Sim-O

Am I missing something here? The Telegraph is getting it’s gender-specific underwear in a twist over nothing, isn’t it?

The first part of this, frankly, piss poor piece starts of invoking Orwell, by claiming the government is changing the meaning of the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ to make them interchangeable…

Civil servants have overruled the Oxford English Dictionary and hundreds years of common usage effectively abolishing the traditional meaning of the words for spouses.

[…]

It comes as part of a Government initiative to “clarify” what words will mean when gay marriage becomes law.
But critics described it as the vocabulary of “cloud cuckoo land”.

It follows claims by opponents of the redefinition of marriage that universally understood terms such as father and mother might be simply deleted by bureaucrats on official forms.

That would be fucking mad, wouldn’t it? How can the government just get rid of words? That’s just downright, er, erm, Orwellian!

Fear not, dear reader. We now move into the second part of the article where some sense is spoken, but not very clearly, if anyone got that far past the outrage just gushing out from the page.

Instead officials have decided to allow the words for the spouses to be used interchangeably for people of either gender in some contexts.

You see? “Some contexts”. The Telegraph gives an example…

The guidance gives the example of some early health and safety legislation drafted in 1963 which includes a range of exemptions for family businesses where the terms husbands and wives will mean people of either gender.
“This means that ‘husband’ here will include a man or a woman in a same sex marriage, as well as a man married to a woman,” it says.
“In a similar way, ‘wife’ will include a woman married to another woman or
a man married to a man.
“The result is that this section is to be construed as including both male and female same sex marriage.”

Yet it then goes on to say that in future legislation the traditional male-only meaning of husband and female-only understanding of wife could make a comeback – but not in all cases.
“The term ‘husband’ will in future legislation include a man who is married to another man (but not a woman in a marriage with another woman),” it adds, confusingly.
“And ‘wife’ will include a woman who is married to another woman (but not a man married to another man) unless specific alternative provision is made.”

Er, yeah. That is confusing. It would be much easier to say in existing legislation, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ can be interchangeable depending on the circumstances, and the people the legislation applies to, which will not be a problem to devine

In future legislation a ‘husband’ is a married man and a ‘wife’ is a married woman, irrespective of what gender their spouse is.

See? That’s not so hard is it? It doesn’t quite fit the agenda of needlessly restricting who can marry who to fit some outdated bigotry, though.

This is fucking depressing.

Only two out of the seven big national papers carried the story about Michael Gove having his arse handed to him on a plate about “survey after survey” show kids nowadays knowing fuck all about history.

You may see a pattern here, but the Telegraph, Mail, Express and the Sun have no sign of this story as expected.

You won’t be shocked to find the Guardian has it, as does the Independent which, by the way, gets’ a gold star for pointing out more of Goves’ bullshit at the end.

What surprised me, although may not surprise you as I don’t read the paper, is the Mirror doesn’t feature it. I was under the impression the Mirror was a bit of a lefty paper and would’ve been pissing themselves laughing at Gove being called out on his shit-speak.

This is a prime opportunity for the opposition to tear strips out of Gove and try and get him to justify the unsubstantiated bollocks he uses to push through what he calls education ‘reforms’, and what anybody with half a clue as to what actually goes in a class room calls A Fucking Nightmare For All Involved.

It won’t fucking happen though, and Gove will be free to fuck things up by reforming the education system back into the shape it was in the 1950’s.

Upponnothing…

My thoughts on Clarkson’s comments are simple: make them on TV and you can expect to get lots of complaints and outrage; make them in a newspaper and you’d be handsomely rewarded as a ‘star’ columnist. If anything, Clarkson has just provided a perfect example of the kind of jokey hyperbole he gets away with in print without a whisper of outrage being deemed as the work of Satan just because he said it on TV.

There is a very interesting double standard in this country when it comes to what is acceptable on TV compared to what is acceptable in print. Just imagine – for example – a TV news broadcast flicking from a serious news story to an upskirt shot of some female celeb getting out of a taxi or a video report about what Suri Cruise has worn during the week or how ‘she looks all grown up’. It, of course, would probably crash the phone network as outraged masses call in their disgust and complaints.

