Paris Hilton thinks she’s above the law (in so far as she can ‘think’ at all)

I’m just going to quote FordPrefect because he said it so well here:

Paris Hilton is a stupid selfish whore. Oh, be as rude about her as you like! She’s famous for having sex on video, taking drugs on video and being racist on video so she can’t accuse other people of lowering the tone.

Paris Hilton is going to jail. Probably. Her counsel went with the I-forgot-I-was-banned-from-driving-when-I-drove defence because it’s vacuous enough to be true, but she got 45 days of glorious incarceration anyway. Try showing a paparazzo your coochie from in there. You can’t, can you? Where’s your rat-dog now?

But Paris Hilton thinks she deserves special treatment and has petitioned Gov. Schwarzenegger to intervene. People who think celebrities (and I use the term loosely, like I called her a “woman”) should not be above the law are counter-petitioning. Please, Lord, give us this one thing.

She really is a vile and despicable human being. I’m a-signing…

MySpazz

Today, I deleted my MySpace account. I’ve been meaning to do so for quite some time now, but I put it off in case I missed Something Very Important. As it turned out, I never did. I don’t understand the point of MySpace, frankly. In the last few weeks, I’ve received ‘add requests’ from members who list upwards of 5,000 ‘friends’. You have five thousand friends?! How exactly does one have five thousand friends? And if I become the 5,001st friend, will that make me special? No, I don’t think it will. And what do people do on MySpace anyway? What exactly happens there? It seems that one doesn’t necessarily have to make an effort (as one does when, say, blogging), and that all that is required is the odd comment on another profile every so often. Perhaps I’m just too old and/ or cynical for such a place, but if I’m going to waste time on the Internet, I want to do so somewhere where something actually engages me.

And the profiles that people think look nice and attractive to others? Aw man, don’t even start me again on the blinding profiles! MINE EYES!

I’m relieved that I’ve deleted it – I’ve hated MySpace for years – and clearly I’m too kool for skool (is that how the kids say it?) now that I’m not there anymore.

I really have nothing else to say today…

Germaine Greer needs to lie down

Darn it, I’m still feckin-well addicted to it. Big Brother that is. I’m watching it and I’m reading about it and I never stop talking about it. Oh my, I wish someone would stop me!

I think that I’m done with it all until I see something else that makes me want to rant. Take the following from Germaine Greer, for example. I’ve never known Greer to be so disparaging of strong and intelligent women, but she gets very scathing in this piece. Look at what she says about Shilpa.

There are no good reasons for watching Celebrity Big Brother and very good reasons for not. Not watching will spare you the nerve-fraying annoyingness that is Shilpa Shetty. Everything about her is infuriating: her haughty way of stalking about, her indomitable self-confidence, her chandelier earrings, her leaping eyebrows, her mirthless smile, her putty nose and her eternal bray, “Why does everyone hate me?” Not to mention the crying jags. What no one seems to have quite understood is that Shilpa is a very good actress. Everyone hates her because she wants them to. She also knows that if she infuriates people enough, their innate racism will spew forth.

So she deserves to be racially abused? Is that the implication here?

She is just the girl to raise the pit bull in a dizzy little drip like Danielle and keep her frothing at the mouth long enough for her nascent career as a sweet little Wag to disappear down the drain. When Shilpa is finished with Danielle even Teddy Sheringham will know what a small, dark heart beats within her fetching chest. This explains the slightly cannibal air of self-satisfaction that never abandons Shilpa. She knows what she is doing. She will shred the nerves of all the other women in that house until even Cleo pulls back her frozen lips and shows the fangs behind her witless Mona Lisa smile.

Oh, so it is all her fault then? Mainly for being able to recognise that she’s not a vapid, talentless idiot, you’re saying?

Wha?!

I’m thinking that this piece probably says more about Greer than it does about Shetty. I’ve always had an admiration for Greer (she was one of the most prominent feminists around as I was growing up), but she’s been letting herself down a lot in recent years. She seems bitter and unhappy about something, and she resorts to attacking women who remind her of who she once was in order to express her discontent. Even when she was on CBB herself last year or whenever it was, I watched her thinking that there was something missing. She’s not fair anymore, and I always remember her being very fair.

