Toddlerpinot’s Blog

Some people will say anything to justify their pointless existences

January 17th, 2010 |

Here in the UK we are suffering from an excess of interfering busy-bodies who have pet theories about how the world should be run. All for our own good, of course, we cannot be trusted to be in charge of our own lives. No, rather we should all behave as these unelected control-freaks think we should and be damned grateful that they are saving us from ourselves. Most of these unspeakable swine work for fake charities that are really funded by the government to lobby the government on the subject of their weird ideas and distorted world views in the hope that it will result in a change of policy in line with the meddlers’ latest whim. These people are always publishing reports or appearing in the mass media in the hope that if they keep banging on and on they will eventually be taken seriously and so justify all that money that has been thrown at them by the government.

I’ll give you some recent examples. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is the perfect example of a bunch of self-satisfied pen-pushers who will take any opportunity to get themselves in the press. Some of their lunacy was reported on the BBC News website today. After the Christmas day bomber, Mr Abdulmutallab, hid explosive materials on his body and tried to blow up an aircraft heading to the USA there has been the usual knee-jerk, ‘something must be done’ reaction from the government who have committed to installing body scanners at UK airports. “That doesn’t sound so bad?” you might well be thinking.

_47024100_scan_afp226x228 The EHRC realised they could get themselves in the press and show that they have some point to their petty, whining existence by criticising these scanners. Apparently the devices risk breaching an individual’s right to privacy under the Human Rights Act. Does that sound convincing? It sounds like a load of tosh to me. They go on to suggest that body scanners could generate illegal images of children and images of celebrities that could be leaked online. The BBC News website helpfully provides a picture of the type generated by these scanners. I’ve reproduced it to the right of this paragraph. These are characterised by the EHRC as ‘naked’ images which are are likely to have a negative impact on privacy, especially in relation to certain groups such as disabled people, the elderly, children and the transgendered community.

It is clear from the body scanner picture that they do not generate pictures of people looking as if they are naked. They are a fuzzy blur, with no real fine details about the target’s body visible. You’d have to be pretty desperate to find the opaque images from these scanners in any way a breach of someone’s privacy, they are just not detailed enough to tell much about a person’s body.

Moreover, even if body scanners produced a more defined image of someone’s body under their clothes, it still would not mean that the scans would be child porn as the EHRC suggests. Nakedness does not equate with pornography and body scanners do not automatically upload the images they scan to Flickr.

Finally, why should body scanners, with their fuzzy, indistinct images, be a particular worry for disabled people, the elderly or the transgendered community? It is just totally vacuous to suggest such groups would have any more difficulty with being scanned than anyone else. These kind of statements, which try to bring victim status to particular groups by saying they would be unfairly treated, are just a feeble attempt by the pressure group involved to make the whatever they are raving about seem a more serious, iniquitous problem and so justify the idea that ‘something must be done’. There are legitimate reasons why body scanners might not be a great idea, for example security experts have claimed that body scanners would only have a 50% chance of spotting the bomb carried by Mr Abdulmutallab, but the extremely vague possibility that a body scan may reveal that someone in a dress might have the suggestion of a penis being in their pants is not one of them.

There are more of these fake charities spewing out countless reports about how only their pet theories can improve the world and everyone else just cannot be trusted with anything important. A few days ago I discovered an excellent blog devoted to debunking the ravings on Don Shenker, chief executive of the government-funded pseudo-charity Alcohol Concern. Quite why the government should be funding this nutcase organisation is beyond me, but then the Labour government under the odious Gordon Brown is only too happy to let his ‘big government’ and the unelected special interest groups nanny us all.

The desire of the government to interfere with our drinking habits has been much on my mind of late. The recent report from the Health Select Committee (HSC) into alcohol consumption was woven from half-truths, manipulated data and unfounded assertions. These people clearly want to dictate how much we can drink, where we can drink it and how much it will cost. Most people have a perfectly healthy relationship with alcohol, I know I do, and yet all of us are being demonised by these jumped up farts who think they know better than us even if they have to publish reports which are a tissue of mendacity and duplicity to show they know best. I dropped by a good beer blog earlier and the author of the site has written a number of articles which debunk most of the claims in the HSC report. He demonstrates that alcohol adverts do not encourage under-age drinking, that cutting overall consumption of alcohol does not necessarily result in a drop in alcohol misuse, that alcohol is getting more expensive rather than cheaper as the neo-prohibitionists claim and much more. All of these blog posts of his are well worth reading; if you know how the bastards are trying to mislead you it is easier to stand up for them.

The problem with all of these hideous gits clamouring for their own ideas to be adopted as government policy is that, even if their most extreme ideas are not implemented, the propagation of the view that there are problems and ‘something must be done’ will result in legislation creep. Bit by bit our freedom will be eroded until it will be impossible to do anything without the government’s express permission. The suggestion floated recently that adults should have ‘entitlement cards’ that have to be produced when buying alcohol and act as ration books to control the amount we purchase shows that this is the aim of some of these nutcases. They want to control us, and unless we stand up for ourselves and our rights the filthy swine will get their way.