Sim-O

Can we just cut the crap about the rioters/looters/youth of today in general not knowing right from wrong? It’s not that these people don’t know, they just don’t give a shit for whatever reason.

Hands up who doesn’t know it wrong to steal stuff? Or smash up property that isn’t yours? Or set fire to someones shop/warehouse? Or to beat the living shit out of someone because you felt like it?

No one? No?

There you go then.

While browsing The Sun website for something to blog about (I try not to leave it all to Septicisle, honestly) I spotted this (istyosty link)…

FRIENDS of Jo want a national two-minute silence in her memory on January 31 at 6pm.

… and thought ‘eh? Really?’ I tried Googling and there are a couple of results but no links directly to the campiagn and the relevant results seem to be articles published today that have a variation of the above quote and a bit of a filler explaining who Jo Yeates is. Or was.

One result mentioned it is a Facebook campaign and after having a search on Facebook came up with nothing aswell. OK, I didn’t try very hard but I’d have thought putting ‘jo yeates 2 minutes silence campaign’ would’ve brought *something* up.

But anyway, 2 minutes silence. A national 2 minutes silence. Why?

I don’t meant to disrespect Jo, but why should there be a national 2 minutes silence for her? National silences are usually reserved for remembering stuff and people that has involved or had an effect on the nation. Like wars. Not for a single murder victim that no body had heard of before becoming famous in a such a tragic fashion.

Think I’m being harsh? Well, no I’m not.

We used to have one minute silences when I was a lad, and then, probably after Diana, Princess of Wales (to give her her proper title), I think, I crept up to 2 minutes and in the last couple of years 3 and 5 minutes have been bandied about. I think two minutes silence for Diana was two minutes too long, and she was the mother of our future king. She has had a little bit of an influence on Actually, probably not.

So, friends of Jo Yeates, if it is a real campaign, two things, 1) you’re probably better off usuing your energy on helping the police find Jos’ killer and 2) if you want to be slightly less disappointed with how may people observe a national two minutes silence in memory of Jo, you want to make your campaign a little easier to find. If it’s a Facebook campaign and I can’t even find it on Facebook, it’s just gonna be you guys silent on in a couple of Mondays time.

Jack Straw is a fucking knobber, isn’t he?

Two blokes have been convicted of abusing girls. The girls are white and the men are from Pakistani origin so Jack Straw feels the need to shout about Pakistani men abusing ‘our’ girls…

Pakistanis, let’s be clear, are not the only people who commit sexual offences, and overwhelmingly the sex offenders’ wings of prisons are full of white sex offenders.

But there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men… who target vulnerable young white girls.

There is also a specific problem of psychos targeting prostitutes, husbands targeting wives, big kids targeting little kids, female school teachers targeting boy pupils. It’s just some people within one demographic going for people within another just because they are seen as weak or vulnerable.

We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way.

Look at that quote. It seems reasonable enough, but let’s do a classic word swap and see…

We need to get the White British community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of White British men thinking it is OK to target prostitutes in this way.

Sounds a bit stupid now, doesn’t it? Why should it be so, though? From the news I hear, the people that go on prostitute killing sprees are overwhelmingly white British. We don’t get anyone asking why or what are we, as a ‘community’, are gonna do about it?

Straw carries on…

These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically,

So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care… who they think are easy meat.

Because they’re vulnerable they ply them with gifts, they give them drugs, and then of course they’re trapped.

Let’s break that quote down.
Young men ‘fizzing and popping with testosterone’ need to find an outlet. Girls of their own background are off limits. Being married into a similar culture, the idea that the girls are pure and sweet and don’t like getting drunk and stoned and having sex is laughable. The sweet innocent girls are, just like in the ‘western society’ a veneer for parents and elders.

Let’s take it at face value that Pakistani girls are off limits to these young men, why don’t these guys just date other girls? What’s wrong with that? The elders don’t have to know. There’s the old ‘just with her for the fuck’ reason to tell his mates.

Jack Straws comments make this case sound like these guys were just going for white girls because they felt they couldn’t pick up girls of their own culture or background. If that was the case they would’ve been picking up and shagging girls of a more appropriate age, not girls as young as twelve. They would probably have picked on any other subset of vulnerable girls as well, but being a predominately white country, vulnerable white girls are the most abundant.

These guys, in whatever culture, whatever society, are nasty bastards. As the judge of the case and the chief exec of Barnardos say, the race of the victims and abusers are coincidental.

The only reason Jack Straw is getting his big wooden racial shit stirring spoon out is because it’s brown people doing stuff to ‘our’ girls.

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

Just a quickie as I’ve got other stuff to get on with.

Gareth F Compton is, according to his Twitter profile, a Conservative activist and councillor for Birmingham Erdington.

He has some wise words about the violence at todays student demo…

Wise words indeed…

Just saying. that’s all.

