Interview with a Vampire

Having now cancelled my Times subscription, as the cumulative result of many failings on their part, I turned today to the Telegraph, where I found this tale of confected woe.

The story is of Olivia Booth’s social media recounting of an horriffic experience she claims to have had during an interview.

Olivia Booth, 22, hit out at the CEO of a tech company in Manchester after he allegedy criticised her Spotify account and tore apart her personality. She was baffled to be offered a job after the experience, and turned it down.

She said she was subjected to a “brutal” two-hour interview with the company chief executive, which she said “felt like being sat in a room with my abusive ex”.

Miss Booth shared her email to the company after the interview on Twitter, writing: “There is something very off to me about a man who tries his best to intimidate and assert power over a young woman and who continues to push even when he can see that he’s making somebody uncomfortable to the point of tears.”

The only problem is that I’m not sure everyone would read the story as intended by the journalist (or Ms Booth) rather than, say, reading between the lines.

The offending interviewer was Craig Dean who is, per LinkedIn, the “Chief Executive of Web Applications Group of Companies”. His companies have been going since 2000. I pulled the last accounts from the particular company that is mentioned in the article – one of four in the group, apparently – and it’s a relatively small outfit, with 5 directors, but it’s been going a long time, apparently with some success.

He seems like a successful and busy guy in his mid-40s. His photo is a bit more ‘Danny Dyer’ than ‘Daniel Craig’, I’ll grant you, but Danny Dyer doesn’t have a Masters in CompSci from Cambridge or a basket of successful enterprises.

She claimed in her Tumblresque screed on Twitter that Dean was hypercritical, and gave ‘a “brutal” two-hour interview’ during which he ‘tore apart her personality’. So brutal and tortuous was the interview, and so verily did he tear her a new one that, in the end, he was so utterly unimpressed with her (!) that he offered her the job.

Her response was to send an email back complaining about how she was treated in the interview… which she then plastered all over social media, naming the company and the interviewer.

Quickly followed by doing the rounds of morning interviews for national BBC radio news…

… and the publshing of her CV on Twitter:

So. I have questions.

1. Why would a busy and successful man spend 2 precious hours supposedly tormenting and insulting someone in an interview room, when he could doubtless find better ways to spend his time?
2. If he’s behaved as described, surely he wouldn’t have been quietly in business for 19 years, 10+ of those in the age of social media? Unhappy employees do not make for profitable times in small businesses. Failure to attract and recruit the best talent doesn’t help, either. Nor do PR shitstorms like this one.
3. If he has behaved as described, presumably this isn’t the first time – or has he had one of those personality changes caused by severe head trauma? Because his fellow directors would absolutely have decided he’s not best placed to be doing the interviewing if he had such a track record.

See, I think there’s a more plausible explanation, where Dean has a cheeky northern sense of humour, but takes his business very seriously. In a small business, for it to be successful, there is no room for slackers or chancers – every effort made by every employee, every day, counts towards the success or faillure of the enterprise. Perhaps he’s made poor recruitment choices in his past when he was a little less wise, and therefore, his interview technique these days is rigorous and robust – after all, he needs to see that faces as well as skills will fit.

One of his recommendations on LinkedIn, from a female employee, says “Craig challenges and inspires his staff to achieve their maximum potential. He does so with determination tempered with humour, and engenders loyalty in those he works with.”

And in the red corner, here we have a 22-year old who is a fledgling self-publicist and the epitome of Generation Snowflake. She got a worthless degree from a 3rd rate former polytechnic (where she was probably infected by the mardy social justice/feminist disease) and thinks she’s the bee’s knees. She has about 8 minutes of experience in the real world, much of it as an unpaid intern.

Everyone in her life so far has told her what a wonderful, fabulous, talented person she is, but she is a delicate, hypersensitive flower with low self-esteem, who is traumatised by any challenge to her egocentric world view, and she lashes out, vituperatively, vindictively and short-sightledly.

After all.. an email expressing your strident opinion of a prospective employer’s interview technique is one thing – and if it’s constructive, I can admire the balls of it – but to also post the email publicly – names, companies and all – on social media, garner loads of attention, go on 3 different BBC radio stations, and then post up your comically threadbare CV on Twitter? Really?

So I have one more question: After publicly slaying a prospective employer on social and mainstream media like that, who in their right mind would be dumb enough to hire this otherwise unremarkable woman to scrub floors, let alone to be a key person in their business?

Finally, I have 3 criticisms of Craig Dean. None of which relates to his interview technique:

1. I’m seriously concerned that his judgement of character allowed him to offer her the job.
2. He made the classic mistake of prostrating himself before the social media altar and apologising.
3. He made both of these mistakes because he clearly hasn’t read “SJWs always lie” or “SJWs always double down” by Vox Day, or even surveyed the freely available SJW Attack Survival Guide.

He seems like a bright guy though.. once bitten and all that.

I should make a note to follow up on where Ms Booth ends up working, and see how things are going there in a couple of months time.

