cynicalbastard

Hey, that’s a clever title. I wonder if it’s relevant?

You know what the government and the feminazis always like to tell us about pr0n? How its run by organized crime, and how, any investment in masturbatory aids is just giving money to evil. How, sinc 9/11, porn (like other immoral activity) is aiding terrorism.

Well, once upon a time there was an interesting website called insex.com. Founded in 1995, it was certainly an ‘acquired’ taste. Featuring as it did the most extreme S&M. All consensual, but sometimes closer to endurance experience or Metzger style performance art than to anything sexual. Even I, who take an especial interest in pain and violence being inflicted on human beings, found it more ‘interesting’ than erotic.

Late last year, the owner was forced to sell. Prurience? Moral Majority? No. As he explains here, changes in the US banking regulations thanks to the Patriot Act. Warning banks and credit card companies that processing payments for adult websites was likely to be aiding money laundering for terrorism, the banks were forced to close the accounts down.

Very clever, if an interesting by-product of the war on terror. The corollary is obvious though. As the US porn industry shut down (at least in its more extreme variants), it relocated its bank accounts off-shore. To Russia. To the Ukraine. Yes, to all those countries where there is no adherence to money-laundering legislation. So well done Mr Bush and the crazy Republican right. You’ve brought into being the very problem you set out to tackle.

DK blogs about the recent fall in the cost of medical insurance and what this might mean for the NHS. I’m surprised by his concern for the poor.

Surely the major reason the NHS is in the state its in (aside from rampant managerialism and consultant-itis thanks to the wonders of our business schools, thank you very much Mrs Thatcher, Lord King and Gordon Gecko) is because Doctors and Nurses spend so much of their time treating poor people. And poor people have bad diets, tend to smoke and drink too much, don’t join proper gyms, and very rarely have ayurvedic treatments. Which means they’re more likely to get ill. It’s their own fault for Kali’s sake.

In fact, without the poor, Doctors would have a lot more time to spend with proper middle class patients who have probably done all their work for them already over the interweb. Patients who might have investments in pharma-combines that would mean both sides of the Doctor-patient relationship would have a vested interest in which drugs are prescribed rather than just the medical end of the arrangement.

If we stopped treating the poor, let them die, then we wouldn’t need the money from fags which is used to support the NHS. Which would be good, because, well, we’d be getting a lot less of it. Then there would be enough resources to go round, and if those of us remaining had a cocaine overdose or two, well, we could afford the treatment and we’d probably only been borrowing the local GP’s supply anyway.

Actually, thinking about it, given its only the poor who go to NHS hospitals these days, perhaps its why the medical profession created MRSA. This is their hidden agenda. Well done Patricia Hewitt, it IS the beat year for the NHS after all. AT least since that nice Dr Shipman retired. Soylent Green anyone?

Football Association makes sensible decision shock. Hell in a handbasket I tell you. Next the ICC will base themselves in a country where cricket is played. Nah, stupid thought.

And, yes, I am fully aware that anyone reading the last few entries and the majority of the posts on here will view me as a paedo-loving, whore-abusing, porn addict.

Does wonders for the self-image.

Actually, he edits, fuck that. While friends like Garry and many others rail against Blair’s uncivil liberties, only I, yes I, will take him on on sex-work and pr0n. I’m doing a service for you people. So nobody notices, that’s what blogging is all about.

First they came for the sex workers…

when you’re asking the public to do their work for them?

Not content with requiring drunk men to get formal consent from drunk women before engaging in sexual activity, without requiring anything of the latter, the government’s latest wacky scheme is to make users of prostitutes responsible for making sure the girls haven’t been the victims of sex-trafficking. With a potential rape charge if they ‘knowingly’ engage in sex with a trafficked girl.

Sounds sensible, but, of course, its completely unenforceable. Never mind the rate of trafficking is somewhat less than the tabloids and Julie Bindel might claim (hell, it makes for prurient reading). But how is anyone to know? Cue lots of conversations with Albanians barely speaking English…’You do anal? You do anal willingly?’

But why stop at trafficking? Why stop at the sex-trade? Brothels can be connected to organized crime–make punters responsible for all the criminal activities undertaken by anyone connected to the brothel. In fact, make all consumers of all products responsible for everything done in bringing something to market. Cockles provided by a snakehead gang of illegals? Shit, you’re responsible. Apples picked by illegals? You’re responsible. You drink Coke? You‘re responsible for poisoning farmers.

Hell, makes enforcing the law a lot easier.

So what was it that attracted you to the loquacious, elegant and handsome Mr Prescott Tracey?

“Well, I had this globule of food stuck in my lower chest and I needed to get it out…”

Love to back this campaign. Unfortunately, Labour lose my local election and I’ll lose my job. Not much incentive to vote LibDem then is there?

Interesting to note that t’Government are backing a Saudi appeal against a Court of Appeal ruling which made it possible to sue Saudi torturers in UK courts.

The issue, apparently, is not about torture so much as jurisdiction.

“The UK government condemns torture in all its forms and works to eradicate it wherever it occurs. The intervention in this case is not about criminal responsibility for torture, nor about the UK government’s attitude to torture. It concerns jurisdiction, and the way in which civil damages can be sought against a foreign state for acts allegedly committed in its own territory.”

So let’s get that right. In this case the UK doesn’t believe it is right that actions taken in foreign countries that would be illegal if they happened in the UK should be subject to British law. Sounds sensible. After all, what chaos would result if we all went round imposing our own parochial standards on regimes across the world?

But what’s this?

In the case of so-called sex tourists, the UK is looking at changing the law so that people perfectly legally having sex abroad will face charges in the UK if their partners were under the UK age of consent.

Someone who abuses children abroad can only be prosecuted in the UK if their behaviour constituted a criminal offence in the foreign country as well as here. But the low age of sexual consent in some places - it is 14 in Romania and 15 in Bulgaria - can make it impossible for criminal charges to be laid under British law. Ministers are considering requests that in future someone who commits an offence anywhere in the world that would be an offence in this country can be arrested and taken to court.

No offence committed abroad, but what would have been an offence if committed in Britain, leads to trial in Britain.

And sleeping with someone under age is less moral than torture how exactly?

Yes, yes, I understand that illegal downloads are costing rhe record industry millions. £1.1bn over three years in fact. It says so in The Times and Reuters and the Evening Standard.

There’s also the same story here, here, here and here. And I mean exactly the same story.

But where’s the methodology? How on earth were these figures arrived at? No one seems interested in any consideration, certainly in challenging the figures.

Only the good old BBC seems to have done any further analysis (though Monsters and Critics mysteriously carries the same quotes). But, hey, if you’re a hack just print the press release, right?

but I’m not sure it’s so bad that Baghdad is an improvement.