The Thessaliad Redux

So the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell has been held up in appeals court. I'm not sure that DADT was the best way of dealing with it, but I'm not sure whether to be proud or ashamed of how long it took me to figure out why the hell such a stupid rule may have been thrown out in the first place. I guess part of me just swallowed whole the idea that it was all down to bigotry, about how people believed that no gay man would be able to function as well as a heterosexual man on the battlefield. I wasn't sure why, but I figured it was the same reason that they didn't want women on the front lines once upon a time. But there are women in the military, and yet there's DADT. This tells me that it's not about closeting the fact that there are gay people in the military. What this tells me is that it's as much for the protection of the gay recruit as it is for the protection of the sensibilities of bigots.

Look, there's a lot of ragging that already goes on in boot camps and military academies. There have been cases of people bullied to suicide or beaten to death or vanishing under mysterious circumstances. I know that there are times when you go into combat with your unit or what have you, and you have to be able to trust the rest of your unit with your life, because that's what you stand to lose. But how do you trust anyone who hates you because of what gender you prefer to pursue sexually? How can you be sure that the bigot in question won't put a bullet in you and call it, at worst, a 'friendly fire accident'?

If DADT was abolished tomorrow, I think that there would be serious issues for those who chose to out themselves. I think there'd be paranoia from hitherto unidentified bigots. I think there'd be a serious shake-up. Yes, it needs to be dealt with, because this kind of exclusionary behaviour is not strictly speaking on, but there still have to be some checks in place to ensure that ... y'know, some overzealous homophobe with a high-powered assault rifle isn't going to get twitchy.

That said, I think Peter Burke said it best: "We don't ask; we don't care". But we're dealing with a whole new ballgame and while I'm not suggesting being sensitive to the beliefs of bigots, I am suggesting that a delicate hand needs to be taken with the DADT repeal so that you don't get paranoia, unnecessary stress and a boatload of death when it goes the way of the dodo bird.

Further to last night's post, now that I've nabbed a little sleep ... while still groggy with lack of sleep and confused at how things are panning out, I am also still angry. Part of that is to do with some stone-faced tit turning around and saying, "Okay, we have an archaic system of voting that is a holdover from the Victorian era and while our lack of imagination robbed a large number of people of their right to vote, imagination is not in our job description and rules are rules, so suck it up". Essentially, in each polling station, there is a single paper list upon which is written the names of those on the electoral roll in each constituency, and only one person can cross the names off the list once they've voted. This is what takes the time, and at least part of that is why various polling stations had queues around the block that left people waiting to vote for hours. Given that the aforemention stone-faced tit insisted that all those people, despite the photographic and video evidence of people queueing for hours, turned up a quarter of an hour before the polls closed, I'm guessing that there is some spin at work here to ensure that the disenfranchised feel like it's their own fault they couldn't vote. But it isn't. Not entirely, at least. I have a hard time taking the result seriously given the number of people who weren't allowed to vote, particularly in the face of the tiny swings that won some parties various seats.

I want to see a re-election. Given hung parliament and the number of people who were not allowed to vote, we are owed a re-election. However, it looks for all the world like we're not going to get one. People are promising 'a full inquiry' but that brings to mind the phrase "closing the barn door after the horse has bolted".

Polls have been closed for 14 hours, and there are 29 seats left undeclared. However, there are already discussions about the fact that ... well, while the LibDems did nowhere near as well as people thought they were going to, it looks like they're the ones who are going to decide who sits in Downing Street. The entire thing is fascinating in a weird sort of way, for all it's more than a little disturbing. I personally think that everyone needs to sit down and think about this over the weekend, but Cameron of the Conservatives is talking about coming out with a plan in two and a half hours, and this is before the last of the seats are declared. I know we're a very impatient culture, but it's in our best interests to take some time and think. There's talk about electoral reform and Clegg holding out for proportional representation and deals being discussed and everyone struggling to get somewhere, but what I can't see is what they're after, beyond a majority in government.

I ... don't really like the idea of a government that is incumbent not because it's what the majority wants but because of backroom deals. I don't know what's going to happen next, but I intend to watch and find out.

Soooo ... the Digital Economy Bill passed.