AJ

PS Sorry, I do have one more thing.. you know if Toyah Wilcox and Mrs Merton had a lovechild? Yeah..

PPS Yeah, one more thing… if you were to look at the list of company officers for “Web Applications UK” (Company number 04070605) you may be as tickled as I am by the details of their former Business Development Director.

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The road to hell

I don’t think I really need to dissect this:

… but I’m going to leave it here so I can refer back to it in the future when we find – to our surprise, shock and horror – that it has… well, I was going to say unintended consequences, but for the promoters of this initiative, I’m sure the consequences are entirely intended.

I’m sure there will be a few in Parliament who will valiantly seek to defang this ghastly piece of legislation, but there will be a silent many who have their misgivings yet choose to remain silent because anyone who speaks out against the inevitable injustice that this presages will be hanged, drawn and quartered in the court of the Twittermob.

So, I’ll come back when it has been shown that this leads to men being unjustly punished due to miscarriages of justice, and women behaving more overtly vindictively than before because they’re being enabled and encouraged to do so by the law of the land.

I’ll remind you of Blackstone’s formulation, which seems to have become a deeply unfashionable nostrum in our dark times.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

Here’s another one that’s out of the window.

Lady Justice (Latin: Iustitia) is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems.^[1][2] Her attributes are a blindfold, a balance, and a sword.

To be reminded today of ‘Lady Justice’ sticks in the throat like a strap-on cactus.

In an age when the police and the prosecution services are truly under the control of the matriarchy, it is inevitable that men will receive unjust treatment, and the women responsible will go unpunished even when their perfidy is revealed.

AJ

UPDATE: I’ll lean on commentary that I agree with from Chateau Heartiste

False Rape Claims

A regular reader would know that this is a bit of a theme on my blog.

This is because I’m constantly aghast at how the perverse state and its enforcers take the word of women as gospel on account of their feminist-inculcated infallibility, and take the word of men as intrinsically faulty, on account of the feminist-enforced idea of universally brutal men.

This blog is awash with examples not just of women who have falsely cried rape, but of those who have been violent, abusive or evil in other ways. Not because I’m a misogynist, because I’m not, but because the reality is that some women and some men are capable of evil deeds or words. Just a little balance, you see.

So I was particularly interested in the article tweeted by the splendid @AbsolutLaudanum this afternoon.

Read the whole thing, but to abridge massively…

Lots of falsely accused men are dragged out of their places of employment in full view of their bosses and colleagues, no doubt giving their false accusers that extra sexual thrill of knowing they’ve thoroughly stripped their prey of the last vestiges of their dignity.  Some young men are dragged from their bedrooms in their parents’ homes half dressed, carted away without any explanation to their terrified parents. 

Once the innocents are hauled to the police station, the fun really begins. They are subjected to grueling questioning on and off over the course of hours or days, often by surly law enforcement personnel who couldn’t care less that the men or boys they are berating are human beings.  They are looking for evidence of a conviction, and if they can convince the male to confess, that makes their jobs all that much easier. Their attitude is often to treat the presumptively innocent male as a vile rapist.

And then there’s the physical examination.  If an innocent woman or girl were subjected to something akin to the following, do you suppose there’d be an outcry about it? "I was taken to a doctor’s waiting room, I was told to completely strip naked. While I was naked the CID agent took pictures of every part of me. The doctor then swabbed my penis 2-3 times, then pulled hair from every part of my body."  That was from a first person account on this blog of a soldier recounting his false rape nightmare. It is typical of many stories we’ve run. 

Once locked up, the men or boys too often are subjected to cruel and offensive batteries and verbal assaults by jail personnel and other prisoners.

And, yes, dear readers, sometimes men and boys are wrongly convicted of rapes they didn’t commit. The young ones, who have no experience in the prison system, are too often routinely victimized by the same crime they were wrongly convicted of. Sometimes, they serve decades in prison before they are released. The news is filled with men who’ve served many years before their innocence can be proven. Think how many others rot away in prison today because the evidence of their innocence was long ago destroyed.

Too often, the awful consequences of a false rape claim are even less predictable.

Remember this story we wrote about at Glenn Sacks’ blog?  Two young lives destroyed — one of the boys was killed — because of a girl’s rape lie. She, of course, served no jail time.  Go read it. It will make you sick.

Or how about this story — I’ll reprint our opening paragraph: "Clifford Martin, 19, is heading to prison for accepting the word of two teenage girls that one of them had been sexually assaulted by another 19-year-old man named Cory Headen. Mr. Martin broke into Mr. Headen’s home and beat him to death while he was sleeping."

Remember the serial rape liar whose lie caused one of her young victims to kill himself?  Despite that, she was allowed to falsely accuse another young men — and he was forced to undergo a grueling trial before he was acquitted.  The liar?  She retains her anonymity, of course.

Or how about mentally unstable man who was charged with rape, then took his own life after the police delayed in telling him he had been falsely accused?