Shilpa isn’t nasty like she describes, but she is a reminder to frustrated women the world over that they’re not all they want to be. This is clearly what upset the three ‘ladies’ in the Big Brother house, and I can’t help but think that it’s what’s upsetting Greer too. Nay, think of the BB house without Shlipa, I say! She’s not perfect, no doubt, but she’s smart and funny and kind and generous and interesting. I can’t think of another housemate to whom you could attach those adjectives. But perhaps Germaine doesn’t like such qualities in a person, now that she’s lacking in them herself.

It’s a shame, really, because I think Greer could still be a very influential and important person; feminist or otherwise. If only she’d stop being a moron apologist (and something of a moron herself, truth be told) long enough to realise it…

Big Brother racism

In further ranting news, it appears that that the Carphone Warehouse has suspended its Big Brother sponsorship.

The Carphone Warehouse Group (“Carphone Warehouse”) today announces that it is suspending its sponsorship of Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother programme. Charles Dunstone, CEO of The Carphone Warehouse said: “Our concern has rapidly mounted about the broadcast behaviour of individuals within the Big Brother house. We are totally against all forms of racism and bullying and indeed this behaviour is entirely at odds with the brand values of The Carphone Warehouse. As a result we feel that as long as this continues we are unable to associate our brand with the programme.

“We had already made it clear to Channel 4 that were this to continue, we would have to consider our position. Nothing we saw last night gave us any comfort. Accordingly we have instructed Channel 4 to remove our sponsorship name and branding with immediate effect.”

I’m not surprised.

We watched Big Brother in our house last night. Scottish was particularly sickened, I think, but I certainly wasn’t far behind him. Jade was nothing short of hysterical, and those two insipid girls she’s befriended are much too brainless to do anything but laugh at her. I admire Shilpa for keeping her calm and dignity in the face of such abuse, but I’m disgusted with this country of ours for awarding ‘celebrity’ to people like Jade Goody. God GOD, what is she? And of course they’re being racist, Ofcom! ‘I wish she’d just fuck off home!’ ‘She doesn’t even know how to speak English!’ ‘Maybe they eat with their hands where she’s from?’ ‘Go back to the slums… ‘ What is not racist about that, exactly? Calling it ‘the bitchiness of girls’ is trivialising something very serious.

I don’t think I’m going to watch any more of Big Brother because it’s not deserving of viewers, frankly. The sooner they pull the plug on it (and Jade) the better.

I better stop now for I’m fearful of giving myself a heart attack. Breathe…

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Edited some time later to add this. It’s from popbitch.com but that shouldn’t make it any less interesting or conspiratorial.

Since Jade Goody shot to fame on Channel 4 she has had the same management as Celebrity Big Brother host Davina McCall, and both Big Brother spin-off show hosts, Dermot O’Leary and Russell Brand, as well as last year’s Celebrity Big Brother winner Chantelle. So is it any surprise that C4 and CBB producers are so reticent about condemning the racist bullying, led by Jade, on their show? They have their own interests to protect.

Um.

Shameful humiliation

I want to draw your attention to this. It’s a segment on a radio station in Yorkshire where the DJ dumps someone live on air on behalf of someone else. I’ve only listened to this one, and it was quite enough. I feel sick.

My friend B. wrote about but I won’t quote directly from her. My [shortened] version is this:

- A bloke called Craig writes a letter to a radio station to tell them that he’s found out that his girlfriend, Angie, to whom he was about to propose, gave her boss a blowjob at the Christmas party.

- Danny the DJ agrees to play a ‘little trick’ on Angie by phoning her pretending to be the jeweler where Craig bought the £2,000 engagement ring.

- The ‘jeweller’ asks to speak to Craig and then ‘lets slip’ to Angie that Craig is about to propose to her. He goes on to ask her how she feels about that. She’s delighted, she says, because she and Craig have a wonderful relationship and she can’t wait to get married and to start having babies.

- A lifetime later, after Danny’s cruelly joined in her excitement, he tells her that it’s a setup. He announces to her, shouting, that Craig knows what she’s done and that she’s now DUMPED! He also implicates her married boss somewhere along the way.

- This is greeted with pained silence on the other end of the phone.

- Danny then says something like, ‘You’re just a tart. We’re going to an ad-break’ and hangs up the phone.

It’s shocking.

The audio is here, if you care to listen. It’s really vile so I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint of heart. It’s called ‘DANNY DUMPS: ANGIE’ and it’s at the bottom of the listen again box.

Clearly this Danny is an cruel misogynistic fuckwit. The pleasure he derives from persecuting this poor girl is horrific. I don’t know if she did what she’s been accused of, but from listening to her, she’s clearly very innocent in many ways of the world.