I'm meeting up with my mother next weekend and I know what she'll say if I bring this up: the words "Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, what's the matter with it?" will come up in some iteration or other. And I won't be able to explain that the dozen or so people who actually discussed this late last night (as opposed to the 260-odd that actually voted on it) didn't seem to understand how any of the technology that they're trying to regulate actually works.

I didn't see the BBC Parliament discussion on this, but I got a few choice snippets from the Twitter accounts of people I trust. And I'm trying to do better than "proposed by the unelected, debated by the uninformed, passed by the absent" as a descriptor for what the hell just happened and can't do it. Because ... seriously, let me get this straight. Some guy who not only is not an elected official but who was removed from government positions twice for various acts of political fuckwittery spends a weekend on David Geffen's yacht and then turns up to government proposing this bill that basically obliges ISPs to police every bit of data that their users download and then shut down any household found doing things it shouldn't, and never mind which individual household member is actually doing it or how many others might be punished for things they didn't do in the process. Not only that, but there's also the thing about site-blocking on, and I quote, "a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright". This mess was pushed through in a 'wash-up' period in which bills are not given the usual examination and there was protest about this but hey! What do you know? They pushed it through anyway. With maybe a dozen people actually debating it and 260-odd votes total in the end.

I know there's an election coming up, and at this point, I have no idea who to vote for. The Tories are apparently saying that if they get in, some of the more unwanted and unwarranted bits of this idiocy are going to be scrapped. Problem is, what do they consider unwanted and unwarranted? Who can say? Labour has been nothing but a cesspool for the last decade or so, and I'd vote Lib Dem like I usually do but ... well, fine, they voted against it later when they saw what it was being turned into (or the problems with it) but the fact is that this idiocy was Lib Dem's brainchild in the first place. I want my voice to count vote-wise but it's clear that it doesn't and never will at this rate. It sometimes feels like anything politically motivated in this country is covered by a thin layer of pond scum - not enough to see, just enough to be really skeevy.

There's a lot of stuff going on in the world to blog about, I suppose (Digital Economy Bill, Healthcare Reform in the US, the whole thing about the UK expelling a foreign diplomat over the use of forged passports in an assassination, which ... well, I read the article and I'm still not sure I understand it) but the fact is that I'm hardly sure what I want to say about any of it.

The Digital Economy Bill ... I've been there and ranted about that. At best it's problematic. At worst it makes every political party who's touched it look sleazier than usual. It does not address the roots of the problem and certainly doesn't protect everyone with a copyright to defend. Instead, it builds a shield around the big media companies and obliges ISPs to invade the privacy of their customers under threat of fines, all to institute a system whereby the innocent might be punished right along with the guilty over trying to get a hold of media that a good three-quarters of them would pay for if only they could. Meanwhile, it gives a loophole for big media to incorporate 'orphan' content into their own product, fully aware of how easy it can be to strip a copyright notice from media obtained from, say, Flickr. This is the sort of thing that seems to be trying to set news and entertainment media back to where it was thirty years or so ago, when staggered international release dates made sense and indie publishing wasn't as viable as it is now. The Digital Economy Bill is basically to new media what tar pits were to the dinosaurs, and it bites.

The US healthcare reforms ... I honestly don't know what to say. I don't think they go far enough, but I was born in a country that provides a decent standard of nationalised healthcare, and have lived in another such country for what now amounts to over half my life. I don't get how "Everyone has to have health insurance as a point of law and there will be government subsidies for low income families to ensure that they can get that health insurance" really helps as much as a lot of people seem to think it will. I'm mistrustful of health insurance, I think at least in part because I have worked for insurance companies and also heard horror stories. It depends on your coverage, as far as I can tell, and even with a certain amount of coverage, insurance companies are worried first and foremost about the bottom line and will try to make everything and anything sound like something they don't cover, even if they should. So claims get delayed as they get investigated and it becomes frustrating in the extreme as you're not only sick but also getting hounded about medical bills that your insurance company is supposed to be covering but isn't, so not only have you got these bills you can't pay but you're also paying for the insurance that isn't even doing what they said it was going to do. And at that point, if your condition requires extended treatment, you're screwed. I know that it's a first step - a baby step to something better for the American people, but I don't trust it. I hope it works out better than it sounds like it's going to, but it does not go far enough and gives too much power to insurance companies. Maybe I'm oversimplifying this - I'm pretty sure I am, actually - but unless there's a separate bit of crackdown on the insurance companies, I don't see this being something for the sore-winners in the Democrat camp to be thumbing their noses at those who hated the idea and going "Neener neener neener WE WON YOU SUCK!!!" over.