Or the innocent man who suffered months of abuse in his community after being falsely accused of being a paedophile before his heart couldn’t take any more?

Or the falsely accused young men who were attacked by thirty inmates?  Or the man who was brutally attacked and suffered devastating brain injuries when he was falsely accused or rape?  Or the man who was beaten because he was mistaken for a rapist?

The only thing in which one can take heart is that while the USA apparently persists in allowing these false accusers to remain free and anonymous, we have at least recently started to prosecute them in the UK, strip them of their anonymity and jail them. This is in spite of hateful Hattie’s shenanigans.

It’s scant consolation, though, because as the article above shows, once the genie is out of the bottle, the damage is done for the men involved, no matter how demonstrably false the claims they have endured.

We must hope that, as we trudge backwards from collective enlightenment, the UK does not end up where the US is. I do wonder, though, whether it’s the insane and terrifying US feminists, or insane and terrifying US religionists that keep America in the dark ages on this matter of fundamental injustice.

AJ

Paul Chambers #twitterjoketrial update – half time at the appeal court

Friday saw the opening of Paul Chambers’ appeal against his conviction under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which he was adorned with after sending a silly, but harmless and hyperbolic, tweet relating to an airport.

Initial expectations were that the hearing would be wrapped up on the day, with a verdict either in favour of common sense and reason, or in favour of the cruel and arbitrary whims of the state.

However, not only has this not come to pass – the hearing was adjourned late on Friday afternoon – but the matter is likely not to be resolved this side of November. So Paul Chambers, and his nearest and dearest, are to be left in further agonising suspense by a callous, arbitrary and inhuman system.

All the coverage you need on the current state of play is provided by the distinctly uneffable @DavidAllenGreen.

 Click to read on…

.. And from @flayman, the guy widely credited with bringing Paul’s case to the attention of the Internet at large, a very insightful post about the state of play.

I’m writing this new post because Paul’s appeal was heard and then adjourned yesterday in Doncaster Crown Court and because the prosecution has, in my opinion, not only failed to strengthen its case since May but has offered evidence that actually weakens it to a never before seen level of farce.

Click to read on…

Matt (@flayman) highlights a telling account of one of the CPS’s arguments, as relayed by the Guardian.

Caroline Wiggin, for the prosecution, said Chambers had earlier sent direct messages to the woman in Northern Ireland as it appeared possible that the airport might close. In one he wrote: “I was thinking if it does I have decided to resort to terrorism.” She argued that the context provided by such messages strengthened the case that Chambers intended to cause menace. “If a man in prison were to send a message to his wife that he was going to come and beat her up, the court might consider that were menacing, albeit the man himself may have difficulty in putting it into effect,” she said.

He does a simply masterful job of demonstrating the monumental incoherence of the argument put forward by Caroline Wiggin, which you should read.

What really irked me about it, though, and what Matt does not address, is the implied gender politics informing the CPS’ argument.

It’s like something from chapter one of the “Harriet Harman Manual of Righteous Misandry” and my piss has been gently simmering ever since I read it yesterday.

Look at it again.

In one he wrote: “I was thinking if it does I have decided to resort to terrorism.” She argued that the context provided by such messages strengthened the case that Chambers intended to cause menace.

ORLY? How so? After all, this is a chap messaging the girly he’s on his way to see. Part of a running gag, perhaps?

Anyway, what possible motive, in the minds of the righteous, could a horny, hairy Yorkshire MAN have to make such a journey?

“If a man in prison were to send a message to his wife that he was going to come and beat her up, the court might consider that were menacing, albeit the man himself may have difficulty in putting it into effect,” she said.

O. Kay.

So, err… once more for the cameras…

If a man in prison were to send a message to his wife that he was going to come and beat her up

Permit  me to pose a question. Do you think, for one minute, that if it were Paul’s young lady in the dock for her part in the same series of messages, Ms Wiggin would have posited that…

“If a woman in prison were to send a message to her husband that she was going to come and beat him up, the court might consider that were menacing, albeit the woman herself may have difficulty in putting it into effect,”

Well, do you?

There are plenty enough objective, rational reasons why Caroline Wiggin’s argument is fatuous, non-sensical, prejudiced and fallacious.

But none of these approaches, as effectively as they make this woman look like a fool, satisfies my ire.

The implied, and lazy, feminist premise that all men are brutes and all women are victims, which seems to underpin this argument is breathtaking.

Matt, though – a man who is reasonable to the point of being fucking infuriating sometimes – insisted that Ms Wiggin was only putting forward the arguments cooked up by the CPS, and that it was unfair of me to level accusations of stupidity at her.

If anything, Matt’s assertion makes things look even worse.

In the conclusion I’d provisionally drawn, perhaps one of shooting the messenger, what we had was one woman who could be dismissed as a lazy, spiteful, man-hating, feminist idiot.

In Matt’s scenario though, the only conclusion we can draw is that the CPS is, institutionally, running a prosecutorial policy of lazy, spiteful, feminist, man-hating idiocy.

