Mostly rants

Our maid is pregnant, can you believe that? Who's going to make my bed now? Selfish! I got the news this morning, she's going back to the Filipines. So I guess we're looking for a replacement. That came at the wrong moment.

The ID card bill is being debated line by line in the Lords. It's becomming more and more obvious that biometrics are a disasterous idea. Apparently iris scanning has now been flagged as problematic for people with brown eyes. Home Office Minister Tony McNulty has admitted there are technological "difficulties", and that is why 13 (yes, 13!!!!!) different biomentric indicators are proposed.

And the Euro accountants have failed to sign off the European Commissions accounts for the 11th (yes 11th!!!!) year in a row. Why are people not rioting in the streets because the European Commission is have not been able to account for hundreds of billions of pounds, year on year over a decade.

Here is a BBC report.

I think I may have mentioned before, the case of Liz Longhurst, from Reading (where I went to university coincidentally). Ms Longhurst's daughter was killed, accidentally as far as we know, in a bizarre sex game with her boyfriend. They were apparenetly into some sado masochism thing and went too far. The boyfriend, Graham Coutts, is now in prison. I have a certian sympathy for this man who is invaribly painted by the media as a porn obsessed pervert. I'm quite sure that his girlfriend, though now regrettably dead, was as much to blame for the accident as he was. And I'm also quite sure that it was just that, an accident. They were experimenting with sex, like many people, and it went wrong. Graham Coutts has however taken the brunt of the blame for this accident, largely it seems because he used internet pornography.

What also bothers me about this case is the hysteria that it whipped up. Ms Longhurst senior is fuelling a massive campaign to try and ban violent internet pornography. Now I'm not suggesting that violent porn is a good thing, but there are lots of reasons why trying to ban it is completely the wrong thing to do. To begin with, a ban won't work. You simply cannot ban anything from the internet. The best you can do is make it illegal to view this material in a particular area. But it's very difficult to prove whether someone has been viewing anything specific, especially if the internet terminal is used by more than one person. You can also make it illegal to possess such material, but again, this is a legal nightmare. If I have a copy of an illegal image on my website which is hosted in another country, do I actually posssess it? You can also make it illegal to distribute. That's easier to prove, but then only the dealers are guilty.

But over and above the fact that trying to ban pornography on the internet is futile, Ms Longhurst should take a step back and ask, "How do we know that pornography is actually a bad influence here?" It sounds like a silly question because we all automatically think of pornography as sleazy and connect it with sad old men in rain coats looking at schoolgirls. The fact is however, that even if someone does use pornography regularly and they are a pervert, one does not necessarily cause the other. More simply put, yes I agree that sex offenders are likely to use porn, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the porn made them a sex offender. That's like saying, I saw a man in a blue hat smoking a cigarette, therefore blue hats encourage you to smoke cigarettes; fallacious logic.

I'll go one step further before I end this. Here are two statements. Is one more correct than the other? And for the purposes of this argument, let's assume that all sex offenders do use pornography.

1. All sex offenders use pornography. This encourages and stimulates them and they would be less likely to offend without it.

2. All sex offenders use pornography. This helps them to release their sexual frustration and they would be more likely to offend without it.