*delete as applicable

Update 23:40
Oh, look. What a surprise. Gareth has now deleted his ‘stoning’ tweet.

Update 11/11/10
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is not happy and Gareth could be in the shit with this one…

The columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has said she will report a Conservative councillor to the police after he posted a message on Twitter saying it would be a “blessing” if she was stoned to death.

What a lovely aoplogy too…

Twitter is a forum for glib comment of the moment. It was a glib comment. Who could possibly think it was serious?

“Obviously I apologise. No offence was intended.

As ever with these things, it’s not just that Gareth would do something like that, I’m sure he wouldn’t, but that someone else might take it up on themselves to act on it however remote the chance.

If someone publicly, or privately for that matter, called for my death, I’d be bloody upset too.

I have a friend who, in his spare time, volunteers for the Samaritans. He sent me this email…

Samaritans have been nominated to be one of the supported charities for The Lawyer Awards. Two charities will be chosen and will be supported by the awards for three years raising over £150,000 for each charity.

The two charities are being voted on by a public vote via http://www.thelawyer.com/the-lawyer-awards-2011-charity-nominations/ It is a public vote so anyone can vote but you can only vote once. The voting closes on 22nd October.

The Lawyer Awards are held in June every year. There is no fee to enter, instead entries are asked to make a donation to the chosen charities. All donations are split between the two chosen charities. On average each charity will receive £50,000 per year for 3 years.

This is a public vote and could raise around £50,000 a year for Samaritans – if you can spare a few seconds, I would be really grateful if you could click on the link above and vote. This could be a massive boost for us financially Please vote!

There are many other worthwhile charities you can vote for as well, but it would be great if you could vote for the Samaritans.

Many thanx

There is a story in the Guardian about some Gypsies and travellers that are going to be evicted from thier homes.

I feel a bit dirty writing this post as it feels very right-wing to me, but there are themes that keep coming up when this happens. This isn’t a comment on this specific case.

A number of Gypsies and Travellers have lived at Dale Farm entirely legally since the 1960s.

Gypsies have been there since the sixties or some specific individual Gypsies have been there since the sixties? Either way, if they have been there for forty-odd years, why are they being evicted now? Surely the legal process isn’t *that* long winded.

But the land the newcomers bought at Dale Farm is protected greenbelt, making development on it illegal. After a five-year court battle with the council, bailiffs have been appointed to evict nearly 90 families from the unauthorised plots.

First of all, if there have been Gypsies there since the sixties, they’re hardly ‘newcomers’.
It’s greenbelt, nobody is allowed to develop it. although others are probably subtler at getting round the planning laws. How long has the area been greenbelted? When was the land bought? If the Gypsies were there before is became a designated greenbelt area, surely they can be exempted or at least given some sort of leway.

a 69-year-old grandmother who has lived at Dale Farm with her family for eight years.

Eight years on one site? Isn’t she supposed to be a traveller?

The Travellers say planning laws are biased against them, and that they have nowhere else to go. “There are some really sick people here who can’t go back on the road,” McCarthy says. “Without an address you can’t get doctors, our kids can’t go to school. The camps we used to pull in to have been closed and barricaded up. Travelling life is finished for Travellers.”

Are planning laws really biased or do gypsies just pick unsuitable land? If a housing development isn’t allowed in a greenbelt area, why should an estate for travellers be allowed? I’m not going to generalise and say *all* the sites where gypsies settle are turned into housing estates, but some are, with bungalows and mobile homes.

You can get a doctor without an address and if you travel around your kids will miss school. If you want your kids to have a good education and you’re not up to home schooling (this isn’t a slight, god knows I couldn’t do it) then maybe you have to sacrifice something, perhaps not travelling might be an idea.

Unfortunately the loss of pitches is very real, due to the loss of common land and possibly land owners, due to the behaviour of a small minority, not wanting to risk being unable to get travellers off the land again or the devastation that they leave behind when they do move on.

Just one square mile of land would be enough to provide all Gypsy and Traveller families in the UK with a place to stay, according to a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, but there is a shortage of authorised pitches. The government, however, has just cut £30m of funding for new sites.

If you choose to move around and not settle in one place, you put yourself at the risk of whoever owns the land you want to stop on, unless you own the land yourself. Even then you have to abide the law. Is there any difference between a traveller buying a plot of land on a greenbelt to develop and a non-traveller that buys a plot of land to build a house on? Not really. In fact, non at all.
I am not going to say anything about the government funding of pitches as this could be equated to the provision of council housing.

“They’ll just keep moving us on from other places, so what good will they have done anyone by putting us out of here?” McCarthy asks. “Everybody has to have somewhere to live, somewhere to go. Why can’t we be left to stay in peace and quiet on land we bought and paid for?”

Yes, everyone has to have somewhere to live, but if the plots bought for development were picked with a bit more thought or research maybe developing them wouldn’t be a problem and the gypsies wouldn’t get into such confrontations.