I was happier when I was just pinning the blame on Caroline Wiggin.

Now the whole house of cunts has to fall. Kier Starmer’s head needs to be on a platter by Christmas if Chambers is not cleared.

AJ

UPDATE: Matt has now gone one better and garnered the opinion of a linguistics expert, who has deconstructed the tweet that got Paul into so much bother. Must read blogging.

Rarity value diminishing fast

*Sigh*

At least they’re getting their comeuppance these days.

An innocent man who was falsely accused of rape by his ex-girlfriend today told how the lies had twice driven him to attempt suicide.

Father-of-two David Lord, 23, was arrested and detained in a police cell for six-and-a-half hours after obsessed Elizabeth Wilkinson wrongly claimed he had raped her four times.

He had his fingerprints and DNA taken, lived a nightmare for a month before being told no action was being taken against him by police.

Today shop assistant Wilkinson, 21, of Oswaldtwistle, Lancaster, was starting a 12-month jail sentence after she admitted perverting the course of justice.

After the case, Mr Lord said: ‘When the police came knocking on my door my whole life was turned upside down.

‘I just couldn’t believe what i was being accused of and all the stigma that goes with it. Being branded a rapist is a horrible experience and my first thought was for my children.

‘This woman was ruining their lives as well as my own. It just such a relief when police realised what she saying was all lies. But I had to be put on medication for severe depression and I tried to kill myself twice, once by hanging.

‘I just couldn’t handle it. Mud sticks. All I want now is closure and to rebuild my life. I think she thoroughly deserved to go prison for what she put my children through.’ 

Indeed she does. Sounds like a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

AJ

Welcome to the Machine

It could be argued that I don’t stand often enough against the tide of lazy misogynist shite the Daily Mail peddles, but today I do.

 

A mother who neglected her three children and let her two dogs starve to death after becoming obsessed with a computer game has been given a suspended jail sentence and banned from using computers by a judge in Kent.

Her German shepherd and lurcher dog lay rotting in the dining room for two months as the 33-year-old widow played Small World on the internet almost non-stop.

After a neighbour peered through the letterbox and saw the ‘appalling conditions’, the NSPCC were told and police officers gagged as they entered the home and saw the ‘decay and filth’.

…

The toilet was in a disgusting state. The woman tried to block officers from entering the dining room and when asked why she replied: “All right, my dogs are in there. They are dead. I killed them.

‘I probably starved them, probably because I have been playing the computer game all the time.’

…

‘She started playing initially for an hour a day in late 2009 but since August of that year it had become an obsession to the point where she was only getting two hours sleep a night,’ said the prosecutor.

‘She still managed to feed the children and get them to school but accepted she let everything else go. Afterwards, it became so overwhelming she didn’t know where to start.

‘It got to the stage where she only bought food that didn’t need cooking. She fed the children pot noodles, sandwiches, chips and pies. She was ashamed.’

Scum! Hang her! Flog her! Feed ‘er to the pigs, Errol.

Well, no actually. Hang on a minute.

Allan Compton, defending, said the woman had been a devoted and competent mother until tragedy struck some years ago with the death of her husband from a heart attack.

‘She retreated into this virtual world provided by her laptop computer,’ he said. ‘She shut herself off from the outside world and operated in the real world on a very basic level.

This puts an altogether different complexion on the case.

The mother was sentenced to six months imprisonment suspended for two years and ordered to do 75 hours unpaid work. She was banned from keeping animals.

I understand that banning her from keeping animals for a period is for the best. I also understand that her kids going into care – temporarily – is probably for the best.

But what purpose does the suspended prison sentence or the unpaid work serve, at all?

And what of this:

Judge Carey banned the woman from having any internet access ‘to assist you to resist the temptation to return to this virtual world’.

This is akin to banning an alcoholic from buying wine. Completely misses the point. It could be a Tamagotchi or a Nintendo DS game next.

And that’s not the only way in which Judge Carey appears to miss the point.

Judge Jeremy Carey told her: ‘I am satisfied you have been a good mother but your life went very badly wrong when you became obsessed with the Small World computer game.’

Errrr. Wait a minute. Didn’t her husband die of a heart attack, leaving her with 3 children to take care of?

You don’t think that may have been the point at which her life ‘went very badly wrong’?

This woman doesn’t need punishing. She doesn’t need opprobrium. She needs help.

What did her psychiatric evaluation conclude? I suppose that completely missed the point as well, being conducted by a low-grade state-appointed ideologue. And her legal team? How did this terribly sad case end up going down this route at all?

I just can’t see how the best interests of anyone at all are being fulfilled here at all. It stinks of the heavy-handed inhuman state making its mark. Again.

I’m almost tempted to go and see what’s being said about this on Mumsnet, but I dread the prospect of unearthing a lynch-mob of hatched faced hormonal harridans.

AJ

UPDATE: A further thought on banning this woman from accessing the Internet.

I was given to believe that, rightly or wrongly, access to the Internet had now been elevated to the status of being a human right.

