making schools compete to show how happy they are is a very New Labour solution.

Extra Terrestrial Or Swede?

In November 1989 a "completely terrified" woman contacted RAF Wattisham in Suffolk to report her close encounter with a man claiming to be an alien.

She said she met the fair-haired man with a Scandinavian-type accent as she walked her dog on a sports field.

If that isn't proof of extra terrestrial life then frankly I don't know what is.

Advice For Bloggers.

I have to say an extended wanking joke to satirise nanny state scaremongering really does wonders for the site traffic. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for example. Even here! Although it doesn't meet with the approval of the commentators one of whom writes "Why post this blog, it comes across as a pompous 16 year old trying to be funny", I have to object to that, the idea that I have an adolescent sense of humour is..... huh huh... he said 'come across'.... snigger, fnarr, chortle.

All the links are much appreciated.