This is one of the most shameful things I’ve heard in as long as I can remember, and I’m really rather speechless about it. I hope he gets run over by a bus on the way home. I really do.

P.S. I’m not condoning cheating in any form. But this… this is too much.

Shocked and upset

No, no, no, I’m not done ranting yet for today at all!

The world shocks and upset me.

And by ’shocks and upsets me’, I mean things like this.

Parents of a severely disabled girl in the US have revealed that they are keeping her child-sized in order to give her a better life. Along with hormone doses to limit her growth, Ashley’s parents also opted for surgery to block breast growth and had her uterus and appendix removed.

“Dad is frequently the one that lifts her from one place to the other, so if she gets bigger that becomes much more difficult, as they get older it becomes more difficult. At that point in time they would be forced to consider using a mechanical lift, which is much more impersonal.”

“Ashley has no need for her uterus since she will not be bearing children,” they said, adding that the decision means she will not experience the menstrual cycle and the bleeding and discomfort commonly associated with it. The operation also removed the possibility of pregnancy if Ashley were ever the victim of sexual abuse, they said. The removal of the girl’s breast buds was also done in part to avoid sexual abuse, but was carried out primarily so she would not experience discomfort when lying down, the parents said.

The parents deny, of course, that Ashley’s treatment (and there’s been a lot of it) is for their benefit, but I can’t seem to believe that: she’s been through numerous irreversible operations so that her parents wouldn’t find it as difficult to care for her. Sure, it’s all under the guise of ensuring Ashley’s well-being, but such spurious arguments as, ‘we removed her breast buds to avoid sexual abuse’ only serve to heighten my suspicions. When does such a grave concern ever even become relevant in one’s mind, and why would one feel that such invasive surgery is the only option?! (And let’s not even get started on where they got the notion that being a victim of sexual abuse is somehow highly correlated with having breasts!) And as a woman, I can assure both of them that one’s breasts are very darned important to us ladies, and are worth the odd bit of discomfort when lying down! They’re your BREASTS, gawdammit!!! And so what if they have to consider using a mechanical lift!? I wonder if Ashley would prefer to have to use a mechanical lift to get around, or to have everything about her being and person altered just so that daddy could still lift her? Much more impersonal, my arse!

I’m not a parent, and I hope that I’m never faced with such issues, but at the moment I can’t understand what gives these parents the right to halt their daughter’s natural progress in such an extreme fashion? I never, ever use this expression (mostly because I’m not sure about the existance of a deity) but seriously: who said they could play God?

The BBC discussion page on this (most of which disagrees with me, but anyway).

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Edit #1: a Comment is Free page on this issue. Unfortunately, it seems to have descended into name-calling as is too often the case on CiF but it might be worth the read.

Edit #2: there is further discussion on this issue on this post.

Edit #3: here’s another Comment is Free discussion page.

Edit #4: a further piece on Comment is Free. I’m not sure I’ve seen an issue get such attention in a long time. And proper order.

Just keeping everything up to date…

Great Britain is Great, Great, Great (except it’s not)

I can see where Douglas Alexander wants to go with this, but it’s just not accurate. As an Irish person living in England, I’m fairly certain that there is not the wonderful harmony between the four nations (Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales) that he’s so sure about. He starts off with the usual Britain is Best sentiments, which you’d expect to see on a piece like this:

Three hundred years since the creation of United Kingdom, the fact that our future is still a matter of periodic debate is a mark of its strength, not its weakness. The UK is a unique union. England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together have formed one of the most powerful and respected countries on earth, yet each has retained its own identity.

… forgetting only to mention how fluffy and pink and cuddly we all are, and how there’s never anything less than a smile on all our faces. Ahem.

I loved the little gems in his piece such as the following.

We share values and have learned to live in harmony without the imposition of one homogenised identity.

Absolutely! I think ‘harmony’ is a wonderful word to describe the situation in Northern Ireland for the last 40 years. Hell, we can’t get enough of each other over there! For 25 of those years, we couldn’t get enough of killing each other. But it was always harmonious, of course! It also explains rather well why Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland haven’t bothered to seek devolution in the last decade. Except, of course, that they have!