I can quite understand that the life of a single parent is at time very lonely and isolated, and that access to the Internet is a massive help in so many ways.

It’s not as if this woman has used the Internet to cause or incite harm, like, for example, someone consuming child pr0n would be.

So the act of banning her from the Internet seems quite cruel in itself.

Some kind of therapy for her addictive behaviour would seem like a far more useful approach.

Oh and does she have a mobile phone that has access to the Internet? Has she been forced to change to an old-skool mobile phone because of this?

Irony Overload

This, from Anna Racoon, is just glorious.

Con-Dem partnerships can be tricky……

Coalition partners resort to violence.

Liberal-Democrat councillor Christine James has been charged with assault and will appear in Weymouth Magistrate’s Court on September 9^th.

Feeling are running high amongst the tribal ground force. Passions inflamed as agendas are compromised. Who did she assault?

Her alleged victim is believed to be her husband of 19 years and Conservative Borough council colleague, Ian James.

Mr James is a champion of the Weymouth and Portland Domestic Violence and Abuse Forum and sits on the Community Safety Partnership…..

At a borough council meeting earlier this month, Christine James said that campaigners from the Friends of Weymouth Refuge for battered partners had ‘proven that a refuge like this is both relevant and needed.’

*snigger*

AJ

Better late than never

Prompted by a report from the IFS, Conservative Home and The Spectator have woken up to the implications Harriet Harman’s much vaunted Equality Act. Just like some of us did about 6 months ago.

The paradox of Hattie’s little scheme is that the result will be the diametric opposite of equality and the total opposite of tolerance and forbearance. As minority after minority take their grievances of perceived prejudice, disadvantage, offence or discrimination through the courts, a hierarchy of protected minorities will emerge. The result will be an acceleration of the balkanisation of society that is already well established under this Labour government. The very divide-and-rule approach to control that has deprived the British people of their ability to just rub along together, brushing off perceived sleights.

• Gay rights will trump Christian rights.
• Muslim rights will trump gay rights and women’s rights.
• Women’s rights will trump men’s rights (except Muslim men).
• Pedestrians rights will trump those of cyclists.
• Cyclists’ rights will trump those of motorists.
• Mothers with baby buggies will trump the rights of pedestrians, especially if they’re breast-feeding at the time.
• Children’s rights will trump those of parents, except mothers, who are a protected group.

This way lies madness. Can anyone not see that?

Okay – perhaps the full implications didn’t quite fall into place back then – specifically that the..

law opens a government to judicial challenge over virtually anything that it does.

What that means is that, as Theresa May pointed out earlier this month,

… cuts in the budget could widen inequality in Britain and ran a "real risk" of breaking the law, a letter leaked to the Guardian shows.

The letter was sent to George Osborne on 9 June, less than a fortnight before his emergency budget, and was copied to David Cameron.

May wrote "there are real risks" that people ranging from ethnic minorities to women, to the disabled and the old, would be "disproportionately affected".

May urged that steps be taken to avoid breaking the equality laws, warning that "there is a real risk of successful legal challenge".

How?

Paragraph 32 of Harman’s Act states that any individual is not prevented "from bringing judicial review proceedings against a public body which  has not considered socio-economic disadvantage when taking decisions of a strategic nature". So if anyone makes cuts which Jo Blogger thinks hit kids with special needs, they can have the decision subject to a judicial review. And, perhaps, try to claim legal aid for so doing. The Treasury might claim this is baseless, but they may end up being sued nonetheless – it will be great fun for the unions to find out how far they can go.

Oh dear…

In this way, Labour transferred power from parliament (where it was about to lose power) to the courts (where the lefty judiciary reign supreme). Their calculation was that if they did this quietly enough, and in technicalities, the Cameroons would not wise up to it because of their aversion to detail. Cameron should have repealed the Equalities Act instantly.

But he won’t, probably because the DibLems won’t let him, and we’ll have years of legal wrangling while any ability to slash the deficit is mired in legal red tape.

Of course, no mention of the Equality Act could pass by without the Wimmin wanting some of that action, via their favourite fake charity:

Fawcett launches legal challenge to government budget

The Fawcett Society has filed papers with the High Court seeking a Judicial Review of the government’s recent emergency budget. (1)

Under equality laws, we believe the government should have assessed whether its budget proposals would increase or reduce inequality between women and men.  Despite repeated requests, the Treasury have not provided any evidence that any such an assessment took place.  (2)

Even a top line assessment of the budget measures show 72 per cent of cuts will be met from women’s income as opposed to 28 per cent from men’s. This is because many of the cuts are to the benefits that more women than men rely on, and the changes to the the tax system will benefit far more men than women.

ORLY? Well, let’s have a little think about that. Or we could let Anna and DK take care of the thinking.

Ed West is on good form too.

AJ

Feminism vs Sex Work

I started thinking about that particular juxtaposition the other day, while mulling over the implications of, as Leg Iron so enchantingly puts it, “free sex for cripples”.

