Anyone who brings up the gulags (or anything else about the horrors of the not-even-vaguely-social-democratic Soviet Union), in an argument about conservative versus social democratic politics, should immediately be sent to them.

"Bush Signs Bill That May Let Schiavo Live" – ABC News. No, it’ll allow her body to continue to vegetate. The ‘living’ stopped around 15 years ago.

I know this is a contentious assertion: that’s rather the point. This case involves a major disagreement between the people who (claim they) believe withdrawing life support involves killing a real person, and people who think that it doesn’t. Given that, the ABC headline is rabidly biased towards the former, religious-Republican perspective, which is odd given that we know the mainstream media is Evil and Lib’rul.

On the plus side, the American people have demonstrated a surprising [*] degree of sanity over the whole case: "70 percent of Americans say Congress’ action was inappropriate and 67 percent thought the elected officials were trying to keep Schiavo alive were doing so more for political advantage than out of concern for her or the principles involved".

[*] Surprising because pseudo-moral shit-stirring often leads to the public claiming to believe ridiculous things, not because I expect Americans to be any more stupid than members of the public elsewhere.

Update: via Simon in the comments, read this Obsidian Wings post.

A new study has found yet more evidence that young people who take virginity pledges are no less likely to get STDs than those who don’t take them. Relatedly, they are also more likely to have oral and anal sex than non-pledgers.

This isn’t so much of a problem. Not only are oral and anal sex fun (unlike abstinence, which is not), they are thorougly approved by God. Hooray for fundamentalism!

DumbJon is incensed at the fact that the Chief of Defence Staff isn’t a crazy right-wing bigot.

I like the implicit mental dilemma Jon is wrestling with here. "But… the head of the army must be brave… and we know all liberals are spineless and craven… so the head of the army must have been made to lie to appease the liberals… because he couldn’t possibly believe it himself…"

While I’m visiting the more insane bits of the right, this guy manages to combine Daily Mail-reader-ish crime-paranoia (I’m seriously tempted to commit some kind of horrible crime against the next idiot who tells me they’re worried about crime – purely as a way of validating their otherwise untenable position. of course), with the most impressive strawman argument ever.

He claims the liberal mantra is "punishment does not deter". What? Many liberals believe capital punishment doesn’t significantly deter compared to life imprisonment. Many liberals believe it’s unwise to exaggerate the rationality of criminals (particularly the ones who commit the horrendous axe-beheadings, random stabbings and child-murders that stupid people use as examples of how Things In General are fucked up) and thereby assume that there’ll be a direct inverse correlation between lavels of punishment and levels of crime.

However, I’ve never encountered a liberal, socialist, communist, anarchist or leftist of any other type who believed punishment didn’t deter – in other words, who believed that people’s ability to get away with doing things had no influence on their willingness to do them. There is no such person, obviously, and it’s a sign of some combination of desperation and insanity that the author has to make them up…

"It’s nice to see that Michael Howard regards dabbling in other people’s misery as a valid election strategy. Not content with being merely unpopular, he seems to want to become the most despised man in Britain. It’s hard to see how he can increase his level of personal repulsiveness at this stage. Except perhaps by calling for gypsies to be gassed." – The Friday Thing

The latter is scheduled for next Thursday.

I’ve been re-reading Get Your War On. It’s a window back to the brief time in 2001-02 when sensible people feared terrorists more than we feared our own governments.

Those days are gone – and despite the governments’ best efforts to keep us scared, it would be very hard to bring them back. A Madrid-style bombing in London wouldn’t do it: a 200 in 8,000,000 chance of terror death is entirely bearable. Not even a 9/11 reprise featuring Big Ben would do it, if only because it would have happy side-effects [*]. We know that sort of thing has happened in the past; we’re already as scared of it as we’re going to be.

So in order to make any difference to Western attitudes, terrorists would need to do something very fucked up indeed. A dirty nuclear bomb is a possibility: although the actual casualties and damage would be negligible, people get scared when they hear the ‘nuclear’ word.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much smallpox or a real nuke.

This is good, in that it makes it unlikely that our fellow citizens will be panicked by the next exploding fanatic into acquiescing to the abolition of any more of our rights than they already have. However, it’s bad in that it indicates the only rational move for would-be exploding fanatics is to kill *millions* of people.

[*] The death of Charles Clarke would be particularly welcomed. Cunt.

I’m feeling too upbeat to rant about politics today. Here are some Siberian baby foxes:

(from here).

And I’m more honoured by Google than ever before.

The callous fucks at the BPI have compared music downloading to drink-driving: "In terms of behavioral change, the U.K. government has broadcast the dangers of drunk driving, but people still drunk drive".

Drink-driving is dangerous not because it is illegal, but because it may well kill or maim you and other people. Downloading music from the Internet is dangerous only to the extent that it might earn you a £2500 fine. Comparing the two is an insane piece of trivialisation.

Then again, this is the industry that has more or less succeeded in associating people who copy music with people who murder the inhabitants of boats in order to steal all their property and cargo. The drink-drive analogy is positively benign by comparison.

We know that serious crime in the UK is trivially low, unless you’ve made the unfortunate career choices of drug dealer or sex worker (‘we’ here excludes paranoid Daily Mail-reading lunatics). Homicides are running at 700-900 a year, and the vast majority are domestic or drug-influenced.

Given this, it seems unfortunately anomalous that of the very few high-profile, ultra-horrible, ultra-dramatic murders to take place in rich areas recently, two have taken place extremely close to Yank expat blogger Jackie D. One next to her office, and one next to her boyfriend’s office. She views this as proof that England is more dangerous than the US. I’m sceptical of this view, given that – at least in terms of homicide – it very, very clearly isn’t.

Nonetheless, it’s a bizarre coincidence. My theory is that someone has become annoyed with Jackie’s incessant whining about how everyone in the UK is an antisemite, an evil statist, a cynic, a thug or a murderer, and has therefore decided to persuade her to flee back to the States by arranging a bizarre and extreme set of apparently coincidental crimes to terrify her.

(meanwhile, Yank expat in France Jason Stone has decided to stop being a Yank expat in France, because he can’t get a job, because he doesn’t speak French. While I have some sympathy for him personally, it’s a brilliant demonstration of Anglophone arrogance: I imagine his attitude to a non-English speaker who applied for high-powered corporate jobs in the US would be, err, different…)

Via Harry Hutton, some data tables covering UK crime rates over the last 100 years.

Interestingly, sexual offences against children [*] are running at less than two-thirds of their 1973 peak, despite far greater efforts to ensure they are reported. This fits with the whole "quick, let’s find a bogeyman to keep the public scared" theory behind the growth in fear of paedophiles and child abductors over the last 20 years.

However, the number of such offences has risen by 36% since its low point in 1998. This could reflect government initiatives to ensure more victims of sex crimes come forward, and that child witnesses are treated more humanely in the courts.

However, in the general spirit of the electoral campaign (ie trivialising others’ suffering and in appalling taste), I’m going to suggest it’s because New Labour is objectively pro-paedophilia, and a vote for Michael Howard is the only way to save your children from having horrible things done to them by asylum seekers and gypsies.

[*] Defined here as unlawful sexual intercourse with girls under 13 and girls under 16, incest and gross indecency with a child. I know incest doesn’t *necessarily* feature children, but prosecutions for adult incest are more than a little rare.