So yeah ... seems like every bit of 'reform' out there is designed to allow people who don't need any more money to make more anyway, while taking the money away from the people that do need it. That's how it sounds from here, at least. Is it just me, or is that a bit depressing?

In other news, I can has The Diamond Age, which has been languishing on my Amazon wish list for a few years. It was pretty good, and Neal Stephenson's ideas on tech and media always interest me. Sometimes I want to lock him, Warren Ellis and Matt Wallace up together in a room containing three laptops, random nibbles and a metric fucktonne of alcohol and see what they come up with after a week. I'm more or less convinced that it would be a novel of epic proportions or the most elaborate, terrifying world domination scheme ever.

...Given how the world seems to be going, I'd probably end up rooting for the latter.

Look! This post is not about That Video Game.

Instead, it's about the UK Digital Economy Bill. According to the Parliamentary website on the subject, this Bill is at the report stage in the House of Lords. But that's the only place you can currently find any in-depth information on the Bill and the changes being made to it that isn't a (and pardon me but I know no better way to put it) tech-geek blog. Seriously - I did a Google search for news on the subject and I got tech-geek bloggery and a couple of news articles barely relevant if you took the words I was searching and shuffled them around a bit. Nothing from the Guardian, the Times, the Independent, the Beeb... But then again, the Beeb are having their own problems, what with the push to save BBC6 Music. Still, while the news about the recent Lib Dem Lords' ideas for the UK Digital Economy Bill is fairly recent, we haven't seen even a glimmer in 'mainstream news' and I doubt we're going to except in a easily-hidden blurb in a corner of page 5. No one really wants to make an issue out of reactionary bullshit that promotes censorship in a bid to make media moguls happy.

Basically, the whole thing stems around the attempt to deal with copyright infringement. There are easy ways to deal with copyright infringement. For starters, there's establishing a single universal global release date for media, which would prevent the poor sods with international friends and a yen to see the programmes said international friends are on about from having to torrent said show just to see it at the same approximate time as said international friends. While we're at it, there could also be steps taken to ensure that there's a universal format for things like DVD releases and iTunes videos and stuff showing on BBC iPlayer so that those of us who want to own something that may never be released in the format our nation uses can still actually give companies our money and get what we want, instead of having to torrent the thing just to be able to see it at all. There's ditching the restrictive, buggy, impossible to purge DRM measures that some companies (looking at you, Sony) stick in their digital media, because I know a fair few people who will torrent something because they don't want to risk putting DRM software on their computers and don't know how to remove it once it's in. All these things and more (there will be an upcoming rant about how, if people want to increase sales of media, they should produce media worth buying for a change) could be done to deal with a good 75% of the reasons people tend to torrent stuff. There's always going to be theft (let's face it; every business that produces a product has to account for 'shrinkage' and digital media isn't going to be any different) but there'd be a lot less piracy if it wasn't so hard for people to get what they want by actually ... y'know, paying for it.

But no, the UK government has apparently decided that the best way to deal with the copyright infringement issue is to crack down on the end user. Because apparently, going on a yacht cruise with David Geffen and then trying to force yourself into the position of Pirate-Finder General (to coin the phrase of one Cory Doctorow) is a sight easier than turning around to Mr Geffen and saying, "Look, you're bringing this on yourself". Apparently it's easier to force ISPs, under penalty of six-figure fines, to invade the privacy of their customers by monitoring activity and then shut off the internet of an entire household if they are deemed to be violating copyright (whether or not everyone in the house was responsible for said copyright violation, which strikes me as a terrible miscarriage of justice, and the inclusion of a cafe or pub's wifi capability or even a library internet network because someone downloaded something the government says they shouldn't have over said network only makes it worse) than to actually deal with the problem.

