I had a rant blockage, so I took a rant laxative (I believe it is generally known as “cheap wine” ), so stand back, the first few rows may get… we’ll just say wet, shall we? (never mind, it dries clear).

Caster Semenya. I feel so sorry for her. People need to get off her back, it’s the way nature made her, she’s not cheating. This is like having a whinge because someone beat you because they have naturally bigger muscles or longer legs. Boo, only mediocre people can run in this race! Its children tipping over the monopoly board because they lost. Also, isn’t the term “hermaphrodite” as employed by the newspapers somewhat antiquated? She’s intersex. There are 30-40 separate intersex conditions known, and they are far more common that most people think. Gender is not a black and white, either/or dichotomy, physiologically OR psychologically. Thousands of people have these conditions and have gone undiagnosed their whole lives. Is it any wonder Semenya, having been born in a small African village, was undiagnosed? And why does it even matter? I mean, without trying to sound crass, it’s often African people who win races like that, they just seem to be naturally better at it, should we ban them from competing because of the way nature made them? Even if her intersex condition gives her a natural advantage, it’s NATURAL, she can’t help being good at it.

We’ve already got Paralympics, Nude Olympics and Gay Olympics; maybe we should have Gender Non Specific Olympics. But no, I just get a mental picture of bad footy-club trannies running about everywhere.

Hmmm, what else. Oh yes, the Salvation Army and the Crusade to Make Everyone Afraid. Don’t get me wrong, the Salvos do a lot of great stuff, and I enjoy their second hand stores, but this recent rehashing of the same old “won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children!?” crap, with the alcohol. There were all these “stories” in the news media basically stating that letting your thirteen year old have a sip of wine or beer at a family occasion will lead to a lifetime of alcoholism, “anti-social” behaviour (I despise the use of that term in that context, I am anti-social, in that I generally prefer my own company and dislike going out in public, I do not physically abuse or assault people! Verbally on the other hand… ) , crime and early death. I’ve no doubt that many young people do end up that way, but again it’s the same mentality that states that seeing porn at a young age turns kids in to paedophiles and sex criminals, or that playing video games or listening to Marilyn Sodding Manson turns kids into murderers, it’s not that simple. These kids genetic and psychological makeup, as well as all the other aspects of their upbringing and environment contribute to who and what they will become; a sip of booze, a peek of porn, or a stupid video game or song is not some magic life changing lightning bolt that turns otherwise perfect children into criminals.

I found a copy of the Salvo’s “faith & culture” magazine, titled “WARCRY” on the train the other day (am I the only one who finds the close association of religious belief with terms such as “army” and “war” unsettling?), and it includes an article on this shocking revelation! The first among many astounding insights; teenagers who drink alcohol develop tolerance to its effects… YOU DON’T SAY! We are then given several other statistics, the main one being that 2.3 million Australians had their first alcoholic “sip or drink” aged 10 or under. Wonderful scientific unit of measurement that, “sip or drink”. I mean, my dad and my pop used to give me shandies (lemonade with beer in it), with a miniscule amount of beer in them, when I was little, must be why I’m a homeless, hopeless down and out now… wait, I’m not a homeless, hopeless down and out?! Oh dear!

That 10 and under group represents 13% of Australians, 20% first drank between the ages of 11 and 14, 33% between 15 and 17, 11% between 18 and 19, 10% 20-24, and 3% were over 25. Now, that’s all lovely and very interesting, but does it mean shit? You are most likely to start experimenting with alcohol in your mid to late teens. Again, does this shock anyone? Another great statistic, when people first drank, 50% were with family and 39% were with friends and acquaintances. Which I assume means the other 11% were alone, or drinking with complete strangers. As these are really the only four options one physically has, what does this fascinating statistic actually mean? Most people first drank alcohol with family or friends? Shit, who’d have thought!