Yet this is what we get in the tabloids. It seems to me that British Society finds the medium of TV inherently more offensive than the medium of print.

You’ve heard of the Leveson Enquiry, haven’t you? Lord Justice Leveson is looking into pretty much all aspects of the press, from the practices and ethics to the regulation.

The press are gonna do all they can to make sure Leveson gets the impression that things aren’t too bad, actually. “We’re better than we used to be” they’ll say. “It was only the one rogue reporter, well maybe two.”

“We always strive for accuracy” the press will purr seductively in the good Lords’ ear, “and we always, always correct mistakes.”

You know that’s not the truth, though. What Leveson needs is a counter balance. There are already some organisations doing that. Hacked Off and FullFact.org are two of them, and they need our help.

This page on the FullFact site will give you a guide as to what the Leveson Inquiry is after. Basically, if you or anybody know or care about has been affected by the press or even if you just have an opinion about how things do or should work, get in touch with them:

generalenquiries@levesoninquiry.org.uk

or by post

Leveson Inquiry Team
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand
London
WC2A 2LL

It would be better by email, if you could, though.

Our press needs YOU!

Fred Goodwins’ superinjunction has been, at least, partially lifted. We can all now know, legally, that Fred ‘The Shred’ has been bonking a colleague. Don’t we all feel better and more informed now?

The issue of superinjunctions is a hot one at the moment. Freedom of speech (or expression as some are saying) versus someones’ right to privacy. The press are scared that they won’t be able to report on vital establishment-shaking issues and people are worried that anything goes and will have to spend a fortune in the courts when their shit hits the fan, or newstand.

One of the arguements the press use is that with these injuctions they won’t be able to expose all these celebrities and public figures for the hypocrits they are. Fair enough, but who is a celebrity? What makes a public figure?

Sometimes it’s easy to say. An MP is a public figure, the leader of a campaign is open to scrutiny, the sportstar that uses his/her image to advertise stuff. They are all trying to influence the public to behave in a certain way. If they are not true to their word then fair enough, a charge of hypocrasy should be called and they shoudl have to defend themselves. They have, though, put themselves forward. They decided to enter the public concience in a certain way.

But what of the likes of Fred Goodwin. He was just a banker. Fred didn’t put himself in the public domain, he was thrust into it due to circumstance. Fred didn’t shout that we shouldn’t be doing drugs or being faithful to our spouses while snorting a barrel full of cocaine out the anus of a prostitute while his good little wife waited at home, sat at the table looking at an empty chair while dinner their plated up dinner slowly went cold. He ran a bank. No one, outside a very small circle, before the banking crises had heard of him.

So while the hoo-ha about his running of the bank or his massive pension agreement could be a fair target why should his choice of sexual partner be up for all and sundry to know about?

Fred was apparently shagging a colleague. How does that change things? Lots of people fuck someone they work with. It might cause a bit of concern if it’s the government defence secretary having secret liasons, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the liason is a honeytrap, but a banker? Does it really have any bearing on anything?

Fred Goodwin may be a national bogeyman, but the fact that he is not a public figure of his own making means he shouldn’t have needed an injunction to supress this little bit of his life that is of no consequence of anybody except those close to him, such as his wife and family.

It is entirely possible for this affair to have had some bearing of the massive losses RBS suffered, making it in need of govenrment help, in which case the press would be legitimate in it’s publication. There is nothing wrong with the press investigating this stuff, that is what they need to do to expose hypocracy and shadowy dealings that are of genuine public interest, but when there is no connection between his affair and (his part in) the collapse of the UK banking industry then there is no need to run it.

This obsession of the printed Press with who is shagging who is what is causing this, what seems to be, sudden flurry of injunctions. If the press stuck to what was important and relevant, there wouldn’t be any need for these people to try and gag the editors freedom of speech.

Footnote:
I understand that an MP might want to use Parliamentary privilege to smash an injunction, in the case of Trafigura for instance, but why the hell did the LibDem MP John Hemming think it’s anyones business who the fuck is fucking who?

MPs’ need to stop buggering about with this and either leave superinjuctions alone unless there is serious public interest being censured or debate it and sort out a proper privacy law.