One local authority has agreed a care plan including payment for a 21-year-old with learning disabilities to have sex with a prostitute in Amsterdam next month.

His social worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said social services were there to identify and meet the needs of their clients – which, in the case of an angry and frustrated young man, meant paying for sex.

Another care worker said staff at her council had been told that trips to lap dancing clubs could be funded, if it could be argued that it would help the "mental and physical well being" of their client.

As you’d expect, most of the blogposts I read on the matter were principally concerned not with the morality or otherwise of prostitution, but with the morality of using tax-payers’ money to fund access to prostitutes for a select group.

Hyperbolic remarks about the apparent entitlement of every 30 year old virgin followed, as did queries as to the gender fairness of the situation – again not from a morality of prostitution standpoint, but with regard to disabled females’ entitlement to enlist a gigolo on the public dime.

What really made my head fizz though, was wondering how these local government departments squared the prostitution arrangements with their supposedly suffocating poltical correctness, gender sensitivity and all that other opressive socialist guff.

Also on my mind was the on-going actions of local authorities against their local providers of prostitution.

But the squaring off of the PC principles was the one that really made me think.

I started to research the feminist position on prostitution. I soon found what I should have known all along – there is no settled consensus (on anything) amongst feminists, any more than there is a settled consensus (on anything)amongst libertarians.

I ended up reading through this site. It’s a bit of a mess, but the content is worth reading – you can download it all as a PDF here.

Handiest, though, is the summary chart (PDF) of the positions of various branches of feminism, which helps convey how muddied and fraught with internecine squabbling the situation is. Click the table to enlarge it.

At this point, I was overcome with cognitive dissonance and shelved my thoughts without putting pen to paper on the subject, as I had originally intended.

It was a tweet from @AbsolutLaudanum pointing me to her blog, that presented me with this jolly excellent video on the titular subject. Well worth 10 minutes of your time.

 

Food for thought.

AJ

Around the world in a day

This is a quality microcosmic example of the need for anonymity for rape suspects.

Lunchtime today:

Swedish authorities say they have issued an arrest warrant for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, on accusations of rape and molestation.

The warrant was issued late on Friday, said Karin Rosander, communications head at Sweden’s prosecutors’ office.

16:15 today on the website of the Swedish prosecutor’s office:

http://www.aklagare.se/In-English/

Assange no longer wanted

Chief prosector Eva Finné has come to the desicion that Julian Assange is not suspected of rape. Considering that, Assange is no longer arrested in his absence.

Eva Finné will make no other comments during Saturday night.

So there you have it.

In a day, one of the world’s most recognisable names has been dragged through the mud, on the basis of iunfounded nonsense.

Jack of Kent is busily worrying about whether the above website is genuine. Why not go and see for yourself?

Plenty will no doubt hype up the conspiracies with the time honoured “no smoke without fire” rhetoric.

Yet again, a man’s name is dragged through the stickiest of mud for no just reason.

Disgraceful.

AJ

UPDATE: BBC News get with the programme.

One more comment. We all know that the internet never forgets, so Julian Assange’s name will forever turn up in certain searches on Google or whatever.

The post on Jack of Kent’s blog, for example, is tagged as follows:

 

UPDATE: Jack has updated his tags to be more appropriate.

I errr. Oh FFS.

I despair at this sort of utter stupidity.

A bereaved mother has led a protest against the ending of a speed camera partnership scheme in her area.

Presumably the young child she lost was mown down by a speeding driver. No? What then…

Claire Brixey’s son Ashley, 20, was killed in a crash in Limpley Stoke, Wiltshire, in 2004 when the car in which he was a passenger landed upside-down in a swimming pool after the driver lost control.

Well, very sad I’m sure.

Ms Brixey, who lives in Standerwick on the Wiltshire/Somerset border, has been a road safety campaigner since the crash.

In the protest in Trowbridge, she urged a rethink of the decision to end the Wiltshire and Swindon Camera Safety Partnership scheme.

Ms Brixey told Sky News: "We need to show the importance of them (speed cameras) and that we need to keep them, that they are there for a very, very good reason and they do save lives."

And this tragedy happened in 2004 you say? When there were FUCKING LOADS of speed cameras operating in Wiltshire?

They didn’t save your son. What good did they do? Anything?

UPDATE: As pointed out by @TheABD on twitter… regarding the car in which Ms Brixey’s son died:

The driver Richard Joyce, who was twice over the legal alcohol limit and had taken ecstasy before getting behind the wheel

So errr… speed cameras, which have replaced traffic policemen are REALLY GREAT at detecting drugged and drunk drivers. (More from The ABD on this incident and the way it has been manipulated here).

This is precisely why the bereaved should not be given a voice in policy, because they are rendered incapable of rational and objective thought.

Have some dignity and grieve in peace, then move on, instead of dedicating the rest of your life to a misguided march of miserablism.

Fucking idiots.