And now two Lib-Dem Lords are talking about blocking sites that is deemed to contain "a substantial portion of [CONTENT]" that violates copyright. Which sounds rather like YouTube and any blog that contains a large number of embeds to YouTube videos, no?

I'm hoping this never gets past the Lords. I don't see how it can. The "Three Strikes" system is going to be hard enough to implement without people jumping up and down and screaming about miscarriage of justice because they're punishing the innocent along with the guilty. The forcing ISPs to invade the privacy of customers and fining them if they don't comply is going to take more restructuring of their systems than any company is willing to undertake. And if they try to censor YouTube because of its ostensible copyright violations? Someone's going to start making really unflattering comparisons to China and it'll get ugly. This is reactionary, overzealous, nonsensical and utterly unworkable, and the sooner it gets snuffed, the better.

I really don't know what to make of this.

The basic story is this: Trans individual, Z Bellamy, age seventeen, applies online for job at McDonalds. Goes in for interview and is forced to tick a box identifying gender. Trans individual ticked 'male' - the article doesn't say whether the individual in question is MTF or FTM, so it's a little hard to say why. The assumption I'm forced to based on the alleged voicemail is that Bellamy is MTF, because the voicemail Bellamy received after this initial interview went on about how "You are not getting an interview; we do not hire faggots. You are a lying brother; how could you?"

...I'm very, very confused, and becoming less sure that this is on the level the more I think about it.

Okay, so I've never been through any of the processes involved myself, but I'm not entirely ignorant about various things someone going through the transition in gender tend to go through. There's a lot of paperwork involved to get changes made on passports, driving licences, all that sort of thing so that the gender on one's ID matches the gender with which the individual identifies. (I am aware that there are issues involving birth certificates and a big argument about whether or not those should be reissued to reflect a gender transition, but that's beside the point here.) I do get that Bellamy, at age seventeen, would have some problems getting those changes made to the relevant documents on the basis of still being a minor, but given that Bellamy is apparently living as female, I have my doubts as to whether the parents would really have that many issues with helping get the paperwork sorted out. So ... with all that taken into account, why didn't Bellamy just tick 'female' on the damn box? Bellamy identifies as female; Bellamy is apparently living as female. Why put 'male' on a form handed out during the interview process?

I'm also really dubious about this voicemail thing. I can see someone saying it to someone's face, or over the phone, sure. But anyone in a managerial capacity at a multinational corporation the likes of McDonalds would have been briefed most thoroughly on the principle of not putting that kind of discriminatory bullshit out where it can be used as proof in a lawsuit. Seriously, in this economy, with this many people looking for jobs, any manager worth their paycheque would have simply sent the usual form letter. No one gives reasons for not hiring someone, particularly not when they go against ever equal opportunity policy a company has. I ... am just very, very dubious about this. I'm not saying it couldn't have happened; I'm just saying that I have serious doubts. Plus the sound quality of that recording is poor enough that voice analysis is going to be a bitch, and the inflection was all wrong for someone angry as the wording suggests.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the manager said all of this stuff about how "we don't hire faggots" to Bellamy's face in the preliminary interview, after Bellamy was 'called out' on the subject of birth gender, and that the call was made by someone who could mimic the manager reasonably well - perhaps another employee or former employee - to strengthen the case. Or just to get some attention. If that's the case ... well, I think it's sad. And if someone really was stupid enough to leave that kind of voicemail ... well, then I still think it's sad. Just a different kind of sad. You know; pathetic-sad.

Time and detail will tell.

Sometimes, no matter how you feel about a thing, you keep your mouth shut because mouthing off about your opinions might offend friends somewhere along the line and you don't want to take the risk of annoying someone you care about and respect out of your own ignorance. However, if you're anything like me, after awhile it starts getting to a point where venting just has to happen, and all you can do is try to vent in the most respectful manner possible.

So. Taking a break from NaNoWriMo to talk about transgender issues.

The only reason I'm bringing this up at all is an article that appeared in Seventeen magazine entitled, 'My Boyfriend Turned Out To Be A Girl'. Frankly, both parties in this little farce are abominable. It's the usual high school shenanigans, really - boy texts girl (where he got her number, I have no idea), boy meets up with girl, girl declares TWU WUV after first date, boy discourages intimacy below the waist and lies about why his chest is taped up (and girl is frankly stupid - who tapes their chest for months after a baseball injury?), boy goes to college, break-up happens, girl confronts new girlfriend and makes threats of violence, boy restrains girl from hurting new girlfriend, police are called.