But let’s not forget that the real point of this piece was for Alexander to lavish praise on the Labour party (obviously, he’s a big fan). I’m sure that he manages to achieve this under any guise really, and the Strength of the Union just happened to take his fancy today. To say that he’s niave about the UK and indeed the world around him is understating how misguided he is in his convictions that everything in these four places is AOK. It’s not. I can only speak confidentently about Northern Ireland because that’s where I’m from, but I can assure you and him that life is far from ‘harmonious’ there. The irony is that he wrote this for the Guardian, clearly without ever bothering to read what’s printed in the Guardian about Our Great Nation. Bless him.

But, to give one commenter (talksense) his/her dues, I really couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m not sure where s/he gets the idea about the Welsh, but perhaps s/he has some knowledge that I don’t.

“the lived British experience is a blueprint for the future not just here, but around the globe”

What a load of lofty rubbish. Especially when we know the real reason why Labour is so in love with the Union all of a sudden (which is traditionally a Tory nueroses). It’s simply because it enables them to stay in power.

“300 years ago, we realised what countries around the world are doing now – that we are stronger together and weaker apart”

I don’t think that too many Irish had a say in this.

The creation of the Union in Great Britian was enabled by elite scots who wanted a bigger slice of the power-pie. The greatest defenders of the union today are also those same elite scots who love the world stage that London provides. However, the scot on the street would be far prouder, happier and better of if the burden of subsidy could be shaken off and they could have their own nation state.

The other union, which was born 100 years later, was a complete disaster, for which people in Northern Ireland are still paying the price. Today, almost half of the people in Northern Ireland have little or no connection with Britian. Of the rest, the working classes have, over the years, been whipped up in a frenzy of perverse nationalism (in the guise of Unionism) by community leaders (the Orange Order, which must be one of the most bigoted organisations in the world) and protestant clergymen (many who believe the world began 4000 years ago). Hardly a “blueprint” for success “around the globe”.

Most English people on the street couldn’t care less about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and are more concerned with England winning the Ashes or World Cup. And good luck to them!

As for the Welsh. Everyone knows they would like to make on their own, but they probably can’t be bothered, especially as they consider themselves superior to everyone else, anyway.

The sooner the union is dissolved the better for all concerned. All except for the Labour party, that is.

Poor work BBC; very poor work

I’m rather shocked about this. A ‘private’ interview with Tom Stephens (the prime suspect in the recent Ipswich murders) was transmitted to the general public yesterday. The BBC justified this decision as follows:

We felt there was a compelling public interest in letting the public hear what he had to say. He knew all five of the murdered women, two of them well. He had much to say about the world of drug dealers and financial pressures in which they lived. On balance it seemed to us to be wrong to deny people the opportunity to hear his thoughts on the events of the past few weeks.

Of course, we reflected long and hard about the legal and ethical issues this interview raised. We are confident that nothing we have broadcast could prejudice any future trial. We also reached the conclusion that nothing we broadcast could reasonably be expected to impede the ongoing police investigation. A full copy of the interview had been made available to the police.

Ultimately our judgement was based on what we felt would be right for our audiences – should there be an opportunity to hear the interview or did it remain inappropriate to broadcast something recorded six days earlier on a different basis? In the very rare circumstances of this case, we took the decision to share Tom Stephens’ account.

Ultimately, this man has not been found guilty of any crime (the police haven’t even finished interviewing him) and the fact that he knew all five victims is still only circumstantial. In the UK we seem to pride ourselves on having an informed and ethical criminal justice system, but surely that must be questioned when we see actions like this being taken. Why did the BBC decide that the general public needed to hear what this man said about the world these women lived in? And why does such an opinion apply to this case and not others? Why don’t we hear the interviews of other suspects in other cases? And what exactly constitutes an ‘exceptional change in circumstances’ and why does this matter?

Might the BBC’s decision be more around the newsworthy nature of this interview (and case) and might their broadcasting it for all to hear be because it’s a juicy and sensational story that’s good for viewer ratings (everyone loves a good story), and nothing at all to do with what they seem to be calling an obligation to the public? I just hope if it’s found that Stevens is not connected with these murders, the BBC hasn’t jeopardised a further investigation into these crimes. And I don’t for a second believe that this decision will have no effect at all on a forthcoming trial. The whole point of the media is to inform the public (albeit in a biased manner, normally) and to encourage debate and discourse. I can’t help but think that this particular case should be kept as classified as possible until a resolution is reached.