AJ

UPDATE: I missed another golden quote in that article:

Ellen Booth, campaigns officer for road safety charity Brake, said: "Increasingly, decisions being made on speed cameras are more about politics and less about facts.

Ahaha… Ahahahahaaaaaa. Ahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaasaaaaaa GRRRRRRRRR. Do these people have no self-awareness at all?

For those who don’t know, Brake was set up by a woman who wanted to campaign for speed cameras, reduced limits, more penalties and fines etc, because her son was killed by an HGV whose brakes had failed.

If you want to know some of the FACTS that Brake find deeply uncomfortable, get yourself over to the Safespeed website.

Born to be an MP

It’s uncanny.

A newly elected MP who was spotted using her mobile phone while behind the wheel of her car was today banned from driving for six months.

Yasmin Qureshi, MP for Bolton South-East, was also found to have no car insurance when stopped by police, Bolton magistrates heard.

The former barrister and human-rights lawyer had been elected as the constituency’s new MP on 6 May but four days later was caught by police while driving through the town talking on her mobile.

…

The Labour MP, who was not in court, apologised to magistrates through her solicitor, who said she would now have the "inconvenience" of having to use taxis and public transport.

Poor lamb. And for a single offence to.. oh.. wait…

the MP already had nine points on her licence when she was stopped shortly before 3pm on 10 May by police…

She had committed a previous offence of using her mobile phone while driving, in 2008, and two speeding offences, one in 2007 and the other last year.

Hmmm.. female Labour MP, former human rights lawyer, charged with using a phone while driving, already had points for speeding…

Remind you of anyone?

The minister was fined £350 and ordered to pay £75 costs and a £15 victim surcharge after her lawyer entered a guilty plea at City of Westminster magistrates court. Her driving licence was also endorsed with three points.

…

The court heard that Harman already has six penalty points on her licence after being caught speeding in a 30mph zone twice. The first incident happened in April 2007 and the second in April last year.

Might I suggest the strongest commonality is the conviction that the laws they make for the little people don’t apply to them.

I’ll be watching Ms Qureshi – further entertainment is almost inevitable.

AJ

In the case for sterilisation

… I give you exhibit A:

  

LARA CARTER has slept with 20 strangers in the past year – in a desperate and reckless bid to get pregnant.

The self-confessed "sperm hunter" uses ovulation kits to tell her when she is most fertile then pretends to be drunk, throwing herself at unsuspecting fellas and making it obvious she wants sex.

If Lara, 25, meets a man who wants to use a condom, she will offer one from her purse – which she has already pierced a hole in.

Lara, an assistant office manager, says: "This is absolutely the right time for me to have a baby and nothing is going to stand in my way.

"All my friends have babies and I desperately want to be a mum.

"I don’t have a steady boyfriend and feel my time to have a baby is running out. I only need a man to provide his sperm – I would have no interest in seeing him again. That is why I’m a sperm hunter."

It’s really difficult to know where to start, isn’t it?

With no regular boyfriend, Lara’s desire to have a baby has driven her to target strangers as potential fathers to her unborn child.

She says: "I’ve had a couple of proper relationships in the past two years.

"But each time I have mentioned the idea of having a baby, the bloke has run a mile.

"Men my age aren’t that interested in settling down with a kid so quickly into a relationship, so I have given up on trying to have a baby with a partner. I’ve looked into getting a sperm donation but it’s too expensive.

Men her age aren’t interested in getting shackled to someone who is quite clearly mental and a filthy duplicitous slag.

"My nearest private clinic costs £295 for a consultation then it would cost a further £2,000 for a donation.

"There are plenty of men out there willing to have a one-night stand for free."

Oh yes – and lots of free money and free housing for you to raise your little miracle.

I hope she turns out to be barren.

Remember guys – be careful out there. Always provide the condom and always make sure the contents can’t be retrieved after you’ve gone home.

Some of those women are mad, bad and dangerous to nob.

AJ

Honest assessment

I’ve pretty much seen both extremes of the ideas posited here. Neither extreme is particularly conducive to a good relationship. But then, neither is being an intransigent git, like me.

 

Take a long hard look at the man in your life. Yes him, the one lounging on the sofa, half-comatose in front of Midsomer Murders. Do you ever find yourself wishing he had a little more get-up-and-go, showed a bit more testosterone-fuelled drive, was – dare I say it – a touch more, you know, manly?

Is he passive rather than active? Does he leave most decision-making to you? Do you feel irritated that he happily fusses around in the kitchen when guests come for supper, but expects you to remember to take out the bins and fill the car with petrol?

If so, then chances are, you only have yourself to blame. A new survey by Oxford University has revealed that women are attracted to men they believe will help out with household chores and childcare. British men came third, after Swedes and Norwegians, in an international egalitarian index.

The survey concluded that our menfolk make the best husbands – which doesn’t quite tally with the fact that 45 per cent of marriages end in divorce. But, according to a leading relationship coach, a great many relationship disasters stem from the fact that modern women are turning their husbands hermaphrodite.