(Yes, this is actually relatively normal, sad to say.)

In any case, it starts getting even more complicated when the police arrested the boy for assault (which makes no sense, given the circumstances, but never mind) and for reasons I will never understand, took the boy to the girl's house for identification. Is this standard procedure? Anyway, fact is that girl named her boyfriend and the police basically said, "No, actually, despite the existence of some sort of data protection laws that state that we're not supposed to just go blaring out personal details of anyone to anyone but the relevant authorities without their permission, this 'he' is actually a she, according to her birth certificate and driver's licence."

Now to me, this is a story of vast insensitivity and the absolute absurdity of teens. However, this is written from the point of view of the girl, who is basically BAWW-ing that her 'twu wuv' was a lie because he didn't come with the equipment advertised, as it were. The boy shouldn't have lied. If the relationship was going to a point where below the waist touching was a factor, it might have been nice for this individual to explain the situation, but one can see why he might not have - that kind of disclosure is scary as all hell, especially when you're a kid. This could have been turned into a story about miscommunication and how it more or less wrecks relationships, and what the fear of not being accepted for what they are can drive a person to do. It wasn't. It was turned into a sensationalist "She was a total bitch who misled me; I thought she was a boy and she wasn't!"

Now, over here at Pam's House Blend, I saw a comment that I suppose sparked off this post in the first place. It's all pretty bad but the bit that really got to me was this: "In my opinion, if transgendered people really want to be accepted universally they should stop pretending their gender is what they decide it is. Operating on that misconception only sets themselves up to be seen as wrong in more ways than just that delusion." There were other bits about gender being about "biology not belief" and similar sorts of things. It was pretty insensitive to the whole issue.

Still, I suppose it's things like that that really make you think. And in this case, what I think about is what I actually believe about the transgender issue. And what I think is that biology is about more than the XX/XY factor and what your reproductive organs look like. If you were born as one gender but identify as another, there has got to be a reason for that. I don't know what the reasons might be, and frankly I don't care, and even if I did, they are none of my business. Mine is not to dissect the transgender community and work out why they identify as one gender or another. Their gender identification is down to them and however they choose to present themselves, that's how I'm going to roll. And if I ended up dating someone who turned out to be transgender ... well, I'd figure something out.

That's not to say that I think the girl's reaction is unjustified, exactly. I mean, seriously - the shock alone is going to be mind-blowing. I know from experience that it's hard enough finding out that half the reason your teenage relationship isn't working out is because the guy in question is gay, but at least he didn't hide that fact; he never mentioned it when we were together because he didn't know. Finding out that the guy you've dated for months before he dumped you has 'female' on his birth certificate because a police officer ran his mouth off? Yeah, that's going to be a shocker, particularly in an acrimonious break-up like that.

Thing is, I think that Seventeen should have thought twice before printing this in the first place. This is what you find in cheap tabloid rags like the Daily Mail, not something for impressionable youth! (And let's get one thing clear right now: most of the kids reading 'Seventeen' are, or were when I was younger, anywhere from twelve to fifteen, and most seventeen-year-olds have moved on to Cosmo.) It's hard enough for kids without having this sensationalist tat flagging up why it's so hard to admit to someone that while you yourself identify as one gender, your birth certificates and body shape say something different. Because let's face it - there was no good time for the boy in question to say, "Oh, by the way..." The girl in question would have felt betrayed unless he had said, "Oh, I'm Derek but my birth certificate says Dana", or whatever, the moment he tried to approach her, and that's not how it works, as far as I can tell. If you are undergoing the gruelling process of physical procedures (up to and including surgery in some cases), speech therapy, counselling and red tape bullshit to reflect who you actually are, you're not going to turn around and undermine all of that in such a way.

If this article had flagged up the other side of this story as well, then maybe I wouldn't have had a problem with it. As it is, it just reads like, "Mean Girl Fooled Me Into Thinking She Was A Guy!" So ... I'm thinking that girl in question doesn't really get the idea of transgender. And okay, some people don't. But if this couldn't have been handled sensitively and looking at all sides of the issue, it should not have been printed. We see enough misinformed garbage floating around without adding more in the shape of a "Victim of Evil Mind-Games" story.