All they need is a hug

Like everyone else, I’ve been deeply shocked and upset by the recent murders of the prostitutes in Ipswich. (No, I don’t want to get into an argument on the rights and wrongs of identifying these victims as ‘prostitutes’ rather than merely ‘women’.) It sometimes frightens me to live in a society where you (a) find yourself in so desperate a situation that you feel forced to sell your body and (b) come face to face with your murderer, likely as a result of this. But I find this sort of thinking very unhelpful.

So, what came first: the abuse of drugs or alcohol and then selling sex to pay for the addiction? Or prostitution followed by a taste for drink and drugs to erase the boredom, degradation, and memories of the (sometimes violent) punters? The answer is neither. What initially drives many women onto the streets is a series of events that build on the bedrock of belief received in childhood that they are unloved or unlovable; sometimes both.

Ironically, then, a magnet that will pull them back to the “game” is the pursuit of love. Often, it comes in the false promise of affection that pimps often give (making easy money in the process). Once the promise is broken, a young woman’s own lack of a sense of self-worth keeps her selling her body.

What? Huh? What is it with people like wotshernamehere and their need to over-intellectualise everything? I like to theorise about things as much as the next person (particularly down the pub of an evening), but there comes a time when we have to think more realistically. None of the women I’ve come into contact with in my world (friends and ’subjects’ alike) have found their way into prostitution because they were sometimes neglected by their parents and family; all of the prostitutes I’ve come into contact with (just subjects in this case) have suffered from severe drug problems. The fact that they may have had an unhappy childhood is a coincidental and secondary issue; and trying to argue that the focus should be placed on that instead of the urgent problems, such as drug addiction, in these women’s lives means that we as a society will take even longer to offer them the protection and help they need.

I never realised how strongly I feel about this issue until recently.

– — – — –

I’m off to Bristol now. I could do with a few more hours drinking coffee and playing on the Interbets, truthfully.

Two (three) things I believe

I try not to be but I am something of a conspiracy theorist. I don’t subscribe to them seriously or fastidiously but I do like to read about them. Let’s face it; they’re often a more interesting read than the facts themselves. One of my favourite conspiracy theories is that of the royal family knocking off Princess Di. I want to believe this theory more than any of the others not just because I’m so anti-royalist, but also because I would like the truth to come out about something in a world where I don’t think the truth comes out about much. The recent report, of course, ‘cleared up’ any confusion over Diana’s death calling it a ‘tragic accident’, and it could well be right. However, of all the conspiracies that someone can think up, this one has to be one of the most plausible. Diana had become nothing short of the thorn in the royal family’s side with all her shenanigans (and the last thing that family tolerates is shenanigans unless they’re being conducted by one of their own), so she was a prime target for bumping off. And if anyone can bump someone off and get away with it, the royal family can. And things like this are certainly food for thought:

Lord Stevens is unlikely to be so lucky. His 900 pages are intended to be the end of the story but, for the community of the institutionally suspicious, they can never be so. Because their central allegation is that the princess was killed by the British establishment, refutation from a man who received a peerage for a lifetime of service to the police will be the equivalent of a press release from Texaco calling global warming a myth.

We’ll never, ever know, particularly not now, but thinking it was a possibility was fun; for me anyway.

(Oh, and I also like to believe that they didn’t land on the moon in 1969. That’s another favourite of mine.)

Another thing I like to believe is that the bible is a load of nonsense (blame my Catholic upbringing): for example, that Mary was no virgin.

One may wonder whether her astonishment resulted from the knowledge that, not having reached the age of puberty, she was not yet ready for motherhood, for virgin in Jewish parlance could designate a girl too physically immature to conceive. The angel, in his answer, seems to argue that God could allow the pre-pubertal Mary to conceive just as he had caused the post-menopausal Elizabeth to become pregnant. Again in Jewish parlance, a married woman past child-bearing age was a virgin for a second time.

The article cited here is explaining it by identifying anomalies in the four gospels (and there were enough of them, let’s face it), but I’m rather more of the opinion that this – the virgin birth – is just one more lie told to us by a Church which thrives on pulling the wool over its followers’ eyes. I’ve tried many times to change my mind about this – largely by talking to people who believe the bible is the Word of God and the Whole Truth – but I remain unconvinced. I’m assuming that after almost 20 years of this line of questioning (I started young), I’m likely to stay unconvinced for a while longer. No, it’s not for me.

It hasn’t been the best day in my world, truth be told, but I don’t really want to get into that here.