No longer sure of their role, these "egalitarian" men have been left straddling the gender divide and are becoming male-female hybrids, in some cases displaying far more feminine characteristics than their partners.

"Some women have become ball-breakers," says Francine Kaye, known professionally as The Divorce Doctor, with an eponymous website. "It’s not entirely our fault, because the demands of the workplace have changed us, and brought out our more masculine side. But unfortunately we’re taking that home with us every evening into the domestic sphere, and often bullying our men into submission."

Read on, for some more interesting truths, although, the article fails to take account of the feminising effect of the modern education system.

AJ

Truth and reconciliation

This is correct.

Two thirds of employees agree they would rather work for a man than a woman.

Female bosses were accused of being moody and incapable of leaving their personal lives at home.

A third of those polled claimed women in charge are ‘loose cannons’ – ready to stab colleagues in the back at any time, and who constantly feel threatened by other people in positions of authority.

By contrast, both male and female workers believe male bosses were less likely to get involved in office politics, were easier to reason with and rarely suffered from mood swings.

Men are also said to be more straight-talking than women and rarely talk about others behind their backs, it emerged.

Many people I know concur: female line managers and office managers can be pure poison.

That said, I’ve had some pretty moody and insecure male bosses, too. Hell, I’ve been a moody and insecure male boss.

Perhaps it’s just that offices are appalling places that turn everyone into hateful freaks.

For the record, when it comes to project managers, women seem to be much better than men.

AJ

Rape-a-dope.

Incredibly rare, these occurrences.

A mother-of-four who lied about being raped because she was ashamed of having sex with a soldier in an alleyway has been jailed for 15 months.

Cheryl Moss, 26, wasted 180 hours of police time and £5,500 of taxpayers’ money before finally admitting the allegation was false.

The single mother pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice after police found nearly an hour’s CCTV footage of the consensual intercourse taking place.

It really galls me to say this, but thank goodness for the pervert CCTV operator. And this isn’t the first time a false-accuser has been caught out by CCTV evidence.

Ouch.

AJ

Siding with the enemy

Feminists are up in arms about this:

Six street-based sex workers in Newham, east London, were named on the Metropolitan police website. Police posted their photos, full names and dates of birth.

…

In a second case, two Polish women who were selling sex from their home in Aldgate, east London, were raided by City of London police as part of Operation Monaco.

…

Police took photographs of the Polish women, who were not charged. Last Sunday, photos appeared in News of the World. The women said they were distressed by the police raid and the lack of warning that their pictures would appear in a tabloid newspaper.

And for once, I am in complete agreement with them.

Absolutely disgusting fascist policing. Yet again.

AJ

Equality: Great job, ladies

I wonder if the ConDems are intent on keeping Jack Straw’s policy of preferential treatment for female convicts.

Miss Brown stabbed her boyfriend’s upper thigh with a carving knife severing several arteries, before running away.

Her sister Toni, 25, refused to call an ambulance to her home in Greater Manchester.

A jury at Manchester Crown Court was told he would probably have survived if he had received medical attention.

And another:

Lucy Viner-Mood, 22, and Lois Gibson, 18, locked Georgia Fenn in a flat for 18 hours while they beat her unconscious repeatedly.

Miss Fenn, 19, suffered burns from a cigarette lighter, had her ponytail cut off and suffered two black eyes and a broken nose.

The two flatmates attacked her in March after hearing that she had slept with Viner-Mood’s former boyfriend, Maidstone Crown Court heard.

A judge, who described the attack as “evil”, sentenced Viner-Mood to five years in jail and Gibson to three years in a young offenders institute.

Actually, this raises an interesting point. The latter pair got 5 & 3 years for “burns from a cigarette lighter, her ponytail cut off and two black eyes and a broken nose”

The former, where a guy was stabbed to death?

Samantha Brown was sentenced to five years in a Young Offenders Institute while her sister was received a four-year jail term

Oh, fair enough then. In the eyes of the law, the life of a man is worth less than the life of a woman.

That’ll be just fine. Pfffft.

AJ

ConDems busy with the *real issues*

I’m pleased to see they’re keeping focused on the prize.

The coalition government is to put the fashion industry under pressure to stop promoting unrealistic body images and clamp down on airbrushed photographs in magazines and adverts.

Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister, who has long campaigned against size-zero photoshoots, will convene a series of discussions this autumn with the fashion industry, including magazine editors and advertising executives, to discuss how to promote body confidence among young people.

WHAAAAAAAT?

Are you paying for that ‘series of discussions’, Lynne?

Oh, no, of course you’re not.

WE ARE, YOU LUDICROUS MONG.

 
Lynne Featherstone, after being airbrushed with a big pile of our cash.

AJ

ConDemFail 2: The Rape anonymity U-Turn

This is from yesterday, but is another prime example of the ConDems going back on their word.

*sigh*.

I’ve rehearsed the argument against the status-quo here and here.

Anonymity for both parties or neither is the way forward. Instead, we’re going to get a bullshit toothless compromise.

AJ