Still, I don't think this article is to do with transphobia. There is a lot of ignorance out there, mostly because it's not something that gets a lot of unbiased, well-handled press. I think that there's been a lot of ill feeling on both sides of the equation. On one side, ignorance of the issues is mistaken for malice, and defensiveness ensues, so things get blown entirely out of proportion and no one learns anything. On the other side, people fear what they don't understand and either don't say anything because they're afraid of saying the wrong thing and having to pay for the sins of a thousand thousand fuckwits as a result, or say the wrong thing and get tarred with the 'bigot' brush. Yes, I'm afraid of speaking out on LGBT issues, and I identify as bi. I'm afraid of speaking out not because of bigots and arseholes; I'm afraid of speaking out because while I am fully supportive of the lifestyle choices of others, I don't necessarily understand them first-hand, am bound to get stuff wrong and don't really want to be seen as a 'stupid unfeeling bigot' because I said the wrong thing in the wrong tone to the wrong person.

In short ... and there's no polite way to put this ... I don't care what you're packing in your trousers or your chromosomes. If you identify as a gender, well and good, I'll stick with that. If you vacillate in your gender identity, I will try to be sensitive to and respectful of that but please forgive me if I get it wrong because ... you know, sometimes it takes awhile to switch gears. I don't care who you're shagging so long as there's informed consent where required. I may not remember all the terminology. I am deeply terrified of using the term 'queer' even though it does seem to be accepted practice in certain situations (I'm just not sure which ones). I also acknowledge that every group of people has its overzealous sub-factions, and that some of those over-zealous sub-factions get offputting at times. So I try very hard not to judge the entire community by overzealous people who throw the term 'heteronormative' around like it's unilaterally evil.

...I'll probably have a rant about the 'heteronormative' thing and representation of various lifestyles and races in the media later, but I realise this isn't the place for it. All I mean to say is ... I get it as well as I can, and try to be as sensitive as I can be not only to the various issues under discussion, but also to the people who are uninformed and afraid to admit they are because they don't want to be thought as bigots. It seems the only way to try to erase the 'them versus us' mentality that seems to have developed.

So in honour of rediscovering my Dreamwidth account, I am going to rant. Hi!

So this morning, I note in my Tweet feed that someone is talking about how Hunt would abolish the BBC Trust if the Tories win the next election. I'm getting a little confused about this on the grounds of ... well, there are two arguments against more or less dismantling the BBC. One is that the BBC is 'not giving the licence-payers what they want'. The other is that the BBC is 'damaging commercial competition'. See ... I'm not sure how this makes sense. How it works is: everyone who actually has a TV that they want to switch on at any point pays a licence fee. This pays for everything the BBC does, so far as I can tell - the programming, the website and all that goes with it. This, to me, means that it doesn't spend its time scrambling around for sponsors and advertising dollars. It won't even do product placement in its original programming whatever new regulations say about it being allowed in UK TV now. And yes, some of that money goes to obscene bonuses and paying some relatively ridiculous people to be jackasses on-air, but mostly, the TV licence pays for good original programming, a well-maintained website with the iPlayer option that means we don't have to miss anything because we wanted to watch something on the other side, and fairly unbiased and properly regulated news.

So, if the above isn't what the licence-payer wants, how come it's still getting used? And if it's not getting used, how is it 'damaging commercial competition'?

I've developed a fondness for the BBC. Previously, I didn't watch much TV, but now most of the shows I do watch that aren't sport in the background or US shows on DVD are on/via the BBC. Masterchef, for example, and some Mythbusters reruns. University Challenge is good for a giggle. And let's not forget Doctor Who and Torchwood (and yes, even Sarah Jane Adventures, which I've never seen but consider fondly as some way of keeping too much of the need for rubber monsters for the kids out of a show that has a wider range than that). And I like the idea that BBC News has to be at least moderately unbiased, insofar as anything written by a human being with opinions can be. That's what regulatory bodies are for.