The most telling numbers come when we are told that these ground breaking, insightful statistics were derived from a random phone survey of a representative sample of 687 persons over 14 years old. Well blow me, who’d have thought the views of 687 persons willing to have a lengthy phone conversation with the Salvation Army could be extrapolated to accurately represent the views of the 21,908,235 people currently living in Australia according to the Bureau of Statistics’ online Population Clock. The article, despite being so gleefully descriptive in it’s listing of drinking age statistics, becomes oddly reticent when it states “Many studies show alcohol use at an early age can increase the likelihood of a teen suffering irreversible brain damage”, or “Research from the Australian Drug Foundation indicates that, even if an adolescent stops drinking as an adult, it may be too late to reverse damage if they’ve had heavy exposure to alcohol”. Really. How many studies? What research? Conducted by whom? When? Where? On what basis? With what kind of “representative sample”? Over what time period? Where can I view the results? And the use of terms such as “can”, or “may”. Specious reasoning, it’s the rock that repels tigers.

If I really wanted to I could probably find or create statistical evidence that alcohol makes your cock bigger and moon beams give you cancer or fish tears cure coldsores, its all wank people. Aren’t the Salvos teetotal? Any “research” they conduct is going to reflect that. They’re a religious organization, not scientists. I’m not saying you should do beer bongs with your nine year old, but don’t let people like that make you terrified of EVERYTHING and don’t think you’re a horrible human being just because you’re not living on bread, water and prayer.

What else. Oh, “you can’t conduct police raids during Ramadan!”. Doesn’t Ramadan last for a month? That’s like a Christian saying “I know I killed those nuns, but it’s Christmas, you can’t arrest me during December!”. Why do we give unquestioning respect to anything that someone espouses as a religious belief? Really, in several South American cultures five or six hundred years ago (which is really no time at all considering how many people base their lives and morals around stuff a carpenter was meant to have said two thousand years ago), it was a dearly held religious belief that the sun would stop shining if you didn’t horribly slaughter lots of innocent people. If a group of people did that today, would we respect and honour their religious practices? Fuck no. Fuck all religion, I respect none of it. Everyone has a right to religious freedom, but I have a right to express my view that you’re all deluded twats, and that God is the most destructive and dangerous thing that humanity has ever invented.

Also, “You’re not arresting me because I’m running a drug mill, it’s because I’m Arabic/Asian/black/from Western Sydney!”. Fuck off.

Internet censorship. I am totally against it, as I am against most forms of censorship, but I don’t think those “Anonymous” people hacking government websites is helping at all. (Though, admittedly, I do find it rather amusing when they piss off the Scientologists) Just gives the pollies more ammunition; “See! The people who are against censorship are hackers and terrorists! Don’t side with them!”. Again, “think of the children, save them from porn, blah blah”. I was born in a time before there was a computer in every home, before everyone had near-constant internet access… a time called… the mid eighties… And guess what!? From the onset of puberty, I had regular access to pornography, with no internet! We had these things called magazines, and even vhs videos! (yes, before dvds and blu-ray!)… never underestimate the ingenuity of young, horny boys in obtaining porn… fair enough none of it involved farm animals, but a friend in year four (we were 9 or 10) used to get hold of some pretty hardcore imagery, which was freely shared around. All that exposure to porn at a formative age must be why I’m in gaol now for raping women and children and farm animals and the elderly… wait, I’m not? None of those things happened?… oops, well there goes that theory.

Anything that limits people’s access to information is wrong. Yes yes, it’s MEANT to just filter out child abuse and bestiality porn, we all know it won’t stop there. The censorship and classification system we have in place for film, books and games now is utterly outdated and flawed (books! We live in a country that censors and bans books! Why not just burn them all you fucking barbarians!). As I read on [link] an Australian film was given an MA rating by the Australian Classification Board due to scenes of drug use, despite no such scene existing in the film. They can’t get it right with the thousands of films they have to classify, “filter” or ban, but billions of web pages, oh, easy. Fucking morons. And all these people with comments like “Surely you should be willing to sacrifice easy access to porn and/or high-speed internet for the safety of our children!?” I don’t give a fuck about your children. I have no children, you chose to reproduce, you deal with it. I’m not hurting them, but the rest of the world doesn’t have to become child-friendly fuzzy fucking bunny land just because you managed to get inseminated. “I spawned, therefore no one anywhere is allowed to swear, fart, fuck or commit an act of violence ever again. We’re all going to sit quietly and watch the Teletubbies. No reality please, we’re breeders”. Fuck you. Once again, these people have jumped on the bandwagon because the media has successfully made them afraid, and the government has come up with a solution which successfully absolves them of responsibility whilst requiring minimum effort on the parent’s part.

