WMD or a new Tesco?
Stupid people run our lives. This was made obvious back in February 2013 when the footballer Paul Elliott resigned his posts at the Football Association as well as trusteeship of the anti-racism campaign group Kick It Out because he used the word “nigger” in a text message argument with another black football player.
Elliott has received the CBE for services to equality and diversity in football and is quite obviously not a racist yet he was forced to resign by the witch hunt mentality that prevails in British public life.
The reason that we oppose racism is that it causes harm to people. We’re not against racism when an American is deemed friendly, a German efficient or an Englishman polite. We’re against it when certain groups are discriminated against. When they lose out to other groups when applying for work or are unjustly hassled by the police. Of course we should avoid using racially derogative terms when referring to people but the single use of such a word should not be a litmus test of racism.
Public life is dominated by people so lacking in judgment that they rely on idiotic rules and this is the way with much of 21st Century life. This same knee jerk mentality seems now to be pushing the United States into another war. President Obama has previously said that the use of chemical weapons by Syria would be a “red line” that could trigger U.S. reaction. Today, the United States Secretary of Defence, Chuck Hagel, put out a statement saying that “that the U.S. intelligence community assesses with some degree of varying confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale in Syria, specifically the chemical agent sarin.” - the talk now is of whether Syria has crossed that red line.
HANG ON A MINUTE! - Statements put out by government departments are always very very carefully worded and this statement reeks of indecision – “WITH SOME DEGREE OF VARYING CONFIDENCE”???!!!!!…..They’re TALKING BOLLOCKS!
Obviously the statement has been constructed under pressure and the authors have made damn sure they express themselves in terms which commit themselves to precisely nothing. It’s interesting to speculate on how the story originated. A brief perusal of the web reveals that a vague article in the London Times on 13th April 2013 stated “Forensic evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria has been found for the first time in a soil sample smuggled out of the country in a secret British operation. Defence sources, who declined to be named, said yesterday that conclusive proof that “some kind of chemical weapon” had been fired in Syria had been established by scientists at the Ministry of Defence’s chemical and biological research establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire.”
So we have a story from an unnamed source that some soil in Syria may be contaminated by some unspecified chemical weapon. The Times is a News International rag and, for Rupert Murdoch, this constitutes hard news.
First we should question whether this story and the subsequent statement by Mr. Hagel have any merit at all. If the British government do have contaminated soil from Syria then let them say so; it’s worth investigating. But rather than setting trip wires that commit Americans to combat and potentially death let’s think this through.
Why do we abhor Weapons of Mass Destruction? It’s not because they kill people, many weapons do that. It’s because they kill masses of people. Hydrogen bombs are an obvious example but gas attacks are another. So if we are looking for evidence of the use of WMD we should be looking for far far more than traces of some bloody substance in a plastic tub of questionable providence. We should be looking for masses of dead people. If Assad is using Sarin to run his lawn mower we should not give a toss. If he’s exterminating thousands with pick axe handles we should sit up and take notice. We should consider the crime not the mechanism used to commit the crime.
Like the absurdity of discerning racism by a single casual word the existence of a few grams of chemical is not a defining piece of evidence. The West has a history of intervening in the Middle East and all interventions are couched in altruistic arguments designed to placate the electorate but fundamentality all interventions have been for the benefit of Western countries.
The decision of whether to intervene in Syria is a difficult one but the United States should resist being bounced into another war by idiots and war mongers.
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waking up with a pencil in your ear wont get you pregnant
Tags: Felicity Gerry, George Galloway, Legitimate rape, pencil in your ear, rape, rape is rape, talking bollocks, Todd Akin
It was me. I was Talking Bollocks!
It’s been a bumper week for those in the public eye TALKING BOLLOCKS!
First I heard that Respect MP George Galloway had blundered around like a bull in a china shop on the subject of rape and said that having sex with a sleeping woman was “not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it“.
Hmmmmm………I’m not sure I’d considered this question before but it’s pretty insensitive. Rape, like race and illegal drug use, is a taboo subject which politicians mention at their peril.
The liberal intelligentsia were quick to jump on Mr. Galloway. On BBC Radio 4′s PM program a criminal barrister named Felicity Gerry was interviewed. She was very clear in her opinion which I have been unable to find on the web and so must quote from memory. When pressed for a definition of rape she said something along the lines that it was “anyone putting anything where someone else didn’t want it” and gave the obvious examples of a penis in a vagina as well as a pencil in someone’s ear!
I kid you not! I heard this almost verbatim on the wireless. The really strange thing is that no other pocket bureaucrat thought it necessary to come on the radio and condemn such idiotic remarks. Imagine if Mr. Galloway had said this?
The interviewer suggested that the law could have different levels of rape and that not all were identically serious and gave the example of murder and manslaughter but Ms. Gerry was adamant: “Rape is rape”. The idea that “rape is rape” is, of course, bollocks as it puts a 16 year old boy who has sex with his 15 year old girlfriend in the same category as a psychopath who has raped multiple women at knifepoint. “Rape is rape” she kept repeating unaware that she was talking as much bollocks as George Galloway.
Then we had a barmy American politician wade into the argument. In an interview with a TV station Todd Akin, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Missouri, was expressing his opposition to the right to abortion for women who had been raped and, in an attempt at justification, said: “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare……If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Woah!!!! This is strange stuff. First he implies that some rapes are not “legitimate” then throws in some weird science he must have read on some Christian Alien blog.
Remember that TV show Kids Say the Funniest Things? How about a new show where the we round up a lot of politicians and ask them questions. They could call it Politicians Talk The Most Bollocks – No, wait, they do it already only it’s called Prime Ministers Questions.
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