The real irony is that I wonder how much of this 'they aren't giving the licence-payers what they want' malarkey is down to the massive protest over Ianto Jones' death in Torchwood. Beyond the Russell Brand thing, I can't think what else a BBC property has done that's actually offended anyone in any visible way. Unlike the Daily Mail, with its horrible article by Jan Moir about the Stephen Gately thing. But given the amount of very loud negative commentary fired indiscriminately at all parties over the way Children of Earth ended, one has to wonder if that's at least partially responsible for the 'licence-payers not getting what they want' thing. Irony is, of course, that so many of the people who didn't like the ending were actually American, and thus not licence-payers at all.

Anyway, point is that the Conservatives need to take a position and stick with it if they want to nack the BBC. Either the licence-payers aren't getting what they want and no one's watching, or everyone's watching that instead of commercial tat and it's damaging commercial competition. Make. Up. Your mind. Or better yet, just leave the BBC alone.

Seems like there's a lot of bids to privatise, commercialise and generally dismantle what few public services remain in this country. First up on the kill list appears to be Royal Mail, or what's left of it. I'm really interested in the insider view of RM I'm getting from this London Review of Books article, which says to me that Royal Mail could actually be a workable business if they treated their staff like human beings, stopped dicking around with quotas and fiddling the figures, screwing with the pension scheme and, oh, incidentally, stopped letting these private companies leech off the postal workers without compensating them for it. Seriously, if you're a postal service, you deliver the post from point A to point B; you don't drop the post off with the public service who's just lost money because you swooped in the moment it stops being profitable for you to deal with it. You certainly don't say that the boxes that they once said hold 208 letters now hold 150 letters, particularly not when they actually hold somewhere in the region of 270 letters. And you certainly don't stick workers with mandatory, nearly unpaid overtime and oblige them to consistently break health and safety regs just to get the post delivered halfway on time. That's not how you run a business, unless your goal is to run said business into the ground.

There's been a lot of comment about how the Royal Mail should just be allowed to die because no one uses it anyway, or perhaps changed so that it doesn't deliver to 'unprofitable' areas like the countryside. Of course, that would almost entirely cut off the countryside, where it can be tricky to find a decent ISP, and any of the elderly who still rely on the postal service for news from friends and family. Yes, the internet has certainly taken over a fair few avenues, but there are some things that it will never be able to take over reliably. Sure, you can have paperless bank statements and so forth, but NHS confirmation letters are likely never going to be sent via email. That would involve a computer infrastructure that doesn't exist there yet. That's just a for-instance. And then, as pointed out in the article, there's how much shopping we do online these days. Now, a few people have pointed out in comments that, because of the Kindle and so forth, books will be more or less obsolete in the next 5-10 years. I ... severely doubt it, because given the current state of affairs economically, I doubt everyone is going to shell out for a Kindle or a Sony Reader in that time. I'm certainly waiting a few years to see how the technology goes before even so much as asking for one for Christmas, same as I waited to buy an iPod. Besides, I don't think books will ever become obsolete because, unlike the Kindle, a book will survive getting wet or dropped or trodden on, will never run out of batteries and costs a pittance to replace if it gets irreparably damaged, whereas the Kindle will, if it dies on you because you got jostled by a commuter on the trip home or its little microprocessor or flash drive storage borked, require you to buy an expensive piece of equipment and potentially replace your entire library of DRM means that you can only load these books to a certain number of machines. CDs probably won't die out entirely for the same reasons, at least until some of the more draconian DRM measures are scrapped as the crap they are. There are a whole lot of internet companies selling a whole bunch of stuff that aren't going to be replaced by digital representations too - clothes (and yes, a lot of people buy clothes online and have them delivered; T-shirts, mainly, but other things too), toys, foodstuffs, electrical equipment...

In short, there's never going to stop being a need for postal delivery. Destroying the postal delivery service that carries not only itself but every other so-called 'competitive' postal delivery service is short-sighted and stupid. If this is how they're treated, no wonder they strike.

I don't have any solutions, really, bar ... come on; leave the public service sector alone. If nothing else, aren't we having enough problems without rendering more people unemployed?