And hasn’t it also been shown that the majority of child-porn is disseminated through peer to peer networks and the like? And we all know any 13 year old will probably get around the filter anyway. So if it’s not stopping kids from viewing evil nasty nudie images, or stopping despicable people sharing stuff that’s actually fucked up, WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT! ?

Another interesting comment I saw, if we accept as a given that pubescent children will manage to access porn in one way or another no matter what you do (there was that thing a few years ago about Amish youths in America getting drunk, having lots of sex and buying cocaine from bikies. If children brought up in a highly insular, deeply religious community with no electricity or access to mass media and culture still wind up doing shit like that, what hope have you got of stopping “normal” young people from, oh I dunno, ACTING LIKE YOUNG PEOPLE?), and that fucked up people are still going to manage to disseminate truly evil shit, this just leaves us the pre-pubescent children to worry about. Now really, what are five to ten year olds doing unsupervised on the internet? Checking their stock portfolio? Browsing the real estate listings in search of an investment property? Despite what uninformed wowser fuckwits claim, simply logging on to the internet does not cause five hundred hardcore porn sites to suddenly appear on your monitor, you do actually have to go looking for it. Pre-pubescent children have zero actual interest in sex, other than maybe some basic curiosity from hearing adults get so noisily freaked out about it. And in any event, if you let young children have unfettered access to any media, you’re asking for trouble.

There was also stuff recently about a website being censored for featuring footage of that poor girl who died during the protests about the Iranian elections, and that other thing about media outlets carrying graphic imagery of an American soldier killed in the Middle East. While I have no conception of how awful it must be for the families who have lost these people, and it is totally understandable that they would not want to be confronted with such imagery, these are things that are actually happening in the world we live in right now. It’s not even censoring fantasy violence in a film, book or video game, this really happened, and we have to be aware of it. I learned in high school modern history that during the first world war, governments censored graphic images of the horrific injuries suffered by soldiers because they did not want to the populace to see how awful the war really was, because people would stop joining the armed forces or attempt to avoid being called up, and question the necessity of war. There has been an attempt to do this in all subsequent conflicts, with decreasing success due to the improvement of televisual communication, radio and the internet. The most recent conflicts, the Vietnam War, Gulf War, and the current Middle East conflict, have faced widespread public condemnation precisely because we are now able to see and know much of what is really happening, in real time and QUESTION IT. Governments don’t like that. They are sickening images, and I agree children should not view them, but intelligent adults should, so they can gain an informed opinion of what is occurring in our world, rather than simply thinking “it’s happening to other people far far away, fiddle de dee”. Pretending bad shit doesn’t happen is not a solution.

Also that father who was arrested for disseminating “child abuse” images for forwarding that video of “a Russian or Ukrainian circus family training”, showing a guy swinging a baby around by its arms, to his friends. I have only seen a still from the video and it does seem fucked up, but it also seems like the kind of thing a lot of people, including myself, would stumble across, think “wow, that’s weird”, and immediately share with friends. Thankfully the classification board did something right for once (like they did with Bill Henson, whom I’m going to see tonight, woo!) and told the police they were full of shit and had no case. But it is a good example of where this ridiculous hysteria is leading us.

Yeah, I think I reached rant climax and lost my steam, time for a ciggie and some sleep. Bye kids!

oh, and just to take the piss out of myself, go look at this XKCD comic about people who write ranting journal entries: [link]