I've been trying to stay well out of the Roman Polanski hoopla, to be honest. For what it's worth, my opinion on the matter is that he ought to go and face the music. I don't know what the statute of limitations is like on rape, but there's also the minor point that he got given a sentence that he never served. What happens next ... that's for the courts to decide.

Those in Hollywood who thinks that it all ought to be forgotten, let go, and generally glossed over despite justice not having been served ... really need to get real. However, rather than looking down our noses or railing in horrified rage at the people who are stupid enough to think that their money, power and fame, as well as Polanski's own, should count for more than due process, let's do what Calvin Trillin has done - use our brains and point out the sheer idiocy of the entire prospect. To wit:

What Whoopi Goldberg ('Not a Rape-Rape'), Harvey Weinstein ('So-Called Crime') et al. Are Saying in Their Outrage Over the Arrest of Roman Polanski

By Calvin Trillin

This article appeared in the October 26, 2009 edition of The Nation.

October 7, 2009


A youthful error? Yes, perhaps.
But he's been punished for this lapse--
For decades exiled from LA
He knows, as he wakes up each day,
He'll miss the movers and the shakers.
He'll never get to see the Lakers.
For just one old and small mischance,
He has to live in Paris, France.
He's suffered slurs and other stuff.
Has he not suffered quite enough?
How can these people get so riled?
He only raped a single child.

Why make him into some Darth Vader
For sodomizing one eighth grader?
This man is brilliant, that's for sure--
Authentically, a film auteur.
He gets awards that are his due.
He knows important people, too--
Important people just like us.
And we know how to make a fuss.
Celebrities would just be fools
To play by little people's rules.
So Roman's banner we unfurl.
He only raped one little girl.

Thanks, nutmeg3

Sex Ed to be made compulsory in British schools ... but faith schools will be permitted to preach against contraception, sex before marriage and homosexuality in-curriculum.

I'm honestly not sure what to think about this. I mean, it's great that sex education is being made mandatory; really it is. I suppose I'm wondering, though, why we can't rely on parents to teach their kids anything anymore.

Look, it's simple: for facts, you go to school. For moral grounding and that sort of thing, you turn to parents. Maybe one's parish. Schools are not a place to be preached at; schools are not a place where the moral and theological values of the teachers should be foisted on the students. Children should be given the facts and encouraged, in view of these facts, to come to their own conclusions, without having their thoughts on the matter twisted into something ugly by the biases of zealots. I don't care if we're talking about 'faith schools'; that's not an excuse to ram "gays are bad and no sex for you!" down kids' throats.

I mentioned recently that people should not go into the medical profession if their main purpose is to foist their ideologies on their patients. Pharmacists should not be given licence to not give the oral contraceptive pill or morning-after pill to people with a valid prescription; general practitioners should not be permitted to refuse to prescribe contraception, emergency or otherwise, nor should they give women medical advice based on their being 'pre-pregnant'; people working in sexual health clinics should not be able to turn away women who are seeking an abortion. (Okay, I think that there should be checks and balances so that women aren't using abortion as a contraceptive method, but see above - if the morning-after pill is widely available, women won't have to be in a position to do that anyway - who wants to have a D&C when they could just take the morning-after pill in case of accidents or worse?) It's not the place of the medical profession to dictate the morals of others in terms of sexual behaviour.

Same with schools. So long as you are giving these kids the facts about sex - including, in a dispassionate manner, the potential consequences of irresponsible behaviour - that's where an educator's responsibility ends when it comes to sex. It's not their place to force a code of sexual behaviour on kids. That is what parents are for. So long as they're not shagging each other bandy in dorm rooms or bike sheds or janitors' cupboards or whatever, it's not an educator's business who their pupils are having sex with. If these kids want to have a religious education on such matters, they know where their church is. If they want the moral view? Parish or parents. Not classroom time. Not even in faith schools. Because some people go to faith schools because they are good schools, not because they are of a particular religious leaning, and it's not fair to them to force these matters on them. The kids who do believe? They'll get the message from one source or another.

This is senseless. The step forward made by insisting that sex education be taught in schools is being totally negated by allowing bigotry to be taught (preached, as the article said - preached, for fuck's sake, as if a classroom should come equipped with pulpit!) in the educational arena. I'm all for free speech, but can we stick to the facts when it comes to school time?